Decentralized Web Summit 2018

Agnes Cameron is a master’s student in the Viral Communications group at the MIT media lab. Her work is focussed on distributed forms of co-operation, and self-organisation in network systems. Her background is originally in Electronic and Information Engineering.

Gunner works to help NGOs, activists, foundations and software developers make more effective use of technology for social change. He has worked in numerous technology environments from NGO to Silicon Valley start-up to college faculty to large corporation, serving in senior management, engineering, teaching and volunteer roles. He is an experienced facilitator with a passion for designing collaborative open learning processes, and is an active facilitator, contributor, advisor, and/or partner in a number of open projects, including The Tor Project, OpenReferral, Open Architecture Collaborative, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, Simply Secure, and Mozilla. He is a board member of The Ruckus Society, Global Exchange, and Peer 2 Peer University, and also serves in formal advisory roles with SAFETAG, CorpWatch, LocalizED, Ranking Digital Rights, The Center for Tech Cultivation, DATA Uruguay, Libraries.io, Social Movement Technologies, The Engine Room, The Everett Program, United for Iran, and The Rosetta Foundation. He believes in melding hard work with serious fun.

The common thread that connects all facets of Gunner's work is a focus on open approaches to capacity building and knowledge sharing in social change efforts. Aspiration prioritizes work that supports and contributes to open communities of practice who create technology and content that benefit nonprofit and foundation efforts. Over the past twelve years, the organization has designed and facilitated almost 500 extremely open learning and knowledge sharing events, in over 40 countries across the globe, predicated on a philosophy of active participation that puts each participant “in control of their own destiny”, in contrast to approaches that place audiences in passive listening roles. Aspiration publishes all licensed work products, including software tools, books, papers and training materials, under open licenses; for published documents and media, the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike, and for software the GNU General Public License whenever possible.

Althea loves a good positive sum game. She helps to guide growth strategy at OmiseGO, a fintech company building the free and fully public OMG network for scalable, decentralized asset exchange secured by the Ethereum blockchain, with a special focus on incentive alignment across the crypto ecosystem.
 

Amandine is the co-founder of Matrix.org, a unique initiative aiming to democratise secure online communication and solve the problem of fragmentation in current Chat, VoIP and IoT technologies. Matrix hopes to create a new ecosystem that makes open real-time-communication as universal and interoperable as email, and brings the power back to the user on choosing who they trust with their data and how they want to communicate. It defines a new lightweight pragmatic open standard for federation/interoperability and releases open source reference implementations of the protocol. Amandine is also Head of Operation and Products for New Vector, the company behind Riot (https://riot.im), an open source, secure and interoperable collaboration tool built on Matrix. She previously set up and led product management for the Unified Communications line of business within Amdocs and has more than 10 years of experience in mobile services and telecommunications. Amandine has a degree in telecommunications engineering from Ecole Supérieure de Chimie, Physique et Electronique de Lyon as well as an EMBA from ESC Rennes.

Amir received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and is a practicing Bay Area artist and educator. Amir's role at the Internet Archive is to connect artist with the collections and to show what is possible when open access to information meets the arts. He is also the founder and director of the Artist in Residence Program at the Internet Archive.

Amy James is the co-lead author of Open Index Protocol, a blockchain specification for an open and permissionless database, and co-founder of Alexandria.io where she serves as strategist, writer, speaker and advocate for artists. She has previously worked for nonprofit arts organizations, political campaigns and as an independent writer/director. How blockchain will benefit creators, audiences & the web is the most exciting story she’s ever told.

Andre is a Mozilla TechSpeaker focused on decentralization technologies and is an active member of the Secure Scuttlebutt community. In the recent years he published books about Firefox OS and managed a Web Literacy program in vulnerable neighborhoods of Rio. He is a firm believer in empowerment through technological experimentation. His home is in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he lives with his wife, cats and more IoT boards than he can ever put into use.

Antonio Tenorio-Fornés is a free software developer and researcher. He holds a 5 years CS/Eng degree and a Master in Research in Computer Science. He is currently developing his PhD at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, funded by an institutional scholarship, and working for the awesome P2P Models project. His research aims to provide decentralized governance tools for Commons-Based Peer Production communities. In the past, he was a core part of the technical team of the P2Pvalue European research project. He has been visiting researcher at the University of Surrey, the University of Westminster and Kozminski University. His experience developing decentralized web tools includes Teem, SwellRT and Decentralized.science, using technologies such as Blockchain and IPFS. Recent related work also include the proposal a framework for decentralized applications using IPFS and Blockchain and the design and development of decentralized.science, a project that aims to disintermediate and open scientific publication. 

Arkadiy's work focuses on creating sustainable communities around media consumption and creation. He is currently a PM with Protocol Labs, and collaborating with the Internet Archive. Previously, he was the CTO at Mediachain Labs (acquired by Spotify in spring 2017) and worked on The Hype Machine, an influential music blog aggregator.

