I’m about leveraging the art of the newly possible for democracy.

Matt Stempeck’s CV / LinkedIn

For nearly 20 years I’ve worked to establish the field of civic technology.

I’ve fought for democracy on presidential campaigns and within tech giants. I’ve built innovative products at leading media companies and foundations. I’ve developed academic programs and lectured at top universities. I’ve led and advised activist movements. And I won an UNESCO award for building the first-ever app to fight disinformation, called LazyTruth.

Along the way, I’ve shared my findings by writing for publications like Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and PBS. My work has been featured in The New York Times, The Economist, The Verge, Engadget, The Atlantic, Wired, Lifehacker, BuzzFeed News, Brain Pickings, and El País.

I speak at conferences around the globe, including TEDx, SXSW, International Open Data Conference, Code for All Summit, and more. I’ve also spoken before the European Union, UN Youth Assembly, UN University, and appeared on podcasts like those hosted by Tech Policy Press and Government Technology Magazine.

I care deeply about helping organizations work more effectively for social change and have served on several advisory boards to help wherever i can.

I live in Lisbon, travel extensively, play padel, geek out about health, and will always root for the Red Sox, as I’m originally from Boston.

From here, I’ve organized the chaos for you in this pleasant menu of past experiences and links below. Enjoy!

• Creative Portfolio
• Roles
• Research & Writing
• Talks
• Events
• Profiles
• Drop me a note

Current Roles

• Founder and Curator of the Civic Tech Field Guide, the world’s largest collection of tech projects for the public good. As featured in Democracy Technologies magazine and GovTech Magazine‘s ICYMI podcast.
  
• Faculty and Librarian at Newspeak House, an independent college of political technology in London.
  
• Coach at Superbloom Design, advising open civic and social startups.
  
• Corporate Overlord at Bad Idea Factory, a creative collective building technology that makes you 🤔.
  
  We built an award-winning mobile app for STAT News and a daily livestream aggregator called LiveGuide with the Boston Globe.
  
• Founder and President of Good Idea Factory, a Portuguese Association (Associação) dedicated to innovation for democracy.

Previous Roles

• Technologist in Residence at Cornell University, where I established the Siegel Impact Fellowship and grew the Public Interest Tech program.
• Advisory board member of the Civic AI Observatory.
• Director of Civic Technology for Microsoft in New York City.
• Master’s student at the MIT Media Lab‘s Center for Civic Media.
• Director of Digital Mobilization at Hillary for America.
• Previous experiences are available on LinkedIn.

Research & Writing

• I research to understand how we can best use tech to bolster our democracies, or mitigate the effects of tech itself.
  • Led a global survey of the Code for All network with National Democratic Institute to understand how their member organizations are effectively confronting digital disinformation around the world. Wrote nine in-depth case studies, a summary Disinformation and Civic Tech Playbook, and created an open database of nearly 450 interventions. Watch the report presentation event. The case studies:
    • Fighting Chinese Disinfo with Doublethink Lab
    • Tackling Disinformation in Brazil with InternetLab
    • Countering Disinformation with the Sentinel Project
    • Democratizing Fact-Checking with Cofacts
    • Unmasking Disinformation: SocialTIC’s Open-Source Intelligence Approach
    • Combatting Misinformation: The Role of Local Leaders
    • Battling Disinformation with Code for Africa
    • Knocking out disinformation with Chequeado
    • Disinfo-fighting lessons from 211CHECK
  • Co-developed Mozilla Foundation‘s Movement Building Landscape Analysis at the intersection of AI and social justice.
  • Conducted extensive research on digital participation platforms for the OECD.
  • Wrote People Powered’s Guide to Digital Participation Platforms.
  • Co-authored the public engagement chapter of Rebooting NYC: An Urban Tech Agenda for the Next Administration.
  • Co-authored Pathways Through the Portal, a field scan of emerging technologies in the public interest.
  • Wrote and built Participatory Aid, my MIT Media Lab Master’s thesis, where I developed a taxonomy of all the ways people use technology to deliver mutual aid in crisis situations.
  • I collect examples of civic engagement features embedded in mainstream tech products on my Civic Features blog.
  • And I track when tech companies politically mobilize their users to influence regulation on my User Lobbying blog.
    
    
• I write on technology for good and other topics for publications like The Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and PBS:
  
  • Harvard Business Review
    • Are Uber and Facebook turning users into lobbyists?
    • Sharing Data Is a Form of Corporate Philanthropy
  • Fast Company
    • See Big Tech’s terrible diversity record, visualized using its logos: A data visualization series I produced for Fast Company where I remixed the Google Doodle motif to visually demonstrate how poorly major tech companies are doing with regards to gender and racial diversity.
  • Civicist
    • Next-generation Digital Engagement Platforms, Part I and Part II
    • A timeline of civic tech tells a data-driven story of the field
    • A Maddeningly Broad Term – Defining ‘civic tech’ for Civicist’s launch series
  • Doteveryone
    • It’s time to prioritise responsibility over ratios
  • The Daily Dot
    • Understanding the Cuban tech environment
  • Microsoft On the Issues
    • Towards a taxonomy of civic technology
  • First Monday
    • The battle for ‘Trayvon Martin’: Mapping a media controversy online and off-line, where we traced the growth of the biggest news story of the year (based on my initial blog post).
  • Computer Supported Cooperative Work Conference
    • Characterizing the life cycle of online news stories using social media reactions
  • PBS
    • The Boston Marathon, Social Media, and the Spread of Misinformation
    • How to Get Social Media Platforms to Support Private Speech
    • Inside Vox Media’s Attempt to Build a Modern Media Stack
    • Kickstopper: When the Crowd Funds Projects You Abhor
    • How to Live-Blog as a Team
    • What If We Had a Nutrition Label for the News?
    • Media Diet Lessons from the Embattled History of Nutrition Labels

Selected Talks

• Democracy Tech Vs. Disinfo: A Global Review
• Is social media good or bad for democracy? Speaking at the EU Parliament on the International Day of Democracy.
• Activism drives attention drives aid, at TEDxAlbany
• More appearances

Events

I’ve organized a lot of events over the years. Most notably:

• NetSquared DC, which we grew from 250 monthly Meetup members to well over 1,250, making it one of the largest tech events in DC in the 2000s. I’m still grateful to Michael Silberman for nominating me to take over the event he started, my co-host Gabriella Schneider, and to the community that made it what it was.
• RootsCamp, an incredible post-election barcamp gathering. I helped organize some editions as a staff member of New Organizing Institute, including running the Most Valuable Organizer (and Failure) awards program. At one point we organized a large number of simultaneous decentralized State RootsCamps, for which I ran the digital and social media components.
• Machine Eatable, which gave a platform to rising stars in the societal AI, data, and privacy domains in the 2010s in New York City.

A full events and speaking list is available in my CV.

Profiles

• MIT: A Civic Technologist on Putting Goodwill to Good Use
• People Powered: The Growth of Civic Tech and the New Guide to Digital Participation Platforms
• Code for All: Fighting Disinformation with Matt Stempeck

Drop me a note