Open MIC Board and Senior Management

Board of Advisors

Farnum Brown, PhD (Chairman and founder) is a vice president and senior portfolio manager at Trillium Asset Management Corporation.  With over a billion dollars of assets under management, Trillium is an internationally recognized leader in the field of progressive shareholder activism.  The Company pioneered the use of shareholder rights to maximize financial return while improving corporate performance in the areas of environmental, social and media responsibility.  For the past 20 years Farnum has managed investment portfolios for many of the leading progressives in the music and film industries.  He serves on the Board of Directors of the Future of Music Coalition and on the Board of Advisors of Public Radio Capital.   Farnum holds bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

Jamie Daves is the Managing Director and Founder of Platform Equity. Before founding Platform, Jamie partnered with former Vice President Al Gore and entrepreneur Joel Hyatt to found and develop Current TV, a national cable network targeting young adults. As a founding partner of Current, he was instrumental in developing the innovative creative positioning and programming format, raising over $80M in financing, and completing the acquisition of Newsworld International from Vivendi Universal. In addition to his background as a business and creative executive, Jamie has had over a decade of experience in the public sector. During the Clinton Administration, he was Special Assistant for Policy and Communications under the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, William E. Kennard. While at the FCC, he advised the Chairman on a wide range of policy matters including the digital conversion of broadcast, broadband open access, and the implementation of the initiative to connect schools and libraries to the Internet. Prior to joining the FCC, Jamie served in a number of policy and political roles including National Field Director to the Democratic Leadership Council and National Youth Director for both the Democratic National Committee and the 1992 Clinton/Gore Presidential Campaign. Jamie is a nationally recognized leader in the non-profit sector and co-founded The Full Circle Fund, a venture philanthropy organization that has directed over $10M to Bay Area non-profits. He received an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and has a bachelors degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

Jason Devitt is a co-founder and CEO of Skydeck (www.skydeck.com), a service that helps individuals and companies manage their cell phones and their cell phone bills.  Jason developed the idea for Skydeck while an entrepreneur-in-residence at iHatch, a venture capital firm that focuses on the mobile market.   Previously Jason co-founded Vindigo, one of the first companies to publish content and applications for mobile phones in the United States. Products included Mapquest Mobile, MovieGoer, and the Vindigo City Guide. Jason led the company from inception in 1999 to more than $10 million in revenue and profitability in 2005. Prior to founding Vindigo, Jason spent four years working for the technology-driven investment firm D. E. Shaw & Co. in London and New York, where he structured OTC equity derivatives. Jason grew up in Ireland and has a Master's Degree in Electronic Engineering and a Diploma in Law from UCD and the King's Inns in his hometown of Dublin.

Laurie Racine is Co-founder and President of dotSUB, a young technology company that has developed a browser based tool for subtitling films from one language into any other language. Racine holds the position of Senior Fellow at the Norman Lear Center of the Annenberg School of Communications, University of Southern California. She serves as co-director of the Lear Center’s Creativity, Commerce and Culture Project. She is Chair of Teachers Without Borders and serves on the board of directors of Creative Commons and National Video Resources. Until she closed the foundation in January of 2006, Racine served as President of the Center for the Public Domain, a private foundation endowed by the founders of Red Hat Inc. The Center was devoted to exploring the balance between intellectual property rights and freely reusable knowledge that is the basis of our cultural and scientific heritage. During her tenure she co-founded Public Knowledge and currently serves as Board Chair.

Executive Director

Michael Connor is an award-winning media executive, entrepreneur and journalist with extensive experience in television, print and the internet. In November 2004, he acquired Business Ethics magazine, the premier U.S. publication in the field, and served as its Publisher and Executive Editor. He later assumed top editorial and management positions at The CRO, a membership organization for corporate responsibility officers. He is also host of Good Company with Michael Connor, a one-hour weekly program that focuses on issues of corporate responsibility and sustainability, broadcast nationally on Lime/Sirius Satellite Radio. Michael began his career as a journalist, first as a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and later as a Correspondent and Senior Producer for ABC News. He subsequently held executive positions at Dow Jones & Co., where he led global development of the company’s TV and multimedia operations and served as CEO of Dow Jones’s pan-European business TV network. Michael is a board member of City Futures Inc., an organization that is home to the Center for an Urban Future, a progressive policy think tank, and City Limits, an urban affairs news magazine. He also sits on the board of Location One, a non-profit devoted to convergence between visual, performing and digital arts in a time of rapidly changing technology. Michael is a graduate of Holy Cross College and lives in New York City.