A passionate advocate for public Internet access and a successful entrepreneur, Brewster Kahle has spent his career intent on a singular focus: providing Universal Access to All Knowledge. He is the founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive, one of the largest libraries in the world. Soon after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied artificial intelligence, Kahle helped found the company Thinking Machines, a parallel supercomputer maker. In 1989, Kahle created the Internet's first publishing system called Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), later selling the company to AOL. In 1996, Kahle co-founded Alexa Internet, which helps catalog the Web, selling it to Amazon.com in 1999. The Internet Archive, which he founded in 1996, now preserves 38 petabytes of data - the books, Web pages, music, television, and software that form our cultural heritage, working with more than 1000 library and university partners to create a digital library, accessible to all.

He first called builders to "Lock the Web Open" using decentralized technologies in 2015, and continues to write about, experiment, cajole, and cheer on those creating decentralized systems we can trust.

     Brian builds Tahoe-LAFS, a distributed storage system that safely uses untrusted servers, and Magic Wormhole, the easiest secure file transfer tool ever.

Callil Capuozzo is a designer at General Trademark, an educator at the School of Visual Arts and a researcher at New Computer Working Group. He is interested in building creative tools through collaboration with artists, scientists and engineers.

Camelon Baker currently works as the Senior Engineer at NetFreedom Pioneers. He has been responsible for the development and implementation of NFP’s primary project: Toosheh, an offline technology that distributes content through satellite datacasting. Camelon has been a computer engineer for the past 20 years. 

Cecilia Mwende Maundu is broadcast journalist working for the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, which is the state broadcaster in Kenya. Cecilia is also a filmmaker with her interest being documentary filmmaking. Ms Maundu is a graduate of the University of Nairobi where she did a Bachelor of Arts and later proceeded to do master of Arts in communication at the same university. She is currently pursuing her Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D) in communication Studies at Moi University in Kenya. 

Ms Maundu is an independent digital security consultant and runs an independent digital security firm. She trains people, in particular women, journalists’ human rights defenders and members of the LGBT community how to stay safe online where they are the most vulnerable. Cecilia is on the quest to make sure that even the most vulnerable feel safe online. She is also a User experience expert (UX), and leads trainings on collecting feedback and evaluates how effective online security tools are. All this in creating a holistic approach to digital security. Cecilia is addicted to everything on digital security!

Christina is the Digital Life Collective's lead mapper and knowledge ecologist, tracing the transformation of information to knowledge in human systems the way an ecologist follows the movement of sunlight energy or nitrogen through a wetland. A collaborative researcher and network catalyst, she uses her experience in ecology, land-use planning (human ecology) and research to illuminate the context - the knowledge ecosystem - of a given problem or endeavor. She works with the people of that ecosystem to translate big-picture systems thinking into the nuts and bolts of strategic actions using critical thinking, skillful dialog and functional design. She is currently focused on a map supporting the decentralized web community.

Christopher Allen is an entrepreneur, technologist, and educator who specializes in collaboration, security, and trust. As a pioneer in internet cryptography, he’s initiated cross-industry collaborations and created industry standards that influence the entire internet. He worked with Netscape to develop SSL and co-authored the IETF TLS internet draft that is now at the heart of all secure commerce on the World Wide Web. Though he’s worked within numerous privacy and security sectors, Christopher’s recent emphasis has been on engines of trust such as blockchain, smart contracts, and smart signatures, in particular decentralized self-sovereign identity. Christopher has been a digital civil liberties and human-rights privacy advisor, mobile developer, startup consultant, MBA faculty, and social web strategy consultant. He served as Principle Architect at Blockstream.

Constance is one of the principal drivers of global, collaborative, multi-stakeholder initiatives (www.blockchainworkshops.org and www.coala.global) and her ongoing work is intended to foster sound public policy to allow blockchain technologies to fulfill the great social and economic promise of its technical ingenuity. Her company, Seven Advisory, also supports diverse public and private clients in global regulations, licensing and compliance, government advocacy, and strategic market development for blockchain technologies. 

   Cory Doctorow is an author, journalist, and Special Advisor at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger — the co-editor of Boing Boing  and the author of the YA graphic novel IN REAL LIFE, the nonfiction business book INFORMATION DOESN’T WANT TO BE FREE, and young adult novels like HOMELAND, PIRATE CINEMA and LITTLE BROTHER and novels for adults like RAPTURE OF THE NERDS and MAKERS. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.

Dan Taeyoung dreams of, and builds, infrastructures for care, cybernetic architecture, ethical pedagogy, and warm cooperatives. He is interested in the intersection of architecture, technology, and cooperative community. 

He teaches on architectural representation and experimental design tools as an adjunct professor at Columbia University GSAPP. He is a founding member of Prime Produce, a non-profit member cooperative for social good, a member of NYC REIC, an activist/anti-displacement real estate cooperative working to create community land trusts and permanently affordable commercial space, and a founding member of Soft Surplus, an intentional learning collective based in Brooklyn, NY. 

