DMA Board of Directors

I was raised on radio. Commercial and non-commercial. I built a crystal radio when I was ten. In 6th grade I was a BCB DXer. We didn’t have a TV at home until I was in junior high and by then I had my own radio station, WN0HYR. When I was sixteen, I got my general class amateur and 2nd class commercial licenses on the same day. When I was eighteen, I was a rock’n’roll DJ on carrier current and a classical DJ on university FM. By then the die was cast.

In my opinion, the difference between commercial and non-commercial radio is that in commercial, the programming is the bait that attracts the listeners, who are then sold to the advertisers. In non-commercial, the programming is the product, which is sold to the listeners. Having worked in both, I much prefer the latter. I prefer radio to video because you can listen while doing something else with your eyes and hands. I think commercial radio has killed their golden goose, but I think community radio has the opportunity to be a vital and... Read more

Sean Brooks is the Director for Responsible Ai at Microsoft. He previously led the Community Defense team at Meta, served as the founding director of the Citizen Clinic, the world's first public interest cybersecurity clinic, and as a Research Fellow at the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity at UC Berkeley. Sean was the first privacy engineer in the US Federal Government, working within the NIST Applied Cybersecurity Division. He has also worked with the Center for Democracy and Technology, the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and The Red Consultancy.

Sean completed his Masters of Public Administration as a Federal Scholar for Service with the NYU Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. While at NYU, he was affiliated with the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Security and Privacy, and was the first Research Fellow at The Governance Lab. Sean received his undergraduate degree in politics from the University of California at Santa Cruz.