The POPVOX team was honored to join many civic tech friends at the 2014 World Affairs Council NextGen Changemakers event in San Francisco, sponsored by Google.

“The NextGen Changemakers: Civic Innovation reception offers a platform for the exploration of innovative solutions to global problems” and this year higlighted “companies and organizations who are at the intersection of technology and civic life.”

These included: Change.org, Code for America, Institute for the Future, The San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation, MapLight, POPVOX, Socrata

A highlight of the evening was hearing the New York Times’ columnist, Tom Friedman, discussing the challenges for leaders in the 21st Century:

“Every leader today is in a two-way conversation, and it is incredibly noisy. … how leaders learn to think through this noise is going to be one of the great leadership challenges at this time of enormous complexity in the world.” (See video at 33:15.)

Our goal at POVOX is not only to help the voices of people be heard but to help those in government discern signal from noise. That is why we verify that comments sent through POPVOX are from real people — actual constituents — and deliver messages in the way that can be most easily processed by Congress.