Dear friends:

This year at Personal Democracy Forum 2016, civic tech—the use of technology for the public good—was a central theme for several of our main hall keynote speakers. 

First, we heard from Marina Martin, the CTO of the Department of Veteran Affairs, and Robin Carnahan, senior adviser to 18F, both speak on the expanding efforts of the Obama Administration to deliver better digital services to the American public. Martin's focus in her talk was on the U.S. Digital Service's work with various government agencies, while in Carnahan's talk she shared her experience as Missouri's Secretary of State, and how tech and website problems literally "keep elected officials up at night."

Then Stacy Donohue, an investment partner with the Omidyar Network, which has long been involved in supporting the field of civic tech, talked about an important new research study looking at the attributes of successful social movements and exploring how the field may learn from them. In addition to listening to her talk, you can read her article about the study here on Civicist.

Building on Donohue's keynote, Elizabeth Stewart announced the launch of Civic Hall's nonprofit research and development arm, Civic Hall Labs. Then she handed the baton to her colleague Greg Bloom, a Civic Hall Labs civic imagination fellow, who talked about his work on "building a safety net for the 21st century" and how to ensure that when people search for help online they can really find up-to-date, comprehensive, and machine-readable data.

Last but not least, Republican consultant and author Kristin Soltis Anderson gave an evocative talk on why we should move past the "big government" vs "smaller government" debate and urged her fellow conservatives to "rally behind data-driven government."

These were just a few of the main hall keynotes at Personal Democracy Forum 2016—we'll be sharing news of more of them in the coming days.