 Hello everyone, so welcome, hi everybody, so I'm Ann-Marie Slaughter and welcome to New America's 2016 annual conference which I am now declaring officially open. What a fabulous room and a fabulous setup. Many of you are New Americans, many of you are our friends, our funders, who are also our friends and our supporters in many different ways. But for some of you who may be new to New America, let me just say we are a think tank and a civic enterprise and we are dedicated to the renewal of American politics, prosperity and purpose in the digital age. That is not a small mission. The way we carry that out, we are a think tank, we are a civic enterprise which you'll hear more about over the next couple of days, we're an intellectual venture capital fund, we're a tech lab, we're a public forum and we're a media platform. And what ties all that together, and we have many different parts and I always say my mother is constantly saying tell me what you do again, but what really ties all that together is we are a place that values big ideas, ideas we sometimes call pre-partisan in the sense that they're big enough that people have not lined up on where they stand. I would say big ideas from across the political spectrum. We do not have an ideological cast, we want the best ideas from the right, from the left, from the center, from preferably no no particular ideological bias. And so big ideas bridging policy and technology. We often say we put together legal code and computer code and you need both to solve public problems. And then broad public engagement. Our fellows program, our fellows write books and they aim to be best selling books. As somebody, one of our fellows said this morning, Kevin Huffman, he said, you know, I'm not sure many people would write a book about, read a book about education policy. But if I can write a book about how the state of Tennessee took on reforming its educational system and tell that story in a human and dramatic way, lots of people will read it and that will move the public conversation. So with big ideas, bridging policy and technology and broad public engagement, we are this year in this conference focusing on the next social contract. And we have been doing work on what we need as a social contract in the digital age since 2007, since before the 2008 presidential election. It will not have escaped you that we haven't exactly gotten there. And we're in the 2016 presidential election. These ideas are still very, very current. They are really what government owes us and what we owe government or what we expect of government and what government can expect of us. And that is what you are going to be hearing over the next day and a half. And when you talk about the next social contract, do you think Lach and Rousseau and your college political theory classes, we're going to try to be bringing that down to what that means for ordinary citizens in multiple areas. So before we get started, I also want to thank some of the donors and the sponsors that made this conference possible. Northrop Grumman, McKinsey and Company, Brown Advisory, Brunswick Group, City Foundation, Uber and Upwork. And I also want to thank the foundations who are supporting our vision to reinvent the think tank. You heard me say think tank and civic enterprise. We are arguing that think tanks are fabulous. They put together great ideas and policy proposals and policy research. But it's a top down model of change. It's a model of change that says you figure out what needs to happen and you try to get government to do that. We also need a bottom up model of change where we tap into what's happening across the country from the people who are just saying let's see what works, putting it out there, trying it, iterating in the same way that a startup does. And New America wants to be in multiple cities. We're in New America, California now. We hope to open in Chicago. We're in New York and in the District of Columbia. And the foundations that are supporting that work are the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Omidjar Network, and the David and Lucille Packard Foundation. Then finally, thanks to our media partners, CNN and Slate. We thank them for their presence at this conference, but also the work they do with us throughout the year.