There is a new digital policy wonk in Washington, DC and her name is Jennifer Harris of the Center for Digital Democracy. She’ll be joining Drew Clark, Senior Writer at the National Journal, Chuck DeFeo of TownHall.com and Tad Hirsch of the MIT Media Lab on the Participatory Democracy panel.

In addition to being a policy wonk, Jennifer has a long history of working the trenches of the PEG access community as a youth media coordinator, communications policy specialist and media literacy mover-and-shaker at the Grand Rapids Community Media Center and Access Montgomery. She has first hand experience helping young people develop their voice through media. A tireless free speech advocate, Jennifer understands the lofty ideals of the community media movement while connecting them to the realities of amateur, socially conscious media production.

For three years she sat on the Executive Board of the Alliance for Community Media (community television’s national advocacy and outreach organization) and is currently on the editorial board of the Community Media Review. She recently partnered up with Jeff Chester at the Center for Digital Democracy as the center’s Strategic Director. According to their website, “the Center for Digital Democracy is committed to preserving the openness and diversity of the Internet in the broadband era, and to realizing the full potential of digital communications through the development and encouragement of noncommercial, public interest programming.”

In a phone interview about the Participatory Democracy panel, Jennifer discussed the need for social media content creators to distinguish themselves online. In a predominately commercial Internet context, where companies can pay large sums to prioritize their information in search engines, public interest media websites could get lost in the competition for eyeballs. Creative tagging, marketing savvy, and brand identification will be increasingly important ways of finding an audience for civic content. Further, she says, real participation can be elusive. In a country known for dismal voter turnout, how do we focus our energies on creating a dialogue in an election year? Just as the on and offline worlds are blending, so must the way we build and maintain relationships. People need to know that democratic participation can happen on any media platform and in multiple ways. We don’t limit the ways we communicate and we can’t have narrow ideas about participation either.

Jennifer holds a master’s degree in Public Communications from American University and a BA in Film & Video from Grand Valley State University.