Danielle Robinson is Co-Executive Director of Code for Science & Society, where she works to open create inclusive public access to information through decentralized technologies. She completed a PhD in Neuroscience at Oregon Health & Science University in 2016. She was a 2016 Mozilla Fellow for Science, where she ran in Working Open Workshops around the world and explored decentralized data archiving as a DataRescue strategy.

Danny O'Brien has been an activist for online free speech and privacy for over 20 years. In his home country of the UK, he fought against repressive anti-encryption law, and helped make the UK Parliament more transparent with FaxYourMP.  He was EFF's activist from 2005 to 2007, and its international outreach coordinator from 2007-2009. After three years working to protect at-risk online reporters with the Committee to Protect Journalists, he returned to EFF in 2013 to supervise EFF's global strategy. He is also the co-founder of the Open Rights Group, Britain's own digital civil liberties organization.

In a previous life, Danny wrote and performed the only one-man show about Usenet to have a successful run in London's West End. His geek gossip zine, Need To Know, won a special commendation for services to newsgathering at the first Interactive BAFTAs. He also coined the term "life hack."

It has been over a decade since he was first commissioned to write a book on combating procrastination

David has in excess of 23 years experience in IT and 15 years running companies. He is the designer of one of the World’s largest private networks (Saudi Aramco, over $300M). He is an experienced Project Manager and has been involved in start up businesses since 1995 and has provided business consultancy to corporates and SMEs in many sectors. He has presented technology at Google (Seattle), British Computer Society (Christmas Lecture) and many others. He has spent many years as a lifeboat Helmsman and is a keen sailor when time permits. David is also a published author on papers in the fields of complex networking, distributed computing and cryptography related technologies. His is the author of 30 patent applications in the field of computer networking.

David is a Peer-to-Peer Software Engineer at <a href="http://ipn.io">Protocol Labs</a>. He is building the InterPlanetary File System, which enables the creation of completely distributed applications. He has also contributed to <a href="https://nodesecurity.io">nodesecurity.io</a> and built several modules that enable developers to check for vulnerabilities. He has a Master of Science in Engineering with major in Peer-to-Peer Networks from Technical University of Lisbon.

Dawn Walker is a PhD student at the University of Toronto focused on
participatory design tactics for grassroots environmental monitoring
civic technologies. Based in Toronto, she has organized workshops on
mesh networking and decentralized technologies with Toronto Mesh. As a
member of EDGI and Data Together, she imagines possibilities for more
just and resilient environmental and climate data.

Devon Read James is the inventor of Open Index Protocol (OIP), a blockchain specification for an open and permissionless database, and CEO of Alexandria.io, where you can find anything published to the Open Index. He has worked for Apple and Sony, deployed twice overseas as a US Marine infantryman, contributed to Emmy & Oscar winners as a post-production artist, and co-founded a small design/manufacture/import business. He is obsessed with how decentralized technology can make the web more open, transparent and trustworthy.

Dr. Dimitri De Jonghe is a cross-domain protocol researcher. After finishing his PhD on micro-electronics and machine learning, he co-founded a series of blockchain startups: ascribe [power to creators] and BigchainDB [a blockchain database], and Ocean Protocol [a public network for data and AI marketplaces]. Currently, Dimitri is heading research at Ocean Protocol on public intelligence networks. He is also a co-chair of the W3C Interledger community, a blockchain interoperability protocol.

Evan (AliReza) Firoozi is a former student activist and journalist who was imprisoned by the Iranian government for more than a year, six months of which he spent in solitary confinement. He has collaborated with several organizations and universities to translate to Farsi technical articles and applications related to internet security, privacy, and anti-censorship. While simultaneously pursuing his education in Computer Science, Evan currently works at NetFreedom Pioneers on the development and implementation of Toosheh/Knapsack, a service and application focused on the distribution of data through satellite connection.

Feross is building WebTorrent , the first torrent client that works on the web in the browser. He is bringing P2P to the masses with accessible, WebRTC-based P2P protocols.

Over the course of 15+ years, Fredrik has worked in everything from freelance web development to fintech, working in most popular languages from PHP to Haskell. Prior to joining Parity, he was co-founder and CTO of several startups. As CTO of Parity Technologies, Fredrik oversees the development of Parity's core blockchain infrastructure technology. He has a Masters in Engineering Physics from Lund University, Sweden.
 

Gary Zhexi Zhang is an artist and writer interested in socio-technical objects. His current research investigates the role of work within decentralised organisations such as swarms, mycelia and markets. He has published essays on many-headed slime moulds, Chinese internet culture, blockchain ethnography, and is currently working on a thesis about decentralized aesthetics and the seduction of systems theory. He is a graduate student in the Program in Art, Culture, Technology at MIT.
 

Greg is Chief Policy Officer at ascribe.io and BigchainDB.com. Before joining ascribe, Greg spent five years as a lawyer with one of Canada’s top class action law firms, where he worked on class actions against Facebook and the Government of Canada alleging privacy violations, and against Teranet alleging copyright infringement. Greg is on the Board of Directors of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, and the author of the BCCLA handbook on laptop and smartphone searches at the Canadian border.

