PirateCon 2017

Recordings | Schedule | Speaker Bios | Will it be streamed? | Registration

PirateCon 2017, our annual conference, was Saturday, April 29th at the Community Church of Boston. The Community Church is in Copley Square at 565 Boylston St #2, Boston. It started at 10am and end at 6pm.

A big thanks to everyone who participated, spoke at it and most especially volunteered.

Recordings

Video

We have a video playlist of all of the talks, and will make them available via BitTorrent. You can also find specific talks embedded below:

Qualifying the Integrity of Media Sources

Electoral Action

Media & Liberation

FOIA: Transparency by a Thousand Papercuts

Organizing for a Sustainable, Accountable Movement

Lightning Talks

State of Surveillance

Audio

• Qualifying the Integrity of Media Sources. (audio)

Schedule

Speaker Bios

Qualifying the Integrity of Media Sources

Kendra Moyer is a writer, political technologist, community educator and member of the International Pirate Party and the MF/PL Support Team and. She teaches programming in GNU/Linux, educating activists about data security. Kendra has served as an Arbitrator for the Massachusetts Pirate Party. She is a graduate of the MF/PL Techie of Color Internship Program in network administration. Kendra mentors the for the Outreachy Program, bringing under-represented technologists into the software engineering industry. A past member of OBIT the Occupy Boston Information Tech team and writer and editor for The Boston Occupier and Versus News, she supports Constitutional protections with Restore the 4th and and Net Neutrality with Fight for the Future. She resides in Highland Park, MI and advocates welfare rights and against the emergency management crisis in low income communities. She is dedicated to promoting and end to systematic violence, human rights, and animal rights. Kendra graduated from University of Michigan and holds an MA in Communications and Arts Management from Eastern Michigan University.

Andrea Romig is organizing a support rally for the March for Real News in DC and wants to have time to speak/promote it at PirateCon. Andrea has been both in mainstream and independent media. She is also involved with Science for the People.

Wendy Joy Welsh is a graduate of Smith College with a degree in Computer Science. Ms. Welsh’s success in the software industry includes starting and running her own consulting company, but Wendy is now using her problem-solving skills to solve the most important problem: Big Business’ control over our government, aka corruption. Wendy’s first foray into political activism was to work with the Greater Boston Trade Justice (formerly NoTPPBoston) in order to stop the Trans Pacific Partnership. Wendy took the group beyond simple protesting by employing marketing techniques. Wendy identified and targeted a prime audience: medical patients, who would have to pay more for medicines with the TPP. Wendy designed and created a targeted, informative trifold flyer. The flyer resembled a pharmaceutical brochure, and was distributed to all of the hospitals in Boston and many of the surrounding towns. While trying to solve the problem of corruption, Wendy stumbled upon a way to prove that Corporate Media is a tool for propaganda. That proof is described her paper entitled Why Media Corporations Lie About Citizens United and How to Get Money out of Politics. She also made a 10-minute video about the same topic: Corruption and Fake News. You can find Wendy Joy Welsh’s work at TheAnswerIsLocal.com.

Electoral Action

Aaron James was the Pirate Party candidate for 27th Middlesex State Representative.

Joseph Onoroski

Adam Friedman serves as the Executive Director of Voter Choice Massachusetts, a movement of volunteers dedicated to educating the public about Ranked Choice Voting. In 2009, he served on the executive committee of a RCV statewide ballot question campaign in Massachusetts. Adam serves on the boards of MassVOTE and Common Cause Massachusetts and has been involved in lobbying and organizing around democracy reform for over ten years.

Adam works full-time as a civic technologist and web applications engineer. Beginning in 2012, Adam created the first searchable public database of official election statistics on behalf of the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and three other US states. He holds a BA in History from Boston University.

Media & Liberation

David Day: In October 2009, David sent out an email to all the producers, performers and promoters he knew about joining forces and starting a festival, called “Together.” Having spent years in the Boston music scene, he figured it was high time everyone got the respect and acknowledgment they deserved. As a creative economy, Art + Music + Technology has a boundless future and Boston is the type of city that can support its endless expansion. As Together’s Creative Director, Day is responsible for watering all the trees.

Sevan Chorluyan is the Chief of BadMirror Broadcasting, a hyperlocal video broadcasting system I created the architecture for. Currently leading a small team of wonderful people changing the relationship people have with where they live.

Thom Dunn is a playwright and fiction author who was a staff writer at Upworthy.

FOIA: Transparency by a Thousand Papercuts

JPat Brown is Executive Editor of Muckrock. He is a graduate of Bowdoin College, the former Editor-in-Chief of the alt-weekly DigBoston, the author of a really stupid book about owls, and at one point ran a computer lab in a church basement. He’s been published in the Boston Herald, had his public records work written about in Newsweek and the New York Times, and wrote a thing that Jerry Seinfeld read out loud in a funny voice on The Daily Show. Hit him up at jpat@muckrock.com or @resentfultweet.

Maya Shaffer is a CoFounder of The Bay State Examiner a government watchdog news outlet that covers Massachusetts. She writes a column on the state’s public records law for DigBoston through a partnership with the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and frequently writes about issues of police abuse, governmental waste and corruption, and general lack of transparency in Massachusetts. Her background is activism and she was a founding member of MassOps the constitutional trolling crew.

Organizing for a Sustainable, Accountable Movement

Grace Ross was the 2006 Green-Rainbow Party nominee for Massachusetts Governor and is an anti-foreclosure/social justice organizer with decades of experience. She is leading the fight against illegal foreclosures in Massachusetts as part of the Massachusetts Alliance Against Predatory Lending and the Worcester Anti-Foreclosure Action Team. The Worcester Anti-Foreclosure Action Team has had a high success rate in fighting illegal foreclosures by empowering homeowners and combining nonviolent direct-action and legal action.

Guillermo Hamlin is an educator, consultant, media-maker, and is currently the Volunteer & Outreach Coordinator at MATV, Malden’s Media Center. Mr. Hamlin holds an A.L.B from Harvard University with a concentration in Philosophy with a secondary concentration in Anthropology. As an undergrad, he was everything from a camera operator to an end user security coordinator. As the Boston Chapter President of the Harvard Latino Alumni Alliance, Guillermo facilitates alumni engagement with Latino student communities through mentoring, community building, and other volunteer activities in the Greater Boston Area. He was previously the Program Assistant for Chelsea Community Schools under the city’s Health and Human Services. Additionally, he serves on the board of the Community Action Agency of Somerville which in addition to fighting the causes of chronic poverty, administers Head Start programs promoting school readiness for low-income children under 5 in Somerville and Cambridge.

Jordan Pelovitz is an industrial designer and teacher. You can find his work at jordanpelovitz.com.

State of Surveillance

Alex Marthews is President of Digital Fourth. Alex was deeply interested in tech policy from before 9/11: at grad school, he helped to design Berkeley’s first course on Cyberlaw (2000-1), wrote his master’s thesis on online discrimination in blocking and filtering systems, and interned at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where he researched surveillance and digital piracy. After graduating, he ran three successful nonprofits (Preservation Action Council, 2003-5; WATCH, 2005-7; Growth Through Learning, 2008-12). After becoming a proud US citizen, Alex founded Digital Fourth in Cambridge, Mass., in June of 2012.

Steven Presser

Steve Revilak is Quartermaster of the Pirate Party and an Arlington Town Meeting Member.

Michael Walsh

Registration

Registration was $10. Youth under 18 were free. Participants could pay in advance or just tell us they would attend if they prefered to pay at the door or are under 18.

Will it be streamed?

We streamed the conference on video and audio, after a delay. It was our first time streaming in both audio and video.