Chris Csikszentmihalyi

director, MIT's Center for Future Civic Media

Chris Csikszentmihalyi is the director of MIT's Center for Future Civic Media. He is the founder of two other prominent Washington-based organizations in the field of money and politics -- the Center for Responsive Politics and Public Campaign -- and a nationally recognized expert on transparency and the influence of money in politics. Trained as an artist, Chris Csikszentmihalyi has worked in the intersection of new technologies, media and the arts for 16 years, lecturing, showing new media work and presenting installations on five continents and one subcontinent. Chris is a 2005 Rockefeller New Media Fellow and a 2007-08 fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He taught at the University of California at San Diego, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and at Turku University. Currently, he is the Director of the MIT Center for Future Civic Media. Csikszentmihalyi's Computing Culture research group is known for developing political technologies that rebalance power between citizens, corporations and governments. Their efforts include the Afghan Explorer, a tele-operated robot journalist designed to bypass Pentagon and Taliban press censorship, and txtMob, a mobile phone based activist system that enabled highly effective protests at the 2004 Republican and Democratic National Conventions. He is currently working on extrAct, which will bring software-based tools for collective action to communities affected by oil and natural gas drilling.