Ivan Vilata-i-Balaguer is a member of eQualitie, a company that develops open and reusable systems with a focus on privacy, online security, and information management. He works on the development of technologies enabling unfettered access to the World Wide Web for netizens operating in some of the most restrictive Internet environments.

Jay is a software developer with an interest in privacy and decentralization tech. 

Jennifer Granick fights for civil liberties in an age of massive surveillance and powerful digital technology. As the surveillance and cybersecurity counsel with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, she litigates, speaks, and writes about privacy, security, technology, and constitutional rights. Granick is the author of the book American Spies: Modern Surveillance, Why You Should Care, and What To Do About It, published by Cambridge Press and winner of the 2016 Palmer Civil Liberties Prize. 

Granick spent much of her career helping create Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. From 2001 to 2007, she was executive director of CIS and founded the Cyberlaw Clinic, where she supervised students in working on some of the most important cyberlaw cases that took place during her tenure. For example, she was the primary crafter of a 2006 exception to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that allows mobile telephone owners to legally circumvent the firmware locking their device to a single carrier. From 2012 to 2017, Granick was civil liberties director specializing in and teaching surveillance law, cybersecurity, encryption policy, and the Fourth Amendment. In that capacity, she has published widely on U.S. government surveillance practices and helped educate judges and congressional staffers on these issues. Granick also served as the civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation from 2007 to 2010.

Earlier in her career, Granick spent almost a decade practicing criminal defense law in California. Granick’s work is well-known in privacy and security circles. Her keynote, “Lifecycle of the Revolution” for the 2015 Black Hat USA security conference electrified and depressed the audience in equal measure. In March of 2016, she received Duo Security’s Women in Security Academic Award for her expertise in the field as well as her direction and guidance for young women in the security industry. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has called Granick an “NBA all-star of surveillance law.”

Jeremy is Lead Application Engineer and Community Organizer of Namecoin, a naming system (currently used for DNS and identities) which backs authenticity of records with the same algorithms and code used to back financial transactions in Bitcoin. Jeremy wears many hats at Namecoin but spends much of his time working on applications which enhance online privacy.

Jeromy is a Distributed Systems Engineer at Protocol Labs. He is the maintainer of the Go implementations of IPFS and Libp2p. Prior to that, he worked on large scale clustered filesystems at EMC Isilon, and got his Bachelors degree in CS at Washington State University.

Joachim is an entrepreneur and tech enthusiast. He is obsessed with knowledge, change and innovation. Currently, he is Founder and CEO of Jolocom, a Berlin-based startup building decentralized tools that lets you generate your own digital identity to assist linkage and attribution of data. Besides that Joachim is a connector for Ouishare, currently curating the content for the Decentralization & Blockchain track of the next Ouishare Fest in Paris. Also he organizes GETDcent and is an active member of the Agora Collective in Berlin.

Joe Hand is Co-Executive Director at Code for Science & Society and a core developer on Dat Project. He has experience developing and managing data-focused programs for researchers and global community-driven organizations. Previously, Joe led a global project at the Santa Fe Institute to transform data collection practices of a community-driven organization, operating in slums across 30 countries.

John Light is a co-founder of Bitseed, author of Bitcoin: Be Your Own Bank, writer at the okTurtles Foundation, free software advocate and contributor, and advisor to cryptocurrency startups and investors. He organized Blockstack Summit NYC in 2015, founded the Buttonwood SF P2P Cryptocurrency Trading meetup in San Francisco, hosts the P2P Connects Us podcast, and is an avid reader and writer on the topics of peer-to-peer technology, philosophy, and culture. You can find John's website and blockchain ID at www.lightco.in.

Joseph Poon, is co-author the Lighting Network and Plasma. He is currently contributing to a new project, Handshake, leveraging abundance models within the greater blockchain space.

Juan Benet created IPFS, Filecoin, and other open source protocols. He is the founder of Protocol Labs, a company improving how the internet works. He studied Computer Science (Distributed Systems) at Stanford University. Juan is obsessed with Knowledge, Science, and Technology.

Jutta is the co-founder and CEO of Parity Technologies, a blockchain technology company best known for Parity, the most advanced Ethereum client. Parity Technologies continues to advance core blockchain infrastructure with Polkadot, an ambitious protocol that addresses blockchain governance, interoperability, and scalability issues. To help foster blockchain innovation, Parity Technologies has recently announced Parity Substrate, a blockchain-building technology that makes it easier to experiment with new ideas for sharding, encryption, and governance.

Previously, Jutta served as Chief of Security for the Ethereum Foundation and pioneered blockchain use in supply chains as Project Provenance co-founder.

Kalli is a graduate student at the Viral Communications group at the MIT Media Lab. She has a background in engineering, neuroscience and design. She is interested in the making and politics of online interfaces, in the User’s behavior, agency and assumed roles.

