Join us on February 26, at 6:00PM at Mixx Ultra Lounge (1203 Main Street in OTR) as Soapbox commemorates its one year anniversary with a special cocktail reception and discussion. Special keynote speaker will be Ben Self, founding partner of Blue State Digital, the consulting firm that developed and executed the ground-breaking online, grassroots organization of thousands of volunteers leveraging digital and social media for the Obama presidential campaign.
Earlier that day, Mr. Self will meet with groups of community leaders to discuss how digital and social media might play a role in advancing Cincinnati's arts scene as well as making the case for the Streetcar initiative.
Next week, Soapbox will feature highlights from the conversations as well as potential next steps.
Love
the photography you see each week? We do to. That's why Soapbox Art
Director, Scott Beseler will be on hand at the party with a special showing of his favorite mastheads available for purchase.
To RSVP, please click
here.
About Ben Self:
Ben
Self is a founding partner of Blue State Digital, a consulting firm
that specializes in creating new media strategy and technology for
political candidates, non-profits, and companies. Blue State Digital’s
software and strategy powers the online presence of the largest and
most prominent Democratic candidates and progressive organizations,
including the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Blue State
Digital also serves numerous non-profits and corporations, such as
AT&T, We Can Solve It (Al Gore’s Environmental Advocacy
Organization), Save Darfur, New York University, the Hearst
Corporation, and the Sundance Film Festival.
Ben founded Blue
State Digital in 2004 with three other individuals responsible for
Howard Dean’s use of the Internet during his presidential campaign. The
company now has offices in New York, London, Boston, Washington DC, and
San Francisco.
During the 2008 election cycle, Ben Self also
served as the DNC Technology Director, where, as a key member of the
DNC’s senior staff, he supervised the technology projects of the
national party – focusing specifically on the website, computer
infrastructure, compliance software, and national voter file database.
In this role, Ben led projects that entirely revamped the technology of
the DNC, including a complete replacement of the website and the
Democratic Party’s national voter file (VoteBuilder).
During his
career, Ben has garnered extensive experience in new media
technologies, statistical data analysis, data warehousing, database
architecture and administration, system design, and system development.
He built the FEC's system for gathering and reporting on campaign
finance data, and architected the largest distributed Geographic
Information Systems database ever deployed for the USDA. He has created
data warehouses for a variety of industries, including health care,
telecommunications, finance, and insurance. In these industries, he has
worked at all levels of system development -- from designing and
writing the software itself to managing large teams responsible for
developing systems to be used by tens of thousands of users. In
addition to this work, Ben has performed extensive research and written
a thesis on object-oriented design.
Ben has both a bachelor's
and a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science
from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
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