Dr. Hollie Russon Gilman is a Lecturer and Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs as well as a fellow at New America and Georgetown’s Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation. At Columbia she co-teaches a new course on Technology and Innovation in Governance. Hollie Russon Gilman holds a Ph.D. and M.A. from the Department of Government at Harvard University and A.B. from the University of Chicago with highest honors in political science. Her research interests include the impact of technology on government transparency and accountability, citizen engagement, and implementing democratic innovations.
She recently published the first academic of participatory budgeting in the United States: Democracy Reinvented: Participatory Budgeting and Civic Innovation in America as part of the Kennedy School’s series on governance innovation. In the Obama Administration, she served as Open Government and Innovation Advisor in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In this role, she worked to implement President Obama's second term Open Government agenda, including inter agency commitments under the international Open Government Partnership.
Dr. Gilman is a founding researcher and organizer for the Open Society Foundation's Transparency and Accountability Initiative and Harvard's Gettysburg Project to revitalize 21st Century civic engagement. She has worked as an advisor, researcher, and consultant to leading non-profits and foundations at the intersection of technology and the public sector including the Case Foundation, Center for Global Development, Google.org, and the World Bank Institute.
She has published in numerous academic and popular audience publications including the International Studies Review and Journal of Public Deliberation. Her popular writings have appeared in several new outlets including Foreign Affairs, Slate, Stanford Social Innovation Review, TechCrunch, and The Washington Post, update writings are available here.
Gilman is a recipient of numerous awards, including: AAAS Big Data and Analytics Fellowship, Fulbright Scholarship, Center for the American Presidency and Congress Presidential Fellowship. She is a fellow at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and Innovation Advisor to the Kennedy School’s Ash Innovations Award for Public Engagement.
Her current research project is a collaborative effort to re-define civic voice and civic power as well as understand the implications of digital innovations to strengthen and deepen democratic practice.