Panel: Building the First Web—Lessons for a Decentralized World

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

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. 

Whitfield Diffie is one of the world’s preeminent cryptographers and a co-creator of Public Key Encryption. Currently, Diffie is Chief Scientist at Cryptic Labs, an innovative research lab primarily focused on solving fundamental problems to advance the viability and growth of the Blockchain.

A mathematician, computer scientist and author, Whitfield is winner of the 2015 Turing Award, often referred to as the Nobel Prize of Computing. Among his other honors, Whitfield is also an elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society, a IEEE Hamming Medal winner, winner of the Franklin Institute’s Louis E Levy medal, a Fellow of the Computer History Museum and a Marconi Foundation Fellow.

Whitfield received a B.S. in Mathematics from M.I.T.  He also holds both an honorary doctorate from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and a Degree of Doctor of Science (Honoris Causa) from Royal Holloway, University of London.

Whitfield is also the co-author with Prof. Susan Landau, of the University of Massachusetts, of the book ‘Privacy on the Line: The politics of wiretapping and encryption’, which has won the Donald McGannon Award for Social and Ethical Relevance in Communications Policy Research and the IEEE-USA award for Distinguished Literary Contributions Furthering Public Understanding of the Profession.

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.

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.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread.

Sir Tim is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the technical standards development of the Web. Sir Tim is the founder and a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation which was launched in 2009 to coordinate efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity. He is a Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Computer Science and AI Lab (CSAIL). His research group, the Decentralized Information Group (DIG), works to re-decentralize the Web. He is also a Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Oxford, UK. He is President of and co-founded the Open Data Institute in London. In 2017 Sir Tim was awarded the ACM A.M. Turing Prize, called the "Nobel Prize of Computing” and considered one of the most prestigious awards in Computer Science. Tim is a long time defender of Net Neutrality and the openness of the Web.