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Willow looks at connections, systems, empowerment, and powerlessness and strives to both understand and improve whatever they find.

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Willow Idlewild, known as willowbl00, works with digital tools to enable coordination between groups of all sizes and shapes. They have studied citizen engagement and combining distributed and centralized decision making structures at the Center for Civic Media at MIT’s Media Lab, been a Professor of Practice at Brown University, an affiliate at the New England Complex Systems Institute, and a fellow at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

They cofounded a makerspace in Seattle to bring direct action to the transhumanist discussion groups they were moderating. To bring scale to those spaces, they cofounded the Space Federation to legitimize and link hacker, maker, and coworking spaces across the US. To impact inequality, Willow cofounded Geeks Without Bounds as an organizer and host of social good hackathons. To bring sustainability to those projects Geeks Without Bounds shifted into an accelerator for humanitarian projects. To increase capacity in digital response, Willow became the Community Leadership Strategist at Aspiration. To scale impact and help government serve its people, they maintained the internal people infrastructure at Truss. Questing for further scale and impact, they now help to secure 1 billion devices with the Apple security team.

In brief, Willow looks at connections, systems, empowerment, and powerlessness and strives to both understand and improve whatever they find. Sometimes that’s with the Occupy Sandy Movement, sometimes it’s with the National Defense University. They have keynoted the IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference. Willow has successfully worked with FEMA Field Innovation Team for Hurricane Sandy, and was awarded at a ceremony at the White House for their contribution.