This Friday, we present the founder of Publius.org, the first website that allowed people to find their voter registration, sample ballots and polling locations online. To date, Publius has served over 6 million interactive ballots to individual Michigan voters. The patented technology has been folded into the State of Michigan’s website. Through a combination of equal parts zeal, craftiness, stupidity, and resolve, Vince Keenan has accidentally become what some people call a social entrepreneur. Join him, fresh off the 2012 voter education trail, as he discusses what went right (and wrong) while putting together this year’s version of the most comprehensive and popular voter guide in Michigan.

Keenan also shares the ups and downs of social entrepreneurship, crafting application and user interface design under the gun with partners who don’t believe users matter, trying to be a media darling to get your point across, and the technology of civic engagement in Detroit.

Keenan is a Detroiter, engaged citizen, and the director of Publius.org, a non-partisan organization founded in 1996 to promoting civic participation and voter education. He holds a degree in philosophy from the University of Michigan and, as he puts it, "attended (UMSI) as a precocious undergrad tolerated by a handful of generous professors." He returned to UMSI while he was the senior computer systems specialist for the U-M department of human genetics during the era of the completion of the human genome project’s mapping of the genome.

In 2008, Keenan authored the federal best practices for building voter information websites. He also sits on the board of the D:hive, a talent attraction and retention clearinghouse for Detroit’s emerging entrepreneurship class.