Citizen Engagement is a hot topic and citizen engagement initiatives are popping up at federal, state and local government entities. This webcast will take an in-depth look at two creative companies that engage members of the public with federal, state and local government in novel ways. This webcast will be a joint presentation by one of the founders of PopVox, a company that verifies, aggregates, and simplifies communication with Congress on an open and nonpartisan common ground, and Citizinvestor, a crowdfunding platform for local government projects. Marci Davis of PopVox and Tony DeSisto of Citizinvestor will talk about their process for capturing and stimulating public engagement with an eye toward how aspects of their processes might be applicable across other areas of the government.
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Marci Harris, co-founder and CEO of POPVOX, likes to say that her "first startup was a town." In 2004, an F4 tornado struck her town of Jackson, Tennessee, the night before an election for which she was running the campaign of the incumbent mayor. She became the town's Tornado recovery coordinator for the long process that followed. Her first interaction with federal agencies and Congress was as an advocate for thousands who lost homes and businesses.
This taste of public service led her to law school and eventually to the "law and government" LLM program at American University. In 2007, she became tax, trade, and health counsel to a senior Ways and Means member and led committee efforts on Medicare program integrity and transparency.
She left Capitol Hill in February 2010 to build POPVOX, which won the SxSW BizSpark Accelerator startup competition in 2011. Harris is a recipient of a 2012 Tribeca Film Festival Disruptive Innovation Award and was named #13 of the "Top 100 Most Creative People in Business" by Fast Company magazine.
