Matt standing in front of an art piece featuring lots of colorful skateboard decks

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

For over 15 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 and UN Youth Assembly, and appear 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. You can check out my full CV here.

I live in Lisbon, travel extensively, prioritize my friends, 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.

Roles

  • Founder 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.
  • Technologist in Residence at Cornell University, where I established the Siegel Impact Fellowship and grew the Public Interest Tech program.
  • Librarian at Newspeak House, an independent college of political technology in London.
  • Coach at Superbloom Design, advising civic and social startups.
  • Advisory board member of the Civic AI Observatory.
  • Advisory board member of mySociety’s The Impacts of Civic Tech Steering Group.
  • 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.
  • Creative technologist, in my spare time. I genuinely love what I do and am always dreaming up, building, and spinning off creative products, apps, and musings, including:
    • LazyTruth: The first disinformation-fighting app on the web. Our team collected all of the debunks and fact-checks from partners at Snopes, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and Sophos cybersecurity into a collective database and API, and launched a Gmail plugin and auto-reply service that helped users get the truth about the crazy email forwards hitting their inboxes. LazyTruth won UNESCO’s NetExplo Award.
    • The On1on: Some news is so ridiculous, it belongs in The Onion. So we put it there.
    • Gender Avenger Tally: Celebrate (or shame) event organizers for their program’s gender (im)balance.
    • Puzzle States: An art project where I produced laser-cut jigsaw puzzles of every US state’s congressional district boundaries to make gerrymandering more tactile.
    • The Emoji Compass: Inspired by our love for the His Dark Materials series, we created an alethiometer that answers any query in the form of a cryptic emoji reply. Powered by celestial Dust and earthly JavaScript.
    • 4,000 Under 40, a professional list so prestigious, anyone can join.
    • AdCropped: A minimalist blog on a mission to reclaim the creative from advertising by cropping out the sales pitch. Featured nowhere.
    • LinkSprout: a free and open source bio page for the web, because you shouldn’t have to pay for a little HTML. Here’s mine, for example.

Selected Research & Writing

Selected Speeches & Guest Lectures

Events

Despite identifying as an introvert 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 list is available in my CV.

Profiles

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