About Us

What Did Your Senator Say About Drilling In the Arctic Wilderness? What was John McCain's Position on the Iraq War Budget? What Did Hillary Clinton Say About Funding For Sex Education in Public Schools?

If you don't know, you're not alone. Currently, there's no easy or convenient way to find out what's happening in Congress on the issues you care about (or any issues at all, for that matter). And if you are a political blogger, journalist, or member of an advocacy or nonprofit organization chances are your audience or membership doesn't know what is happening around the issues that are important to them. It's like searching for a needle in the haystack.

The Congressional Record is neither an accurate transcript, nor an easy to navigate document. And few people have the patience and time to watch eight hours of daily CSPAN video.

VoterWatch is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that allows you to easily and conveniently search videos of Congress to find out what's going on about the issues that matter most to you and your community. And then, you can easily blog or email just those parts with your friends, audience, and membership at the click of a button.

You can search for specific issues (e.g., the estate tax, Iraq, or global warming) and jump directly to points in the video about that topic. Also, you can select specific representatives or senators and jump directly to points in the video where that person is speaking. And, you can do a combination of the two searches specifying both the person and topic (e.g., Harry Reid and the estate tax) and jump directly to what that person said about that specific topic.

VoterWatch puts information in your hands and allows you to share it with others whether you are a concerned citizen, a blogger or journalist, or a member of an organization fighting for change and accountability in government.

VoterWatch is a Creative Commons license project and encourages users to share these video clips. You can easily link to specific places in the video and with one click, place it on your blog or email it to your friends.

We're in beta right now so you only sample the videos from the Congressional floor proceedings about Iraq. But we'll be adding more and more videos in the next months. Thanks for your support and interest in an accurate and easy to use record of our government's actions!

Best,

Perla Ni
Co-Founder

Counsel

Perkins Coie and the Stanford Law School Fair Use Clinic

Staff

Daniel Kreiss, Senior Director of Programs and Development

Daniel Kreiss is a Ph.D. student in Stanford's Department of Communication studying the intersection of technology, politics and journalism. Prior to entering the Ph.D. program Daniel served as a political journalist and blogger, including covering the 2004 Democratic primaries and the Democratic National Convention, and was a research fellow in Stockholm, Sweden studying how media outlets cover technological innovation. Daniel also spent a number of years working in non-profit management and politics in New York City. Most recently, Daniel served as the Director of Major Gifts for The After-School Corporation, a project of the Open Society Institute, and the Development Director and Electoral Organizer for Citizen Action New York, a state-wide nonprofit organization and public policy research institute. Daniel holds a B.A. in Political Science from Bates College and an M.A. in Communication (Journalism) from Stanford University.

Perla Ni, Co-Founder and Chairman

Perla was the founder and publisher of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the leading journal on nonprofit management and philanthropy. While at the Review, she also launched the successful www.ssireview.org Web site and blog.

Perla also co-founded and was editor in chief of Grassroots.com, a nonprofit advocacy Web site named by Forbes as "Best of the Web." A frequent speaker on nonprofits and philanthropy, Ni continues to blog at www.ssireview.org. She has a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. She's on the advisory board of the Nonprofit Finance Fund San Francisco and on the board of GoodWill Industries San Francisco.

Product Manager: Kamal Ravikant

Engineering: Marcel Blanchet

Transcript Editors: Ruth Grunberg, Clint Raulsten, Lawrence SanFillippo

Special Thanks to Engineers:

John Davi
Tripp Millican
Naicu Octavian
Marco Schmoecker
James Young

Board

Bernadine E. Abbott Hoduski

Bernadine is one of the founders of the American Library Association Government Documents Round Table and currently serves on the ALA Council. She was elected to the board of the Freedom to Read Foundation in 2007. She is the author of "Lobbying for Libraries and the Public's Access to Government Information". Her book is based upon years of being lobbied and lobbying. She served 21 years as a professional staff member of the Congressional Joint Committee on Printing. She is a contributing editor to "Unabashed Librarian". She chaired the Friends of the Lewis & Clark Public Library for 8 years and co-chaired the Fund Our Library's Future levy campaign, which persuaded the voters of Lewis & Clark to support a seven year levy for the library. She was born in New Deal, Montana and is from a family of Montana and North Dakota homesteaders. She has a history degree from Avila University in Kansas City, Missouri and a masters of art in Library Science from the University of Denver.

