Dear friend:

This year at Personal Democracy Forum 2017, we were thrilled to host a fantastic array of keynote speakers. Over the coming days, we'll be posting videos of those talks, starting with these standout speeches:

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) gave her thoughts about how to protect democracy during the Trump era. If you've been asking WTF; well, it appears the junior senator from New York has exactly that question on her mind.

Malkia Cyril, founder and Executive Director of the Center for Media Justice (CMJ), explained the connections between racism, power and digital rights, in a talk titled "Will You Harbor Me? To Fight Police Violence, Demand Digital Sanctuary."

Mike Masnick, the founder of TechDirt, warned all of us of the chilling effects on free speech that his blog is facing and that others may face if today's libel laws are changed.

Rashad Robinson, Executive Director at Color of Change, one of the leading online groups on the frontlines, gave a powerful summing up speech asking movement leaders,  "Are We Going To Get This Right?"

Please feel free to share the links to those talks, using the hashtag #PDF17. 

We're also writing with a timely request from Mozilla, a longtime partner of ours and proud sponsor of Personal Democracy Forum 2017

Mozilla thinks of the Internet as an ecosystem -- and right now they need your help figuring out if that ecosystem is healthy. What should we pay attention to? The number of people or languages online? The speed of an internet connection? 

To capture what’s healthy & unhealthy in that ecosystem right now, Mozilla has launched an open source initiative called the Internet Health Report. And it needs your input now. Please Visit indicators.internethealthreport.org by June 16, 2017.
 

Thanks for all that you do!

 

Micah L. Sifry and Andrew Rasiej and the rest of the PDF team at Civic Hall