Justin Brown
Justin has been a member of the Coffee Party’s Internet Infrastructure Work Group since June 2012, where he helps to implement the next generation of web technologies to power our mission. Justin is one of the leaders of BigMarker.com, which is a technology partner of Coffee Party. BigMarker builds tools aimed at helping all people have a voice and make their mark. Justin is also involved in a number of nonprofit and charitable causes, the common thread being the use of technology to connect and strengthen communities. Prior to joining BigMarker, Justin was a management consultant at Accenture, where he helped businesses and governments solve a multitude of strategic, operational, and technology-related issues. He holds degrees in Economics and Marketing from Miami University, and enjoys outdoor pursuits such as backpacking, skiing, snowboarding, and boating. He lives in Chicago.
ESSAY
What do you bring to the Coffee Party Board of Directors and why do you want to serve on the Board?
The short of it:
I bring to the Coffee Party Board of Directors a habit of leadership in the grassroots nonprofit and social entrepreneurship arenas, with over a decade of experience connecting communities. I also bring strong business and technology acumen, and a track record of working with a diverse set of organizations and people to find ways to find common ground to achieve common goals, power missions with technology, and operate in a way that is respectful of the diverse values and cultures that stakeholders bring to the table.
The long of it:
Coffee Party USA is at a crossroads: we have the bold mission of connecting communities to reclaim our government for the people. We are breaking ground by working across partisan lines, in a civil and inclusive way. We are beginning to make big strides toward greater inclusiveness; we have content mavens who are leading discussion and challenging people everywhere to think. But we still have a number of opportunities ahead of us.
To connect communities, others are counting on the Board of Directors and other volunteers to be the “glue” that unites people, empowering them to find each other, and giving them the tools they need to facilitate civil discourse and action at both the national and local levels.
Like the broader organization, I am on a personal mission to connect communities and empower people. I believe that people who share a common passion or interest can achieve greater impact by working together. All of the work that defines me, and consumes my full attention as a leader of BigMarker, my nonprofit pursuits, and most recently the Coffee Party IIWG, is centered around solving this same problem. In summary, I bring with me all of my insights, experience, and dedication to solving the issue of connecting people so they can do more together; in the case of the Coffee Party, so they can reclaim our government for the people.
What do you think is the most important impact that the Coffee Party can make in the next five years?
The short of it:
Empowering people with the democratization of technology.
The long of it:
It’s easy for us to think of the technologies we use on a daily basis as ubiquitous, but we are the few; it’s important for us to remember that as Americans, we are among the most privileged segment of the global population. Just over 200 million Americans have access to high-speed internet, which compared to the developing world is nothing short of massive. But to those calling for the democratization of technology in the US, 2/3 of Americans is not sufficient. “We are a country in which only the urban and suburban well-off have truly high-speed Internet access, while the rest — the poor and the working class — either cannot afford access or use restricted wireless access as their only connection to the Internet” (Susan P. Crawford, NY Times “The New Digital Divide” 12/3/11).
In the next five years, access to high speed internet will become ubiquitous in the United States, many first time users of web-based technologies leapfrogging those who came before them, accessing them on the new better, faster, cheaper mobile devices and completely skipping entire generations of earlier, clunkier, more expensive devices. Similarly, with increasing adoption of web-based technologies, the cloud, and software as a service (SaaS), the masses will have access to the tools that were once only available to corporations and governments with large IT budgets.
What Facebook, Twitter, and Meetup have done in the past five years to help the masses connect with each other, post articles, status updates, and organize offline groups is really only the beginning. The next generation of social and collaborative platforms like NationBuilder, indiegogo, Kiva, BigMarker, Khan Academy and mentormob are empowering people to connect in a more authentic way, openly share knowledge and information, organize around increasingly complex initiatives and actions, and support the mobilization of resources to incite change driven by people, for the people, independent of their backgrounds, locations, budgets, or constraints.
The democratization of these capabilities driven by the growing accessibility of high speed internet and the availability of tools created by cloud-based, socially-minded companies will empower people to come together and do what they do better by being connected in a more authentic way. As a community of communities, Coffee Party wields a giant torch, possessing the clout to call thousands, if not millions of people to action. How Coffee Party chooses to leverage this next generation of technologies will determine what meaning the term ‘Coffee Party’ evokes in 2017.
So Coffee Party is at a crossroads: we have a tremendous opportunity to harness new technologies that further our mission, but we must tread carefully. As an organization that was born and raised online, our technology choices must flow naturally from our mission and strategy, and more than ever, we must maintain our focus on keeping the two lock step.
In summary, our successes, or missteps in the use of technology will determine the magnitude of impact we have in the next five years.
