Lightning Talks: New Discoveries Session 3

Alexis Rossi manages all aspects of Internet Archive collections work for movies, audio, software, and books, as well as the archive.org web site and social media presences. From 2006-2008, Rossi managed the audio and video collections and Open Library, as well as working on the Open Content Alliance, and the Zotero/IA project. From 2009-2015 Rossi managed internal web crawling projects and the Wayback Machine.

Rossi has been working with Internet content since 1996 when she discovered that being picky about words in books was good training for being picky about data on computers. She spent several years managing news content at ClariNet (the first online news aggregator), worked as the Editorial Director at Alexa Internet, and as Product Manager at Mixercast.

Rossi has an Masters of Library and Information Science, concentrating on web technologies and interfaces, and enjoys making jewelry, dancing, and baking Cookie Smackdown-winning cookies.

Mark Kudlac graduated with degrees in engineering and computer science from the University of Toronto in 1985. He founded Conxsys with a partner in 1990. Conxsys developed a turnkey Linux based ERP system, Drive 2.0, for car dealerships. After a successful exit in 2000 Mark developed a voice controlled email system for mobile phones, VerbalFusion, which was crushed by the rise of BlackBerry and later smart phones.

After a period of retirement travelling and spending time with family a number of other products were developed which focused on using mobile devices as data servers. This track has culminated in Subsect which is a light weight general purpose platform for serving web content from Android and iOS devices.

Nicolás Pace is a member of AlterMundi A.C., a grassroots organization supporting rural underserved communities in their pursue for creating their own telecommunications infrastructure, their own piece of internet. In doing so, Nicolas has traveled to more than 15 countries, getting to know most of the community networks out there, and getting to understand the diversity and complexity of the matter. One of the latest actions he has been undertaking has been working together with REDES A.C., a grassroots organization from Mexico in supporting first nation communities. Within AlterMundi he has also been involved in the Decentralized Repository of Culture, a P2P project that tries to find a way around the digital culture distribution, involving everyone in the process: creators, curators, enthusiasts.

John Light is the Community Lead at Aragon, a project that is building tools for the governance of organizations and open source projects. He is also a co-founder of Bitseed, author of Bitcoin: Be Your Own Bank, free software advocate and contributor, and advisor to cryptocurrency startups and investors.

John has helped organize many crypto-community events including EIP0 Summit in 2018, the Decentralized Web Summit in 2016, and Blockstack Summit NYC in 2015. He also hosted the P2P Connects Us podcast, founded the Buttonwood SF cryptocurrency trading meetup in San Francisco, and is an avid reader and writer on the topics of peer-to-peer technology, philosophy, and culture.

You can find John's website at lightco.in.

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).

​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.​