Open MIC Board and Senior Management

Board of Advisors

Farnum Brown, PhD (Chairman and founder) is Chief Strategist and lead portfolio manager for Arjuna Capital, a sustainable wealth management platform of Baldwin Brothers, Inc.  As the founder of Open MIC, Farnum pioneered investor interest and activism on the issues of privacy, access and openness on the Internet.  For the past 26 years Farnum has managed investment portfolios for many of the leading progressives in the music and film industries.  He serves on the Boards of Directors of the Future of Music Coalition and the Public Media Company and holds bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees in philosophy 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 [1]), 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.

Rebecca MacKinnon is a Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation [2], where she conducts research, writing and advocacy on global Internet policy, free expression, and the impact of digital technologies on human rights. She is author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom [3] (Basic Books, January 2012). MacKinnon is also cofounder of Global Voices [4], an international citizen media network.  Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, MacKinnon worked as a journalist for CNN in Beijing for nine years and was Beijing Bureau Chief and Correspondent from 1998-2001, then served as CNN’s Tokyo Bureau Chief and Correspondent from 2001-03. From 2004-06 she was a Research Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society [5], where she began her ongoing research and writing about the Chinese Internet in addition to launching Global Voices with colleague Ethan Zuckerman. In 2007-08 she taught online journalism at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre [6]. In 2009 she conducted research and writing as an Open Society Fellow [7], and in the Spring of 2010 she was a Visiting Fellow at Princeton’s Center or Information Technology Policy [8]. She also serves on the Boards of Directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists [9] and the Global Network Initiative [10], a multi-stakeholder organization dedicated to promoting and upholding respect for free expression and privacy in the Internet and telecommunications sectors. MacKinnon received her AB magna cum laude from Harvard University and was a Fullbright scholar in Taiwan in 1991-92. She currently lives in Washington DC.

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.