Tim Dick

Tim is founder and Vice Chairman of Hawaii Superferry, a company that is bringing energy-efficient & low cost inter-island vehicle ferry service to Hawaii. A serial entrepreneur, Tim was previously founder and President of Grassroots.com, a political web technology company. In 1995, he founded WorldPages.com, the internet's first white & yellow pages, which went public and was subsequently acquired Transwestern Publishers (now BT). He has raised over $300M of venture capital. Previous to that, Tim was a principal at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

Tim holds an MBA from Stanford University where he was a member of the Public Management Program. He also holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California. He serves or has served as Board member and advisor to numerous companies including Hawaii Superferry, Emptor / Accept (acquired by Amazon), Affinity Engines, Biopacific, WorldPages (IPO & acquired by Transwestern Publishers, now BT), Dali Wireless, and Spoxel. A believer in social responsibility, he co-founded TRUSTe.org which has become the Internet's privacy standard. He is a founding Board Member of Reef Check Hawaii and an active member of the Hawaii Venture Capital Association, and the Hawaii International Film Festival.

Perla Ni - See previous

Advisory Board

Jim Cashel, Chairman, ForumOne Communications

Jim co-founded Forum One Communications in 1996, awestruck by the possibilities of the web and online community. Jim plays a lead role in Forum One's work to guide public and private sector organizations in strategic use of the web. Among other activities, he oversees senior client work involving global health and other topics, and helps lead Forum One Networks, the online community research and events activities of Forum One. Jim is also a noted expert and frequent speaker about the development of online collaboration.

Prior to Forum One Communications, Jim co-founded the Eurasia Foundation, a Washington D.C.-based grant-making organization. At Eurasia, Jim served as Senior Program Officer and Chief Financial Officer as the Foundation grew from three staff members to over 100, nine offices in seven countries, and an annual budget of over 25 million dollars. Jim loves travel, having lived, worked and toured in over fifty countries. Along the way he learned Spanish and Russian. Like most people working on web initiatives, Jim has an eclectic background, with a science degree from Stanford University, a public policy degree from the Kennedy School of Government, and a medical degree from Harvard Medical School.

Steven Freedman

Steven Freedman, MD, MBA, advises startup companies in the domains of software product management, knowledge management, medical informatics, and general business strategy as the principal of Mecando Consulting. Mecando also serves as the umbrella for Dr. Freedman's entrepreneurial activities and interests. In 2004, he co-founded Quoticus.com, an early web service for the verification of political quotes and citations by linking them in context with video recordings of their original speeches . His role at Voterwatch.com is a natural continuation of that work.

A pioneer of hypertext research and product development, Dr. Freedman entered the field in the early '80s while in medical school when he realized that the information and communication overload faced by physicians could be only be addressed by electronic collection, communication, sharing, and organization of semantically-rich information. Recognizing that the public-at-large would eventually face similar overloading from information in the office and the home, his work has and continues to extend beyond medicine into commercialization of hypertext-related technologies and applications for general business and consumer uses.

Prior to starting Mecando, Dr. Freedman co-founded OpenDesign, Inc. with Edward Jung, former Chief Software Architect of Microsoft, and Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft Chief Technical Officer, to develop peer-to-peer web services platform technology for distributed network applications.

From 1993 to 1999, Dr. Freedman worked at Microsoft Corporation, where he served as the principal designer and lead program manager for Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 Channels (the direct ancestor of RSS web feeds), co-created the original Microsoft Passport project as a client-based identity management and privacy protection system, and led the team that created the Microsoft Home Health online consumer health service as part of MSN 1.0. Current versions of these products are used by more than 200 million people worldwide.

Trained in medicine, as well as computer science, Dr. Freedman pioneered the development of multimedia hypertext technologies for healthcare while at Stanford University, where he designed and led development of the ElectricCadaver, the first multimedia electronic medical textbook.

