Todd Davies
San Francisco, California - USA
Website

Biography:

I lived in colorado, in and around denver, from birth through high school.
My parents were from families that immigrated to the u.s from europe early
in the 20th century. Their families both struggled during the depression,
but my parents each experienced the kind of good fortune that young white
people could hope for in the middle of the century. They both got good
educations and we lived well while I was growing up.

I moved to california when I was 18 (in 1980) and got undergraduate and
graduate degrees at Stanford. I studied statistics and then psychology,
eventually focusing on behavioral studies of judgment and decision making.
Before working on my Ph.D. I did research for several years in an
artificial intelligence lab at SRI International. I taught psychology for
three years at Koc University in istanbul, turkey, in the late 90s before
returning to Stanford in 2000 as lecturer and coordinator of the Symbolic
Systems Program. SSP is an interdisciplinary undergraduate and master's
degree program focused on the relationships between people and computers.

I became gradually politicized during my student years and have been
involved in various grassroots activist organizations since then. In the
beginning these were focused on california issues that especially
concerned me: the death penalty, access to health insurance, housing and
homelessness, and forest preservation. My experience in turkey led to
some work on international issues, including a year of summit-hopping and
direct action organizing in 1999-2000. I followed others in the global
justice movement early in this decade in becoming involved in and
supporting organizations near me that addressed wider imbalances in a
local way. In the last four years, I have mainly worked on using the
Internet to help community-based and labor organizations in the bay area
involve their rank-and-file constituents participate more meaningfully in
decision making. The desire to connect with others both within and
outside academia who share my interests led me to host Online Deliberation
2005 at Stanford in May. I am working with others who attended the
conference to establish an international organization to support the
creation and application of software and research in online deliberation.

What's a recent movie you've seen and enjoyed and why?

"Primer" -- a low budget, independent film about time travel. The film
has a very complicated timeline that requires repeated viewing to
understand. I wasn't motivated to watch Primer more than once, but I
enjoyed reading the discussion about it at imdb.com (see
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390384/usercomments and note the interesting
filtering options). Both the film and the online forum seem designed for a
new kind of movie experience that combines the ease of random access on a
DVD with the extended discussion made possible by asynchronous forums.

What is "community" and why is it important to you?

I think a community is a group of people who share a stake in something,
which is a bit stronger than sharing an "interest". For example, I might
share an interest with people in Mexico in an election there, but that
doesn't mean we each have a similar stake in the outcome. This
distinction is important for social movements because a shared stake is
often the basis for mutual trust and, therefore, the right to participate
in collective decisions. I've become increasingly attentive to this
meaning of community and am trying to build software that supports it.

Pick your favorite technology and explain how it
makes the world a better place?

I guess I'd pick writing because I think that, despite the obvious effect
that literacy gaps have in furthering inequality between people, writing
has a leveling effect relative to spoken language in communities where
both forms of communication are practiced by everyone. Overall, I am not
convinced that any technology makes the world a better place than it would
be if we had no technology at all. But given where we are, developing
technology for online deliberation seems like a reasonable strategy for
addressing a number of the world's problems.

2-3 questions or issues that you hope we'll address at the "Deepening Online Deliberation" meeting?

(a) How can we work together to support multiple platforms and models for
online deliberation?

(b) What are the best ways to connect design and academic work with the
needs of tool users?