Karissa McKelvey is an open source software developer, writer, project manager, and activist supporting an equitable web. She develops and maintains a wide variety of tools and services for Digital Democracy. She is also a board member of Code for Science and Society. Formerly a data scientist, her work studying online political communication resulted in multiple peer-reviewed papers and press in outlets such as NPR and the Wall Street Journal. In addition to an experienced software and web developer, she leads teams to success with diverse projects in academia, non-profits, and industry. In her spare time she plays the trumpet and volunteers at The Debt Collective as a technology consultant.

Katie Barrett is Development Manager of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library, offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to the world’s knowledge in digital format. Her primary goal is to help the Internet Archive improve its financial resiliency, ensuring the long term sustainability of this vital cultural heritage library.

Prior to joining the Archive in 2016, Barrett was General Manager of some of San Francisco’s premier technology conferences, including the SF MusicTech Summit and Future of Money & Technology Summit, where she drove sponsorship and partnership development, and oversaw all event production and planning.

Barrett has a background in membership development, having worked with the Grammy Awards organization as Membership Manager. She promoted artist advocacy at the governmental level, spearheaded artist professional development projects, and drove engagement with many Grammy Nominated and/or Award winning artists.

Barrett is Founder of Pops & Buzzes, an affiliation of accomplished women who work in all aspects of the entertainment, recording and live music industries. She produces quarterly networking events and salons promoting partnership, mentorship and community engagement to female music professionals in the Bay Area.

Barrett spent 2 years teaching abroad in Kamojima, Japan as part of the JET program, and graduated from St. Mary’s College in Moraga with a degree in English.

Kyle Mock is a fan of distributed web technology who studied painting and drawing at California College of the Arts. From DAT sites to chatrooms, he explores ways to enable more people to build and own their own communities online. As a self-taught designer, his vision is to make open web technologies easier to use and understood by less technical audiences. 

Laurel Schwulst currently teaches interactive design at Yale University and maintains Beautiful Company, a design practice. Previously, she was creative director of The Creative Independent and worked at the New York-based design studio Linked by Air. Most recently, she's excited about the potential of the peer to peer web in the context of creative self-publishing.

Lila Bailey is Policy Counsel for the Internet Archive where she advises on the complex legal and policy issues associated with democratizing access to knowledge. She is also a lecturer at Berkeley Law, most recently teaching a course in the Fundamentals of Internet Law. 

Prior to becoming the Internet Archive’s in-house counsel, Bailey was the founder and principal attorney at The Law Office of Lila Bailey, specializing in digital copyright and privacy issues for individual entrepreneurs and creators, early stage startups, Internet platforms, and libraries. From 2011-2013, Bailey was a Clinical Teaching Fellow at Berkeley’s Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, where she managed and mentored student attorneys as they tackled cutting edge work in public interest technology law and policy. Bailey’s work there included advising a Civil Rights group on the copyright issues involved in making historical materials available in digital form, working on privacy issues associated with California’s “smart” electricity grid, and drafted a white paper on the benefits of flexible copyright exceptions and limitations for libraries outside the U.S. 

Prior to this, Bailey was counsel for Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization offering open copyright licenses that allow the sharing of creative works under flexible licensing terms. In this capacity, Bailey worked with the Open Educational Resources community, to make high-quality educational materials freely available under terms that allow anyone, anywhere, to access, customize, and share those resources via the Internet. Bailey held an Intellectual Property Fellowship with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2007, helping Internet users push back against abusive DMCA takedown notices and supporting EFF staff on the early stages of the Lenz v. Universal Music Group case (a.k.a. “the Dancing Baby case”). Bailey served as an associate at Perkins Coie, where she worked on copyright, patent, and trademark litigation. In 2006, she won the firm-wide Pro Bono Leadership Award for billing over 600 pro bono hours for the Internet Archive.

Bailey is a frequent speaker on digital copyright issues nationwide. She received her JD from Berkeley Law and her bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Brown University.

María Gómez is a former Colombian/Spanish corporate lawyer. She worked several years in the M&A and corporate finance practice. Currently she works for Aragon.one, the first team, and in the future one of the several teams, working for the Aragon project. A local to Bogotá-Colombia a citizen of the open world. 
 

Mark is a mathematician turned programmer. He runs a VC backed Open Source company and has traveled to 30 countries. The diverse cultures he has experienced fuels his passion for learning, sharing, and creating open technology freely for all.

Mary Kay Magistad is creator & host of the Whose Century Is It? podcast, looking at ideas, trends and twists shaping the 21st century -- the prospect of a decentralized web among them. After more than two decades as a foreign correspondent in China and Southeast Asia for NPR and for PRI/BBC's The World, she now lives in San Francisco, teaches international reporting to undergraduates at UC Berkeley, and has been a fellow at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto.

Mathias Buus is a self taught JavaScript hacker from Copenhagen that has been working with Node.js since the 0.2 days. Mathias likes to work with P2P and distributed systems and is the author of more than 650 modules on npm. He is also the Chief of Research at Beaker leading the technical work on the Dat protocol.

