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
- 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 NDI to understand how their member organizations are effectively confronting digital disinformation around the world. You can read the Disinformation and Civic Tech Playbook, and watch the full report presentation event.
- 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
- 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
- The Daily Dot
- Understanding the Cuban tech environment
- Microsoft On the Issues
- 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
- 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 Speeches & Guest Lectures
- 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
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
- 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