Emergent democracy refers to the rise of political structures and behaviors without central planning and by the action of many individual participants, especially when mediated by the Internet. More recently, Clay Shirky has referred to this as "the power of organizing without organizations." The term was coined to stand in contrast to more traditional forms of democracy, such as representational democracy and direct democracy. The phrase draws upon emergence theory for the idea that the simple actions of individuals can collectively create complex and unpredictable results, as when the behavior of termites results in large, efficient nests beyond the comprehension of any individual participant.

In the paper that first drew attention to the term,Joi Ito expresses a hope that the Internet, as a large and decentralized network, will enable innovative responses by citizens to highly complex problems. From its outset, emergent democracy has been seen arising most clearly among bloggers who, as a decentralized network of writers, can provide a fuller airing and development of ideas than can the relatively limited resources of traditional media. Supporters of the idea point to instances in which bloggers have brought about political change by posting about issues that mainstream media had not paid much attention to. The canonical example of emergent democracy was the December 2002 resignation of Trent Lott as Senate majority leader after bloggers publicized his praising of Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist campaign for the presidency.

Joichi "Joi" Ito (伊藤 穰一, Itō Jōichi^?, born June 19, 1966) is a Japanese activist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist and Director of the MIT Media Lab.

Ito has received recognition for his role as an entrepreneur focused on Internet and technology companies and has founded, among other companies, PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. He maintains a blog, a wiki and an IRC channel. Ito is the Chairman of Creative Commons, on the Board of Trustees of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the board of Directors of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and General Partner of Neoteny Labs.

Ito was born in Kyoto, Japan. His family moved to Canada and then when Ito was about age 3 to a suburb of Detroit, Michigan in the United States where his father became a research scientist and his mother a secretary for Energy Conversion Devices, Inc., now Ovonics. Company founder Stanford R. Ovshinsky was impressed with Ito, whom he thought of almost as his son. Ovshinsky helped Ito develop his interests in technology and social movements, and at age 13 gave him work with scientists, saying, "He was not a child in the conventional sense."

Ethan Zuckerman is an American media scholar, blogger, and Internet activist. He is the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media.

He is a graduate of Williams College, spent a year in Accra, Ghana on a Fulbright scholarship, and currently resides in Lanesborough, Massachusetts with his wife Rachel Barenblat.

Zuckerman is on the board of directors of Ushahidi, Global Voices, and the Ghanaian journalism training nonprofit, PenPlusBytes.

Zuckerman was one of the first staff members of Tripod.com, one of the first successful "dot com" enterprises, and later founder of Geekcorps and Global Voices Online. He won the MIT Technology Review "Technology in the Service of Humanity" award in 2002 for his work on Geekcorps Ethan has been a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where he is also a long-time fellow. His work at the Berkman Center has included research into global media attention, as well as the co-founding of Global Voices in collaboration with Rebecca MacKinnon. For some years he was also a contributing writer for Worldchanging.com, where he served as president of the board of directors.

Dr. Dambisa Moyo is an international economist and New York Times best-selling author of both Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way For Africa, published in 2009, and How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly - And the Stark Choices that Lie Ahead, published in 2011. Moyo's 3rd book Winner Take All: China's Race for Resources and What It Means for the World will be published in June 2012.

Moyo was born and raised in Lusaka, Zambia. She holds a Doctorate (PhD) in Economics from St Antony's College, Oxford University; her 2002 dissertation is titled "Essays on the determinants of the components of savings in developing countries". In 1997, Moyo earned a Master of Public Administration (MPA) from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. She also earned a Master of Business Administration (MBA) in Finance and Bachelor of Science (BS) in Chemistry from American University in Washington D.C. She worked for the World Bank as a Consultant and at Goldman Sachs where she worked in the debt capital markets and as an economist in the global macroeconomics team.