Matt is a software engineer with a passion for exploring possibilities at the intersection of human rights and emerging technology. With a background in international human rights works as well as the Drupal and Angular open source communities, he is excited to be volunteering as a coordinator of the humanitarian track of the Decentralized Web Summit.

Mehdi Yahyanejad is founder of Balatarin.com, the largest user-generated news website in Persian and a crucial information source in the 2009 pro-democracy protest movement in Iran. He is the co-founder and director of NetFreedom Pioneers, a nonprofit organization that delivers curated digital content via satellite to regions of the world with limited internet access. He is also a researcher at USC researching new anti-censorship technologies. 

(@mekarpeles on GitHub) is a software engineer and citizen of the world dedicated to curating a living map of the universe's knowledge. His philosophies on open access and semantic knowledge systems can be explored at https://michaelkarpeles.com.

Melanie Hoff is an artist, researcher, and educator examining the poetics and politics of culturally embedded software. Hoff builds computational and social installations to study how platforms and processes — including algorithms, data collection, language, networks, and ritual — yield distinct modes of seeing, thinking, and feeling. She engages technology as both a cultural and ideological framework to contextualize social organization and question the ways existing systems of power are reinforced. Hoff has worked as a machinist, artist, and she teaches at Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts and the School for Poetic Computation.

Michael Brennan is the technology program officer on the Internet Freedom team at Ford Foundation where he oversees a global portfolio of grantees that address open Internet issues through a technical lens. He also designed and manages the Foundation's technology fellows program. Michael has over 10 years of experience researching and advising both the private and the public sector on technology policy.

Mindy Seu is currently a student in Harvard's Graduate School of Design and incoming fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for the Internet and Society.

As the leader of the Mozilla Project, Mitchell Baker is responsible for organizing and motivating a massive, worldwide, collective of employees and volunteers who are breathing new life into the Internet with the Firefox Web browser, Firefox OS and other Mozilla products. Mitchell continues her commitment to an open, innovative Web and the infinite possibilities it presents.

Mitra Ardron is the technical lead for the decentralization work at the Internet Archive. Apart from building a decentralized version of the archive he is interested in how we can build tools that can work across different decentralized architectures, and has built small libraries for naming and authentication.   Prior to the Archive, He co-founded the Association for Progressive Communications (apc.org), co-authored several internet standards, and was CTO on the first peer to peer video sharing system (which pioneered sharding and content addressing).  His passions include renewable energy (ran solar payment networks across Africa); and mentoring innovators working to make the world a better place. 

Muneeb co-founded Blockstack, a new internet for decentralized apps where users own their data. Muneeb received his PhD in Computer Science from Princeton University specializing in distributed systems. He went through Y Combinator and has worked in the systems research group at Princeton and PlanetLab—the world's first and largest cloud computing testbed. Muneeb was awarded a J. William Fulbright Fellowship and gives guest lectures on cloud computing at Princeton. He has built a broad range of production systems and published research papers with over 900 citations.

Nadia Eghbal explores the economic incentives and community dynamics of digital infrastructure. She published "Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure" with support from the Ford Foundation, which highlighted gaps in funding and knowledge around how open source tools are produced. While at GitHub, she focused on improving the open source developer experience. Nadia currently works at Protocol Labs, focused on research. She is based in San Francisco.

Nick Lambert​, ​started his working life in project management roles with IBM, before a change in tack led him into senior marketing positions with a diverse range of companies. He has co-authored papers on decentralised networks, presented at several international conferences and holds an MSc in Marketing from Strathclyde University.

​Nighat Dad is the ​Founder and executive director of the Digital Rights Foundation (DRF), Pakistan, She has run the DRF since it was established in 2012, and has been a practicing lawyer since 2007, where she worked on civil​,​ criminal​ and now cyber​ litigation​. ​

Nighat has been an affiliate for Internet and Society at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University from 2016 to 201​8​, USA. Prior to this, she completed a certification in Internet Governance from the Diplo Foundation in 2011. She was TIME Magazine’s next generation leader in 2015, and received the Tulip Award​ from Dutch Govt​ as well as the Atlantic Council Freedom Award in 2016. She was a TED Fellow in 2017, and is on the World Economic Forum (WEF)’s Young Global Leaders 2018 list.​ Nighat has also established regions first cyber harassment helpline in Pakistan in 2016.​

Omayeli is a Nigerian born artist and technologist living in New York. She use writing, data visualization, code and satire to put our current realities in a view that exposes issues and fosters disillusionment. She's also interested in making technology and data more accessible and understandable. She gives talks and teaches workshops on creative and activist uses of technology. She's an alum of the School of Poetic Computation and has previously worked as a Software Engineer at LinkedIn. She's currently exploring bias in language at the Recurse Center.

Paul is the co-creator of the Beaker browser and an active contributor to the Dat protocol. Previously Paul helped found the Secure Scuttlebutt project, and has a history of working at small Web development agencies. He's here to talk about peer-to-peer computing and how the Web can become a live environment.

