OPENMEDIA

As the Managing Director of OpenMedia, I led the development of the organization through a period of massive growth. Given our dedication to the participatory culture enabled by the Internet, we wanted to continue to be an empowering, democratic workplace even as we grew from a tiny staff of 3 to a larger team of 14. Internally, we experimented with participatory budgeting and were devoted to collaborative campaign design, trying to maintain the ethos of a flat structure while also having clear forms of accountability and authority. Externally, we engaged hundreds of thousands of people in uniquely participatory campaigns, where supporters could use specially designed drag-and-drop tools to crowdsource policy and tell us what their lived experience taught them about how to protect affordability, privacy and free expression online. We broke totally new ground in Canada with the scale and sophistication of our campaigns, which still provide a model for how to strategically impact decision-makers with advocacy that was impossible to ignore.