The Green National Convention is the Presidential nominating convention of the Green Party of the United States (GPUS). Though the Green National Committee meets annually in a "national meeting", the convention is convened by the GNC once every four years in order to nominate an official candidate in the upcoming U.S. Presidential election, and to officially adopt the party platform and rules for the election cycle.

The convention signals the end of the primary season for Greens, and the start of campaigning for the general election of that year; as such, prominent Greens in state and local races are also spotlighted in order to give them the publicity that the convention affords. In contrast to the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, however, the convention is not merely a formality which endorses the will of the electorate in the primaries, but the final determinant for the nomination. This is because ballot access laws in many states prohibit the Green Party from holding a state-sponsored primary election—only five states were able to meet the requirements in 2004—and others prevent voters from actually registering into the party, thus making it difficult to credential Greens.

During the French Revolution, the National Convention or Convention, in France, comprised the constitutional and legislative assembly which sat from 20 September 1792 to 26 October 1795 (the 4th of Brumaire of the year IV under the French Republican Calendar adopted by the Convention). It held executive power in France during the first years of the French First Republic. It was succeeded by the Directory, commencing 2 November 1795. Prominent members of the original Convention included Maximilien Robespierre of the Jacobin Club, Jean-Paul Marat (affiliated with the Jacobins, though never a formal member), and Georges Danton of the Cordeliers. From 1793 to 1794, executive power was de facto exercised by the Convention's Committee of Public Safety.

France, like the rest of Europe, has never again used an elected constitutional convention to draft its constitutions, instead relying on the executive or legislative branches to draft successive constitutions before usually (but not always) submitting them to the electorate for approval in referendums.

Ben Manski (born July 16, 1974) is an American attorney, organizer, activist with the Green Party, Executive Director of the Liberty Tree Foundation for the Democratic Revolution and editor of the Liberty Tree Journal. As a member of the Wisconsin Green Party, he served as co-chair of the Green Party of the United States from 2001 through 2004. Manski also served as the Wisconsin representative on the Green Party Diversity Committee, and is a former chair of the GPUS Coordinated Campaign Committee. In December 2011, Manski was announced as the campaign manager of Jill Stein, candidate for President of the United States.

Manski was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on July 16, 1974 to economist Charles Manski and educator Kate Manski. When he was a little over three years old his family moved to Jerusalem, Israel, where he and his sister, today a Palestinian rights advocate, spent their early childhood years. In 1982, his parents decided to return to the United States, moving to Madison, Wisconsin.

Matthew Edward Gonzalez (born June 4, 1965) is an American politician, lawyer, and activist prominent in San Francisco politics. He currently serves as chief attorney in the San Francisco Public Defender's office.

Gonzalez was a member and president of San Francisco County's Board of Supervisors. He was also one of the first Green Party candidates elected to public office in the San Francisco Bay area. In 2003, Gonzalez ran for mayor of San Francisco but lost in a close race to Democrat Gavin Newsom. In the 2008 presidential election, Gonzalez ran for vice president as the running mate of candidate Ralph Nader.

Matthew Edward Gonzalez was born in McAllen, Texas, to a Mexican mother, Oralia, and Mexican-American father, Mateo. Gonzalez spent his first four years in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The Gonzalez family moved to New Orleans, Louisiana; Baltimore, Maryland; and Louisville, Kentucky, before the family returned to McAllen when Gonzalez was 11 years old.

In an interview with the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle, Gonzalez described his father as a salesman who initially started out selling "cigarettes from the back of his car in south Texas" in the late 1950s or early 1960s, and later started an import/export business selling medical and dental supplies. A profile in the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Gonzalez's father was a division chief for the international tobacco company Brown & Williamson.

Gar Alperovitz (born May 5, 1936) is Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, College Park Department of Government and Politics. He is a former Fellow of King's College, Cambridge; a founding Fellow of Harvard’s Institute of Politics; a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies; and a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution. Alperovitz also served as a Legislative Director in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and as a Special Assistant in the Department of State. Alperovitz is a founding principal of The Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland, and a member of the board of directors for the New Economics Institute.

Alperovitz is a political economist and revisionist historian whose numerous articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The Nation, and The Atlantic among other publications. Alperovitz has been profiled by The New York Times, the Associated Press, People, UPI, and Mother Jones and has been a guest on numerous network TV and cable news programs, including Meet the Press, Larry King Live, The Charlie Rose Show, Crossfire, and The O'Reilly Factor.