Peter is the Executive Director of the Web3 Foundation, where he works on supporting the development of the next generation of distributed technologies. As a principal engineer at Parity Technologies, he contributed to the Parity Ethereum Client development, in particular looking at consensus algorithms, as well as driving enterprise solutions built on the Parity technology stack.

Primavera De Filippi is a Permanent Researcher at the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, a Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a Visiting Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute. She is a member of the Global Future Council on Blockchain Technologies at the World Economic Forum, and co-founder of the Internet Governance Forum’s dynamic coalitions on Blockchain Technology (COALA). Her fields of interest focus on legal challenges raised by decentralized technologies, their potential to design new governance models and participatory decision-making, and the concept of governance-by-design. Her book, “Blockchain and the Law,” was published in 2018 by Harvard University Press (co-authored with Aaron Wright).

Richard Caceres is a developer and designer at the Internet Archive. His primary focus is with Internet Archive's online library (BookReader, Lending, etc), but he has recently been involved in evolving the UX and creating a new design system for Archive.org. He is also involved in various community-based projects at Internet Archive such as Archive Lab's Experiments and the Decentralized Web Summit (developer of the site).

In his spare time, he also develops open source apps, and is interested in writing decentralized applications that work on many platforms, and have realtime collaborative features. He's interested in increasing the diversity and craft in the software we use everyday. 

Twitter, Github, Website

Rob Walker is the Clinical Supervising Attorney at the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at Univ. of California, Berkeley, School of Law. Rob’s practice focuses on intellectual property and Internet law issues. Prior to practicing law, Rob was a video producer and business journalist in New York.

Ross Schulman is a co-director of the Cybersecurity Initiative and senior policy counsel at New America’s Open Technology Institute where he focuses on cybersecurity, encryption, surveillance, and Internet governance. Prior to joining OTI, Ross worked for Google in Mountain View, California. Ross has also worked at the Computer and Communications Industry Association, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and on Capitol Hill for Senators Wyden and Feingold. Ross earned his juris doctor magna cum laude from Washington College of Law at American University and his bachelor’s degree in computer science from Brandeis University.

Sam Hart is a scientist, curator and editor working across computational biology and distributed publishing.

Sam is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Architecture at MIT where his work addresses issues of networked image culture. The medium of his recent work spans the likes of a twitter bot, a sticker set, an augmented reality app, and chocolates.

Sarah Aoun is a data activist, operational security trainer, and Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellow working on data privacy and security. Her work lies at the intersection of tech, human rights, and transformative justice. She’s collaborated with activists, journalists, grassroots social movements, and NGOs in the US and MENA region on digital security, ethical data & privacy, and data-driven storytelling.

Sarah Bowers works as an Outreach Coordinator for NetFreedom Pioneers. With a background in international education and nonprofit work, Sarah’s passion lies in cross-cultural inquiry and analyzing the ethics and effectiveness of international development efforts. With these interests she has joined NFP in rethinking the social impact of technology. 

Sarah Hamerman is a librarian and arts researcher based between New Jersey and New York City. She currently works as Poetry Cataloging Specialist in Princeton University Library's Rare Books and Special Collections. Her research is centered around experimental publishing as a networked practice across print and digital media. Sarah is a founding member of the Cybernetics Library, and has presented at venues including the NYU Center for Experimental Humanities, the New York Art Book Fair, and the BABZ Art Book Fair. Her writing has appeared in Temporary Art Review, Avant.org, In The Mesh, and Art Libraries Journal. 
 

Sean White is a high-tech executive, entrepreneur, inventor, and musician who has spent his career leading innovative development of the experiences, systems, and technologies that enable creative expression, connect us to each other, and enhance our understanding of the world around us. He was most recently the founder and CEO of BrightSky Labs, a company he incubated while an EIR at Greylock Partners, and is currently teaching CS377m: HCI Issues in Mixed & Augmented Reality at Stanford University.

Shadi Sharifi is an Iranian lawyer who practiced family law for four years before moving to the United States. Shadi is an innovator and coordinates NetFreedom Pioneers’ Toranj project - an android application that supports those at risk of experiencing violent or abusive circumstances.

Stephen Whitmore works with Digital Democracy to build useful open tools that raise the bar of the commons, especially for marginalized communities.

Stephen creates and maintains open technology that enables self-determination; honors people, not profit; is sustainable for the communities that adopt it; and is maximally accessible regardless of resources or technical background. Stephen is based in Oakland, CA, USA.

