Lucy Caldwell
Lucy Caldwell is a political strategist and technologist who builds bridges between advocacy, analytics, and imagination.
As founder of Mockingbird Lab, she develops audience-intelligence tools that help organizations understand and engage real people—not just data points.
A veteran of campaigns and civic-tech ventures, Lucy served as Chief Strategy Officer at Crowdskout and managed Joe Walsh’s Republican primary challenge to Donald Trump.
Her commentary has appeared on CNN, Fox News, and NPR, where she argues that effective democracy demands both moral courage and operational rigor.
At the Atoll Society, Lucy leads the translation of experimental ideas into executable strategies, grounding distributed-intelligence concepts in political and technological reality.
Liz Walsh
Liz Walsh is a strategic storyteller and global journalist whose work bridges culture, politics, and imagination. As Founder of Walsh Strategies and a current Editor at Le Monde, she brings editorial intelligence honed across leading newsrooms and global institutions. A former Senior Producer at Al Jazeera English and Voice of America, she has led teams shaping narratives across continents, reported and edited for The New York Times and the United Nations, and directed strategy for major philanthropic initiatives centered on democracy, justice, and cross-cultural understanding.
As Editor in Chief of The Atoll Society, Liz oversees editorial direction and narrative integrity across its global network of contributors—ensuring that the Society’s explorations of governance, technology, and culture remain rigorous, legible, and faithful to its pluralist ethos.
Dmitri Mehlhorn
Dmitri Mehlhorn is a political entrepreneur and systems strategist who applies venture logic to democracy defense.
As co-founder of Investing in US, he mobilized risk capital for organizations safeguarding elections and rule-of-law institutions.
Previously he led global operations at Bloomberg BNA and Gerson Lehrman Group and advised ventures across education, biotech, and data infrastructure.
Known for his candor and outcome orientation, Dmitri treats governance like portfolio management—fund many experiments, scale the ones that work.
At the Atoll Society, he pressure-tests speculative ideas against coalition math, resource constraints, and political reality, ensuring that imagination remains accountable to execution.
Dom Caldwell
Dom Caldwell, the husband of the fictional protagonist Kaspar Locke, represents the synthesis impulse within the Society—the drive to translate between incompatible systems. Trained on traditions of philosophy, systems theory, and ecological design, Dom writes about technology as a moral organism. His essays in Dom Caldwell’s World explore the collapse of consensus and the possibility of rebuilding shared truth through verification networks. Dom speaks for integration without erasure—believing that the next Enlightenment will emerge not from consensus but from coherence.
Karthik Subasri
Karthik Subasri works with Kaspar Locke, Butch Hart, and Victoria Caldwell to embody the analytic conscience of the Society. A security professional who has tracked authoritarian coordination across continents, he views democracy as an engineering challenge—a system requiring continuous stress-testing. His field notes examine how democracies decay not through coups but through patient institutional corrosion. Karthik’s presence within the Archive reminds members that optimism without structure is surrender—and that survival requires disciplined awareness of threat.
Sarah Calloway Mendoza
Sarah Calloway Mendoza is the sister of Butch Hart, the mother of two children, and the spouse of a Trump supporter. She speaks for the lived experience of democracy. A mother and witness to civic collapse, she writes from the kitchen-table perspective that most political theories forget. Her voice insists that the rule of law must serve ordinary life—families, schools, neighborhoods—or it serves nothing at all. Within the Atoll dialogues, Sarah anchors compassion as a form of evidence: emotional truth tested through everyday survival.