Panel: In a Decentralized World, Who Decides? Five Leaders Share their Governance Stories

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. 

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.

Greg is a lawyer based in Berlin, where he chairs the Privacy and Data Protection subsection of the Blockchain Bundesverband. He is co-founder of the Interplanetary Database Foundation, and the former Chief Policy Officer of ascribe.io and BigchainDB. Before moving to Berlin, Greg spent five years as a litigator with one of Canada’s top class action law firms, where he worked on class actions against Facebook over privacy violations, and Visa and MasteCard alleging price fixing. He served on the Board of Directors of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, and authored he BCCLA handbook on laptop and smartphone searches at the Canadian border.

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.

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.

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.