Participation and Sponsorship Information

Registration is now open! Please download the invitation and registration leaflet.

WE WELCOME SPONSORS in order to be able to cover our costs and to help experts from across the world to attend the forum, which otherwise cannot come. Interested? Please contact Host Comittee Co-Chair Joe Mathews.

2010 Global Forum Host Committee

 The 2010 Global Forum Host Committee

Is the organization in charge for preparing, conducting and evaluating the third worldwide conference on participative democracy across the globe.

The 2010 Global Forum Host Committee (GFHC) is an affiliate to the Center for Governmental Studies a 501(c)(3) tax exempt educational and research organization based in Los Angeles.

GFHC is co-headed by Joe Mathews and Bruno Kaufmann and does include the following members: Robert M. Stern, Paul Jacob, Lynne Mosier and David J. Jung.

JOE MATHEWS

Joe Mathews is a journalist and an Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation. He serves as a contributing writer at Los Angeles Times opinion, and as a columnist at the Daily Beast. His work on California, its politics, government, labor and media appears in the New York Times, Washington Post, The New Republic, Politico, Los Angeles magazine, the Scientific American, and other publications. He maintains a blog about initiatives and referenda, and is co-president of the 2010 Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy in San Francisco. Joe spent eight years as reporter at the Los Angeles Times, most recently covering the presidential campaign as a correspondent based in Washington. He previously served as Justice Department reporter for the Wall Street Journal and as a city desk reporter and New York correspondent at the Baltimore Sun. He is author of The People’s Machine: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of Blockbuster Democracy (PublicAffairs 2006), a political biography of the governor, and co-author of The California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It (University of California Press, 2010). Joe, his wife Anna, also a journalist, and son Ben live in Los Angeles.

BRUNO KAUFMANN

Bruno Kaufmann has worked with democracy, conflict and development issues since the mid-1980s as a trained political scientist, conflict researcher, and journalist. After a term with the Swiss Development NGO “Berne Declaration,” he became the coordinator of a European citizens’ network preparing a “transnational constitution with direct-democratic rights.” Ten years later Kaufmann became the first director of the Initiative & Referendum Institute Europe, a non-partisan institute for research and education with headquarters in Marburg. Kaufmann has served as an expert for numerous national governments and international organizations including the European Union, the German Parliament, the Council of Europe, International IDEA, and UNDP, and democracy-supporting organizations across Asia such as Korea Democracy Foundation, Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, and the Asian Network for Free and Fair Elections. As a journalist, Kaufmann worked at the Swiss Broadcasting Company, the daily Tagesanzeiger newspaper and the weekly Die Weltwoche before joining the special editorial team for international reform issues at Die Zeit in Hamburg in 1998. Since 2001, he has covered European and international affairs for the Swiss Broadcasting Company and has been a columnist on publications such as Nordis, Open Democracy, Gazette and European Voice.Kaufmann has authored and edited numerous books on modern direct democracyincluding the Guidebook to Direct Democracy, which has been published in nine languages and the Initiative for Europe  handbook series on the emergence of European citizens’ initiative.

ROBERT M. STERN

Bob Stern is President of the Center for Governmental Studies, a Los Angeles based non-profit organization that for 26 years has studied governmental process issues: including the initiative process, campaign financing, redistricting, and voter information. He co-authored Democracy by Initiative: Shaping California's Fourth Branch of Government, a 400 page book examining California's initiative process, the second edition of whichwas published by the Center in 2008.  Before coming to the Center, he was general counsel for the California Fair Political Practices Commission, the state agency in charge of administering and enforcing the state's campaign finance, conflicts of interest, and lobbying laws.  He also has worked for the California Secretary of State's office and the California legislature. He was the principal co-author of the California Political Reform Act of 1974, an initiative measure (Proposition 9) passed by 70% of the state's voters. Peter Schrag in the Sacramento Bee called him: “the godfather of modern political reform in California.“

PAUL JACOB:

Paul Jacob, president of the Citizens in Charge Foundation, is, a leading national figure in Initiative & Referendum. He hosts an online, radio, and print opinion program, Common Sense, which reaches a growing list of over 15,000 e-mail subscribers and is aired daily by more than 150 stations. He is also a featured columnist at townhall.com. Paul has helped organize over 150 state-wide petition drives in 47 states on various issues.  He has also been a party to dozens of lawsuits defending citizens’ rights to petition their government.

In 2005, Paul assisted Oklahoma residents with a ballot initiative to cap state spending. In 2007, Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmonson charged Paul and two fellow activists (The Oklahoma Three) with a felony for allegedly hiring out-of-state petitioners, even though Oklahoma leadership of the initiative had consulted with state officials and followed their advice. Facing a possibility of 10 years in prison, and against the advice of attorneys, Paul did not remain silent. Instead, he spoke out strongly against the AG’s “politically-motivated” prosecution, rallying Oklahomans and citizens nationwide against the increasing criminalization of the political process. Paul launched a website – FreePaulJacob.com – to chronicle the case, receiving wide-spread support. In January 2009, the charges against Paul and The Oklahoma Three were finally dropped. Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist Paul Greenburg wrote, “The best way to assure freedom of expression, no matter where it may be threatened, would be to have an army of utterly determined Paul Jacobs fighting for it.”

For more than a decade, Paul was the term limits movement’s leading voice, running U.S. Term Limits, the nation’s largest term limits group. For his work on the issue, columnist Robert Novak good-naturedly called Jacob “the most hated man in Washington.” In the 1980s, Paul started a pro-volunteer military, anti-draft group called Volunteers for America and served jail time for refusing to register for the draft. Paul also serves as a member of the board at the Center for Independent Thought, the advisory board of the Initiative and Referendum Institute and on the National Advisory Board of Save Our Secret Ballot.

LYNNE MOSIER:

Lynne G. Mosier, CFA, Investment Consultant/Political Activist. Her passions include bringing forth dialogue and connecting people to create positive change in our political and investment landscape.  She speaks publicly representing her father, Senator Mike Gravel, a controversial peace, environmental and civil liberties advocate.  As a US Senator, he filibustered to end the Military Draft, released the Pentagon Papers and helped bring an end to the Vietnam War and the Nixon Administration. Additionally, he ended nuclear testing in the North Pacific and initiated the Nuclear Critique. In 2002 he opposed the the Iraq invasion calling it “Our next Vietnam.”  As a presidential candidate he aggressively spoke out against the Military Industrial Complex.  Lynne’s work with her father includes promoting his books, Citizen Power, The Kingmakers and A Political Odyssey, as well as, The National Initiative, an initiative to empower the American people to vote directly on issues such as education, healthcare and military spending.    

DAVID J JUNG

David Jung is professor of law and direct of the Center for State & Local Government Law www.uchastings.edu/cslgl at UC Hastings College of the Law, the host of the forum. Innovative law-making at the state and local level makes California a leader in addressing the day’s most vexing problems. Through the center and its affiliated Public Law Research Institute, Jung works to create opportunities for Hastings students, research staff and faculty to become involved in the search for solutions at the state and local level. Some highlights of the center’s work: establishing clinics for Hastings students with the legislature in Sacramento and with Bay Area local governments; helping implement a new redistricting system for California elections; creating a comprehensive database of health privacy laws; publishing Environmental Justice for All, the leading source of information on state and local efforts to achieve environmental justice. Professor Jung has been on the Hastings faculty since 1982, with short breaks to teach at the University of Iowa and in Hamburg, Germany.