Melissa Blaustein

Melissa Blaustein is the New Media Director at Dennis Herrera for Mayor. Prior to taking on this role for the Herrera campaign, Melissa served as New Media Director for Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords on her 2010 re-election bid and worked on the White House New Media team under President Barack Obama. She is a graduate of the New Organizing Institute's New Media Bootcamp program and earned an honors degree from UC Berkeley. She got her start in politics as a press intern for then Mayor Gavin Newsom. She is also a featured guest lecturer at USC's Jesse M. Unruh Institute for Politics and UC Berkeley's Political Science Department where she speaks on digital strategy in political campaigns. Melissa is a published cookbook author, loves music blogs and street art, and is pretty confident anything can be explained in 140 characters or less. Find her on Twitter at @MentionMelissa.

Why the next SF mayor needs to understand open government

In August of 1993, San Francisco officially adopted the Sunshine Ordinance, a law that allowed any citizen to request city documents, records, filings or correspondence, attend meetings of any group that meets with the Mayor or city department heads and make any meeting of the governing bodies of certain local, state, regional and federal agencies attended by City representatives public.