Dr. Freedman holds an A.B. magna cum laude in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard University, an M.D. with honors from Stanford Medical School, and an M.B.A. from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ben Jealous, President of Rosenberg Foundation

Benjamin Todd Jealous is President of the Rosenberg Foundation- a private independent institution that supports advocacy efforts to make significant improvements in the lives of California's working families and recent immigrants. He is the fourth person to hold the position since the Foundation was founded in 1935.

Mr. Jealous came to the Rosenberg Foundation from Amnesty International, where he directed its US Human Rights Program. While at Amnesty International, he led its efforts to pass federal legislation against prison rape, rebuild public consensus against racial profiling in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks, and expose the widespread sentencing of children to life without the possibility of parole. He is the lead author of the 2004 report Threat and Humiliation: Racial Profiling, Domestic Security, and Human Rights in the United States, the release of which received coverage by major media outlets in most states and on six continents.

Formerly, Mr. Jealous served as Executive Director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA)-a federation of more than 200 black community newspapers. While at the NNPA, he rebuilt its 90-year old national news service and spearheaded the creation of a proprietary software system that enabled dozens of local papers to begin publishing online.

During the mid 1990s, Mr. Jealous served as Managing Editor of the Jackson Advocate, Mississippi's oldest black newspaper. His reporting for the frequently-firebombed weekly was credited with exposing corruption amongst high-ranking officials at the state prison in Parchman, and helping to acquit a small farmer who had been wrongfully and maliciously accused of arson.

He initially came to Mississippi as a field organizer on a successful campaign to stop the state's plan to close of two of its three public historically black universities, and convert one of them into a prison.

Mr. Jealous began his career as an organizer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund working on issues of healthcare access.

He was born, raised, and attended public and parochial schools in Monterey County, California. He holds a bachelor's degree in political science from Columbia University and a master's degree in comparative social research from Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Mr. Jealous is a member of the Asia Society. He is a board member of Northern California Grantmakers and the California Council for the Humanities.

Tracy Westen

Tracy is Vice-Chairman and CEO of the Center for Governmental Studies (CGS), which he founded in 1983. He has co-authored more than 12 CGS reports and publications. He helped create key CGS projects, including the California Commission on Campaign Financing, the National Resource Center on State and Local Campaign Finance Reform, the California Channel, the California Citizens Budget Commission, the Democracy Network, the California Citizens Commission on Higher Education, and ConnectLA.

He is also Chairman of the Municipal Access Policy Board for Los Angeles Channel 35, Adjunct Professor of Communications Law and Policy at the USC Annenberg School of Communication (since 1983) and Senior Fellow for Electronic Democracy at the Aspen Institute. He was Deputy Director for Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission (1977-81). He is recipient of national "public service" awards from both Common Cause and the National League of Women Voters for his work on campaign finance reform and online voter information systems.

Tim Wu, Professor, Columbia Law School

Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School. He is the co-author of Who Controls the Internet? (Oxford U. Press 2006), and a writer for Slate Magazine. In 2006 Wu was recognized as one 50 leaders in science and technology by Scientific American magazine for his work on Network Neutrality theory.

Tim Wu previously worked for Riverstone Networks in the telecommunications industry in Silicon Valley, and was a law clerk for Judge Richard Posner and Justice Stephen Breyer. He graduated from McGill University (B.Sc), and Harvard Law School, and has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of Chicago, and Stanford Law School.

Wu has written for various legal publications, and also the Washington Post, Forbes Magazine, Slate Magazine, Playboy, and others. He is on the advisory board of Free Press, Public Knowledge, and is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and once worked at Hoo's Dumplings.

ShinJoung Yeo, Stanford University Libraries

Shinjoung works as a communication librarian and reference coordinator at Stanford University Libraries. As an information activist, ShinJoung co-founded several initiatives including Radical Reference (radicalreference.info), an information workers collective which supports independent journalists, and community activists and Free Government Information (freegovinfo.info), a group that advocates for and promotes free access to government information. She left Korea 15 years and is a fast learner at questioning authority.