Present Moment is a network of educators, librarians, technologists, scholars, artists, policy experts and organizers coming together to do work that matters.
Greta Byrum is an expert in technologies for digital opportunity, resilience, safety, wellbeing, and imagination. Her work focuses on building infrastructure and technological self-determination with communities to create digital wellbeing instead of exclusion, surveillance, and extraction.
She was the inaugural director of the Just Tech Program at the Social Science Research Council, director of The Digital Equity Laboratory at The New School, and co-founder and director of Community Tech New York. Greta is a Hudson Valley mom and a practitioner of Zen Buddhism in the Plum Village tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh.
Jordan Shapiro is a public interest technologist and community organizer. They build data and operations systems for community groups and help them use technology responsibly, including working through tech policy and governance questions.
They founded JD Digitalization, a consultancy for nonprofits and small businesses, and built Women's Sports Central, which covers more than 160 women's sports leagues. They directed the Innovation Frontier Project at the Progressive Policy Institute and are a Sprite+ Expert Fellow and Co-Chair of Governance on the BetaNYC Associate Board.
Jordan Kraemer, PhD, is an anthropologist with two decades’ experience studying emerging tech and society. Jordan brings a holistic view of technology in social context, to show how collective action can drive structural change. At Present Moment, she combines national advocacy experience with deep knowledge of the challenges local communities face in a disordered information ecosystem.
Jordan’s research in local communities shows how tech can accelerate injustice while also offering new means for resistance and transformation. She is the author of Mobile City (Cornell UP 2025), an ethnography of Berlin’s transnational creative class in the early 2000s, along with numerous white papers, peer-reviewed articles, and book chapters. Previously, Jordan led research combatting online hate and harassment and promoted evidence-based guidance for users, technologists, and lawmakers. Her op-eds have appeared in Tech Policy Press, Counterpunch, and Fast Company, while her advocacy reports have been covered by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, and more.
Jordan holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from UC Irvine, an MA from the University of Chicago, and a BA from Wesleyan University. She lives in Brooklyn with a spouse, two younger humans, and a large cat.
Lauren Spiro studied American poetry and information science (on separate occasions). She works as an information architect, taxonomist, and content strategist and lives in the Hudson Valley. Her leisure time includes bicycling on rail trails and music.
A researcher-investigator using technologies and storytelling for community-oriented data frameworks. Currently a Just Tech Fellow at the Social Science Research Council and teaches at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program.
A researcher investigating social impact of AI systems through computational data analytics and digital ethnography. Previously worked in digital diplomacy and AI governance in Geneva, and co-leads the Not A Stranger initiative.
Every project draws on a different mix of our collective.
Want to work with us, or join us?
Start a conversation