Lawrence Lessig — Founder, Board Member
Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, and founder of Rootstrikers, a network of activists leading the fight against government corruption. He has authored numerous books, including Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Our Congress—and a Plan to Stop It, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Free Culture, and Remix.
Lessig serves on the Board of Creative Commons, AXA Research Fund and iCommons.org, and on the Advisory Boards of the Sunlight Foundation and the Better Future Project. He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Association, and has received numerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Award, Fastcase 50 Award and being named one of Scientific American’s Top 50 Visionaries.
Lessig holds a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from Cambridge, and a JD from Yale. Prior to rejoining the Harvard faculty, Lessig was a professor at Stanford Law School, where he founded the school’s Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court.
Kahlil Byrd — Board Member
Kahlil Byrd is a political entrepreneur and an expert at building and managing large, disruptive, technology-based advocacy and political organizations. For the past decade, Byrd has focused on building long-term strategy, securing substantial investments and achieving reform at state and national levels. Currently, he serves as the chief investment officer of Fund for the Republic, a nonpartisan, nonprofit grantmaking fund committed to reducing the influence of money in American politics and policymaking.
Most recently, Byrd was president of StudentsFirst, a multi-million dollar national reform effort focused on changing the nation’s legislative and policy landscape for public education. Working with founder Michelle Rhee and the board, Byrd was responsible for StudentsFirst’s long-term strategy, operations, budget, and effort to develop an optimal culture focused on growth.
Prior to StudentsFirst, Byrd was chief executive officer of Americans Elect, a national start-up with the twofold mission of re-imagining, through technology, the U.S. presidential primary system and placing a bi-partisan presidential ticket on all 50 state ballots. Byrd and his team raised more than $40 million, oversaw over 150 paid staff, 5,000 contractors, and 3,000 volunteers nationwide. AmericansElect.org is the winner of the 2012 People’s Choice Award at South by Southwest, one of the country’s largest interactive technology conferences; the Campaigns & Elections 2012 CampaignTech Innovator Award; and two 2012 CLIO Awards for content and interactive excellence.
Byrd was a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and in 2006-2007 served as an International Affairs Fellow focused on international media. He is a graduate of Morehouse College and Harvard’s Kennedy School.
Jim Greer — Board Member
Jim Greer is the cofounder of Kongregate, which distributes 80,000 games to over 20 million monthly users on web and mobile. He recently stepped down as Kongregate’s CEO to found CounterPAC, which seeks to improve the problems of money in politics through direct intervention in elections. He has worked in the game industry since 1991 and holds a Computer Science degree from Princeton. In his spare time he enjoys biking and poker. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and two children.
Mark McKinnon — Board Member, Treasurer
Mark McKinnon is an award-winning media producer and communications strategist who has served as principal media advisor for hundreds of corporate and political campaigns around the world. McKinnon has helped engineer five winning presidential primary and general elections. He has been awarded more than 30 Pollie and Telly awards, honoring the nation’s best political and public affairs advertising.
According to Broadcasting and Cable magazine, McKinnon is one of “a handful of players behind every big decision, consensus or roadblock in Washington…putting a unique, sometimes hidden stamp on the outcome of today’s debates.” Politics Daily writes: “He’s known for his originality in a field typified by copy-cats, a mellow personality in a world populated with high-strung brutes, and ecumenical urges in a profession dominated by its unadulterated partisans.”
“McKinnon is evidence that principled centrism is not an oxymoron,” wrote John Avalon in a Daily Beast column about the 25 Best Centrist Pundits. “McKinnon piloted John McCain’s 2008 primary campaign to victory. But he announced in advance that if Barack Obama won the democratic nomination, he would ride off into the sunset rather than participate in the negative attacks he knew would be required. This is unheard of in the world of modern politics, where partisanship trumps principle as a matter of course.”
Former President George W. Bush says of McKinnon, “I was really impressed by Mark’s creativity, and I was particularly impressed by his honesty.” Senator John McCain, in his typical straight-talk fashion, remarks, “He’s almost a genius.” And President Barack Obama calls McKinnon “a class act.”
McKinnon is co-founder of No Labels, a non-profit organization dedicated to bipartisanship, civil discourse and problem solving in politics, and is co-chair of Arts+Labs, a collaboration between technology and creative communities that have embraced today’s rich internet environment to deliver innovative and creative digital products to consumers. President Bush appointed McKinnon to serve as a governor of the Broadcasting Board of Governors. He currently serves on the boards of the Lance Armstrong Foundation and Change Congress, an organization dedicated to campaign finance reform, and has taught at the JFK School of Government at Harvard University and the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.
McKinnon attended the University of Texas at Austin and served as editor of the award-winning university newspaper, The Daily Texan. He spent several years in Nashville working as a songwriter with Kris Kristofferson (and was wildly unsuccessful). McKinnon also is a two-time Ironman finisher. His quality of life is exceptionally enhanced by the enduring love and patience of his wife, Annie (whom he met before he could drive), and his daughters, Brita, 26, and Kendall, 24.
Marcia Morris , JD, MPA (Ret.) — Board Member
Marcia Morris spent her 40-year career as a chief legal officer and in executive management roles at for-profit and not-for-profit enterprises in the healthcare delivery, life sciences, and consumer products and services industries. Morris is serving or has served as a board member of Roger Williams University, New England College and the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park. She is a graduate of Connecticut College, Boston University School of Law and the Kennedy School at Harvard University.
Aaron Lifshin — CTO
Aaron Lifshin is the CEO of inMoment Software, makers of MeetingPulse, and CTO of Whysaurus. He has been working to get money out of politics since 2011.
Szelena Gray - COO
Szelena Gray has spent the last few years in the vanguard of the campaign finance reform movement with projects like Rootstrikers, The New Hampshire Rebellion, and now MayOne.US. Gray received her MTS from Harvard Divinity School in 2009 and completed her BA in religious and women’s studies at the University of Florida.
Brian Boyko — Deputy CTO
Brian Boyko is a social media and marketing consultant from Austin, Texas, whose consultancy, Blogphilo, produces web copy, video production, WordPress configuration, and presentation animation for tech industry startups and political campaigns. He operates a political blog at BoykoTX.org.
Michael Ortlieb – Creative-at-large
Michael Ortlieb is a graphic designer and creator at large, who operates his own creative consultancy, mo:create.
Trevor Potter – Legal Counsel
Matthew Sanderson – Legal Counsel
The First Responders
When we had trouble with scaling the site for the overwhelming demand we had encountered, these individuals, and others, jumped on the #MayOne IRC channel on Freenode to help assist us. They were the first to hear our own call of “mayday” and for this, we thank them.
Hunter Freyer – “hjfreyer” 
Hunter Freyer is a Google engineer based in New York City working on user data protection. He has a website at www.hjfreyer.com.
J.T. Olds – “jtolds” 
J.T. Olds is a senior software engineer at Space Monkey, and a Ph.D student at the University of Utah.
David Harrison – “trog” 
David Harrison is a director of Mammoth, an Australian company expanding to the USA with a VPS service, Binary Lane.
Corey Farwell 
Corey Farwell is a software developer from the San Francisco Bay Area. He is an advocate for free culture and increased government transparency. He graduated from California Polytechnic State University in 2013 with a B.S. in Software Engineering and now works for an education start-up. He enjoys photography, writing music, reading non-fiction, and traveling the world.
Brad Pitcher 
Brad Pitcher is a senior software engineer at ORCAS who enjoys unicycling in his free time.