Current Leadership
Silona Bonewald is Founder of the League of Texas Voters. She started her own company, ElecTech, in 1993 that created specialized software for political campaigns. Silona also ran a web consulting business from 1994-97.
She became one of the first people to create websites for hire and to successfully optimize her clients’ websites for usability and top search engine ranking. Since 1998, she has also worked in the gaming industry, creating high visibility web presences, content management systems, and large database back-end integrations for such clients as Siemans, Blue Byte and Ubisoft.
Silona volunteers for the ACLU and EFF on technology-based civil liberties issues, and has lobbied on various issues. The combination of her involvement in political activism, educational activism, psychometrics for gaming communities, lobbyist work, netizen activities and web design make her uniquely suited to envision the framework that will make the League of Texas Voters system all possible.
Taylor Willingham founded Texas Forums, an initiative of the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum, in 2003. She teaches Change Management and Fund Development for the highly acclaimed graduate library and information sciences distance education program at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. She also is a research associate for the Kettering Foundation, a former board member for the National Issues Forums Institute, and is a consultant on public engagement processes for organizations such as the National Coalition for Literacy and Bill Moyers Public Affairs Television.
Willingham has been on faculty at over fifty National Issues Forums Public Policy Institutes and two International Deliberative Democracy Workshops, working with participants from countries like Croatia, Tajikistan, Russia, Colombia, and other emerging democracies. She has traveled to Russia three times conducting training on the role of deliberative forums in democracy in Russia.
Her current area of interest is in civic and social entrepreneurship, the role of libraries in community and social networking technology, citizen journalism, citizen engagement in public policy, and web 2.0 applications to modern democracy and social movements. She is a 2007 recipient of a fellowship to conduct research, author articles for academic journals, present at conferences and develop an interdisciplinary course on Civic Entrepreneurship in Public Institutions from the University of Illinois Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership.
