User Profile for Nancy Scola (Nancy Scola)

Bio: My name is Nancy Scola. I'm a Brooklyn-based non-fiction writer and -- for lack of a better way to put it -- activist.

I'm a weekend writer at the political blog MyDD and, currently, a consultant to the AFL-CIO. I'm a contributing editor at Personal Democracy Forum, a blogger on TechPresident, an advisor to the Open House Project, and I sometimes write about the struggle over and the promise of creative content for iCommons, the blog of the global Creative Commons movement. I authored a report called "Avatar Politics: the Social Applications of Second Life" for the Institute for Politics, Democracy, & the Internet. My personal blog is at nancyscola.com.

Until recently, I was a policy advisor, outreach coordinator, and member of the Internet team at Forward Together, the PAC of former Virginia Governor Mark Warner, based in Alexandria, VA. For Forward Together, I handled tech policy issues -- like network neutrality -- and tech community outreach and organizing -- like the Governor’s foray into the Second Life virtual world. I wrote for the Forward Together PAC blog when I remembered that I was supposed to.

Before FTPAC, I worked in Washington DC on Capitol Hill for just under five years as a staffer with Rep. Henry Waxman’s Committee on Government Reform. While on the Hill, I focused on increasing communications between the public, press, and the Committee and covering legislative issues from election reform to technology trade with China to online pornography to the Federal Information Security Management Act. I was also part of the team that created such fun policy-meets-communications things like Politics & Science -- the State of Science Under the Bush Administration. I had no part in investigating Major League Baseball and was unaware of who exactly Sammy Sosa was at the time I watched him testify.

I received an B.A. from the George Washington University, majoring in Anthropology and becoming the second student to minor in Africana Studies in GW’s history. I continued work on Africa as a fellow at Boston University’s African Studies Center as a PhD student in the Anthropology department -- until I realized that the sky in Boston really is that color most of the year and left with M.A. in hand.

My interests include in understanding the social side of technologies, technology policy, and all things Africa. My hobbies are more or less limited to reading, photography, doodling around in graphic design, watching documentaries, exploring New York City, and occassionally campaigning for Democrats until I get tired of people and want to go home. I'll be a filmmaker one day. One day.

I occassionally appear on technology panels, talking on things from localized blogging to network neutrality. But I’d much rather write and will do so for food. Please send along any prospects.

I live in beautiful Park Slope, Brooklyn. I grew up in northern New Jersey, a place I still consider home.

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