Personal Democracy Forum

Fabio Chiusi is a freelance journalist (Repubblica, L’Espresso, Wired) and blogger (ilNichilista, Chiusi nella rete) who regularly writes about Internet censorship, surveillance and the complex relationship between digital technologies, politics and society.
He is the author of ‘Critica della Democrazia Digitale’ (Codice, 2014).

Fabio Pietrosanti has been part of the Italian digital underground scene with the nickname “naif” since 1995. He has been working in digital security since 1998.

Among the founders of the Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights, he is active in many projects aimed at creating and spreading the use of digital tools to support freedom of expression and transparency.
A member of Transparency International Italy, owner of Tor’s anonymity nodes, Tor2web anonymous publishing nodes, he is also among the founders of the Anonymous Whistleblowing GlobaLeaks Project, used by investigative journalists, citizen activists and public servants for anti-corruption purposes.

Fabio works on technological innovation in the field of whistleblowing, transparency, communication encryption and digital anonymity.
As a veteran of the hacking and free software environment, he participated to many community projects such as Sikurezza.org, s0ftpj, WinstonSmith Project, Metro Olografix and many others.

Professionally he worked as network security manager, senior security advisor, entrepreneur and CTO of a Startup doing mobile voice encryption technologies.

His blog is Infosecurity

Federica is Creative Director at Nuams, an open civic solution company based in NY. Formerly she served as chief of staff in Buenos Aires’ city government’s e-gov team, where she helped redesign and migrate all of the city’s digital family onto open source technologies. She’s passionate about design, UX, OpenSource and civic work.

Felicity Ruby is the ThoughtWorks Director of Global Internet Policy. From 2008-2013 she was Senior Advisor to Australian Greens Senator Scott Ludlam who held the Communications portfolio and successfully fought data retention and internet censorship proposals, as well as supporting Australian citizen Julian Assange. Prior to this she headed the UN Office for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, was a policy adviser at the UN Development Fund for Women and at Greenpeace International.

Francesca Bria is a Nesta Senior Project Lead in the Nesta Innovation Lab. She is the EU Coordinator of the D-CENT project on direct democracy and social digital currencies and the she is the Principle Investigator of the DSI project on digital social innovation in Europe.
Francesca is a Researcher and Teaching Associate at Imperial College Business School in the Innovation Studies Centre- Digital Economy Lab.
She has a background in social science and innovation economics and an MSc in E-business and Innovation from the University College of London, Birkbeck.

Francesca is a member of the Internet of Things Council and an advisor for the European Commission on Future Internet and Smart Cities policy. She is also a member of the EC Expert Group on Open Innovation (OISPG) and a member of the European Research Cluster on the Internet of Things (IERC).

Francesca has been advising the City of Rome and the Region of Lazio on innovation policy, open technology, and open cities. She is also active in various grassrooots movements advocating for open access, knowledge commons and open, decentralised privacy aware technologies.

A degree in political science and competitive intelligence, Frédéric is passionate about cyberculture, activism, empowerment and digital inclusion.
He has 15 years of experience working as a consultant, speaker, trainer and social entrepreneur, putting the power of action and innovation of the Internet at service of NGOs, associations, foundations and social economy organizations, including LIMIT, an agency specialized in responsible communication, which he founded in 2008

In 2013, Frédéric co-founded Simplon.co: a “developers factory” primarily oriented to young people from modest and minority backgrounds and diversity, especially girls with innovative social projects.

He is the author (with Nicolas Danet) of “Anonymous, can they change the world? ” (2011) and “Reading, writing, arithmetic coding… ?” (2014 ).

Frédéric is married with 5 children. He and his partner, a doctor, lead a humanitarian missions with their lykemi association.

(Photo credit: Nicolas Friess)

Gabriella (Biella) Coleman is the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy in the Art History and Communication Studies Department at McGill University. Trained as an anthropologist, she researches, writes, and teaches on hackers and digital activism. Her first book on Free Software, “Coding Freedom: The Aesthetics and the Ethics of Hacking” has been published with Princeton University Press. She is currently working on a new book on Anonymous and digital media under with Verso.

Gale A. Brewer is the 27th Manhattan Borough President, taking office in January of 2014. Ms. Brewer previously served on the City Council for 12 years, where she was the founding chair of the Council’s Technology Committee in 2002, and successfully passed legislation requiring all City data be published online, among many other initiatives.

Her experience in City Government also includes four years as New York City Deputy Public Advocate; Director of Mayor Dinkins’ Federal Office in New York City; Executive Director of the Mayor’s Commission on the Status of Women; and Chief of Staff to West Side Council Member Ruth W. Messinger.

Immediately prior to her election to the City Council, Brewer served as Project Manager for the NYC Nonprofits Project at CUNY’s Graduate Center, and before that worked for the Telesis Corporation, a private firm that builds affordable housing in New York City.

Brewer has an MPA from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and did her undergraduate work at Columbia University and Bennington College.

With a unique background in business, technology, science and media, Gavin has broad and deep knowledge of how data can change the world.

He began developing internet-based research tools in 1993, and joined Branson’s award-winning Virgin Net (now Virgin Media) in 1995 as its fifth team member.

In 2006 he created AMEE, raising over $10m from world-class venture investors including O’Reilly, USV, and Amadeus (organising the world’s environmental data, standards, and calculations into a simple web-service). In 2011 he joined the UK Government’s “Energy Sector Board” as part of their Midata open-data initiative.

Having helped to kick-start the streaming media industry in Europe in the late 90’s, Gavin created award-winning media-technology service, Tornado, selling it to a larger media group in 2003. He then helped create the digital media supply-chain, as founding CEO of world-leading digital distributor, CI. CI was the first company to deliver digital products to iTunes, and delivered Amazon US ~25% of its download store at launch.

At the UK’s Jodrell Bank Radio Observatory he worked on systems designed to map and interpret the universe. He created courses and lectured in Engineering and Music at Glasgow University, and has degrees in Astronomy (B.Sc.), and Electronic Music (M.Mus.). He co-created a co-operative harbour on the Thames where he now lives, as a musician has released his own album, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

George Jologua is the Head of Media Research at a non-governmental organization Civic Development Institute since 2011. In 2004, he received a bachelor’s degree in International Journalism from Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University. In 2008-2010, he completed the Global Journalism Master Program at Örebro University, Sweden. In 2010, he wrote his master’s thesis at the University of Örebro on War and Peace Reporting Trends in Coverage of the Russian-Georgian War in August 2008. In 2008-2010, in parallel to the Master’s Program, he completed the master courses at Oslo University College, Helsinki and Tampere Universities.

Since the spring of 2013, George is a member of the National Platform for the Eastern Partnership Civil Society Forum. Since December 2012, he is a member of Public Advisory Council of State Minister on European and Euro-Atlantic Integration.

For the last three years George Jologua has worked on media monitoring projects funded by EU, UNDP, UNICEF and OSGF.