Taeyoon Choi is an artist, educator, and activist based in New York and Seoul. His art practice involves performance, electronics, drawings, and installations that form the basis for storytelling in public spaces. He has published artists’ books, including ‘Urban Programming 101’ and ‘Anti-Manifesto.’ Choi’s solo exhibitions include Speakers Corners, Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, New York (2012); My friends, there is no friend, Spanien 19C, Aarhus (2011); and When Technology Fails, Reality Reveals, Art Space Hue, Seoul (2007). His projects were presented at the Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai (2012) and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015). Choi was an artist in residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace, New York (2014), The Frank-Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh (2014) and at Art Center Nabi, Seoul (2006). He received commissions from Art +Technology Lab, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LA (2014) and SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul (2016). He curated Resistance and Resilience at Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, Vermont (2012) and directed Making Lab at Anyang Public Art Project, Anyang (2013). Choi holds a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a M.S. from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. He teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program in the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Choi co-founded the School for Poetic Computation where he continues to organize sessions and teach classes on electronics, drawings, and social practice. Recently, he’s been focusing on unlearning the wall of disability and normalcy, and enhancing accessibility and inclusion within art and technology.

Tamas is a self-taught web builder from Hungary who has been in love with the Internet since the dial-up era. He is the founder and programmer of ZeroNet (https://zeronet.io), which allows you to create decentralized, P2P and real-time updated websites using Bitcoin cryptography and the BitTorrent network.

Tara is the co-creator of the Beaker Browser, a browser for exploring and building the peer-to-peer Web. She co-founded Blue Link Labs, the team of decentralization enthusiasts behind the Beaker Browser and hashbase.io. She's dedicated to building the Web of tomorrow as a Web for all.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He founded and Directs the World Wide Consortium (W3C) the forum for technical development of the Web. He founded the Web Foundation whose mission is that the WWW serves humanity, and co-founded the Open Data Institute in London.  

Tim is a long-time defender of rights such as privacy, freedom, Net Neutrality and the openness of the Web. He serves as Project Director of Solid is an exciting new project taking place at MIT. The project aims to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy.

Tracey Jaquith is a founding engineer and system architect for Internet Archive since 1996, writing multi-threaded servers, crawlers, and more. She wrote the “what’s related” services that ultimately led to Alexa Internet’s acquisition by Amazon. An inventor with two patents, she is the Archive’s longest tenured employee after founder, Brewster Kahle.

In 2000, Jaquith left for four years to be the technical lead and founding engineer at a financial startup focusing on more efficiently trading convertible bonds.

Recently, Jaquith rewrote Internet Archive’s TV recording system as an open source single server system, capable of preserving 75 simultaneous 24×7 channels, and developed the Television Archive’s “full stack” first and second versions. For more than a decade, Jaquith held primary responsibility for archive.org and its full stack infrastructure, later launching a fully responsive “Version 2” of the archive.org website —migrating to jQuery, bootstrap, LESS, modern faceting, ElasticSearch, postgreSQL and more. She is leading the core infrastructure migration to Docker for archive.org’s in-house AWS and S3-like system. Open Libraries services will rest upon the infrastructure Jaquith is designing.

Jaquith’s first job was at Xerox PARC, writing core low-level C-language image processing and comparison algorithms using novel computational geometry based on research from her Master’s degree. 

Jaquith holds a Master’s and Bachelor’s in Computer Science from Cornell University where she focused on machine vision, robotics and mathematics. Jaquith presents at conferences (Demuxed 2016, MozFest) and is a regular guest lecturer at colleges about news and broadcast technologies.

Vinton Gray "Vint" Cerf is an Internet pioneer, who is recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet” for his co-invention of TCP/IP. His contributions have been acknowledged and lauded, repeatedly, with honorary degrees and awards that include the National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Marconi Prize, and membership in the National Academy of Engineering. Cerf has worked for Google as a Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist since October 2005.

Having graduated in Aerospace Engineering and Astronautics ​CTO Vivekanand Rajkumar​ worked as a Server Specialist at IBM before joining MaidSafe. He has extensive expense leading UX teams as well as being a certified Mobile platform engineer. Viv’s experience with IBM and his 6 years at MaidSafe ensure that he is capable of leading all aspects of development. In his time at the company he has been pivotal in refining development processes and helping to build the development team.

Wendy Hanamura is the master juggler of the Decentralized Web Summit 2018. She led the team that produced the first DWeb Summit in 2016 and the team building this event.

As Director of Partnerships at the Internet Archive, one of the world’s largest digital libraries, Hanamura has helped guide the strategic direction of the Internet Archive since 2014. Passionate about using stories to accelerate social change, she uses her communication skills as a veteran journalist and leader in non-profit media to share the remarkable mission of the Internet Archive—providing people everywhere with unfettered access to knowledge. 

Wendy Seltzer is Policy Counsel to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT, where she leads the Technology & Society Domain's focus on privacy, security, web payments, and social web standards. As a visiting Fellow with Yale Law School's Information Society Project, she researches openness in intellectual property, innovation, privacy, and free expression online.

Zooko has more than 20 years of experience in open, decentralized systems, cryptography and information security, and startups. He is recognized for his work on DigiCash, Mojo Nation, ZRTP, “Zooko's Triangle”, Tahoe-LAFS, BLAKE2, and SPHINCS. He is also the Founder of Least Authority. He sometimes blogs about health science.