Bios

Baller, Jim

Jim Baller is the president of the Baller, Stokes & Lide, PC, a national law firm based in Washington, DC.  The firm represents the American Public Power Association, regional and state utility and municipal associations, and numerous other public and private entities in communications matters at the national policy level and in site-specific matters in more than 40 states.  It is the only law firm in America to be included in Broadband Communities Magazine's "Fiber Top 100" list in each of the last seven years.  Jim was a founder and president of the US Broadband Coalition, a broad consortium of more than 160 entities of all kinds that advocated for the development of a national broadband strategy for the United States and proposed the framework that was later reflected in the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan.  He is also the co-founder and president of the 550+ member Coalition for Local Internet Choice, which works to preserve, protect, and, where necessary, restore local decision-making authority in advanced communications infrastructure matters.  

The Fiber to the Home Council (now the Fiber Broadband Association) has called Jim "the nation's most experienced and knowledgeable attorney on public broadband matters." In 2001, the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors named him its Member of the Year.  In 2006, MuniWireless awarded Jim its first “Esme Award,” for “working tirelessly to protect the interests of municipalities, many times in the face of huge opposition.”  In 2007, NATOA honored Jim as its first "Community Broadband Visionary of the Year," for "almost single-handedly putting the need for a national broadband strategy to the forefront of public consciousness." Also in 2007, Washingtonian Magazine listed Jim as one of Washington's "Best Lawyers" (defined as the top one percent). In 2009, Ars Technica included Jim on its list of 25 Top Names in Tech Policy and FiberToday named him its “Person of the Year.”  In 2012, Jim received the FTTH Council Chairman’s Award “for his relentless promotion and pursuit of community broadband and of faster networks for everyone. His efforts have paved the way for the deployment of all-fiber networks across the country.”  Each year since 2016, Thompson Reuters has included Jim in its “Washington DC Super Lawyers List” and American Registry has recognized him as one of “America’s Most Honored Professionals.” In 2018, Marquis Who’s Who presented him its Lifetime Achievement Award.

Jim is a frequent speaker and author on communications matters. He is also the chairman of the Broadband, Economic Development, and the Future of Work programs at Broadband Communities’ national and regional conferences. Jim is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Cornell Law School. He is a member of the Bars of the Supreme Court of the United States; the United States Courts of Appeal for the Federal, District of Columbia, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Ninth Circuits; and the courts of the District of Columbia.  He holds Martindale-Hubbell's highest "Preeminent AV" rating.

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Cagle, Susie

Susie Cagle is a Columbia-trained investigative reporter and self-taught cartoonist. She currently covers climate crisis and the West for the Guardian. She was previously a staff reporter at ProPublica, and a John S. Knight Journalism fellow at Stanford. She's reported on technology, labor, economics, politics and policy for the New York Times, the Nation, Vox and others. She's cartooned the Silk Road trial, federal narco-terror stings, the California housing crisis, and numerous problems with "the sharing economy." Her reporting on unregulated shopping loans was nominated for a 2018 Loeb award, and her recent story on the nightlife ID-scanning dragnet service PatronScan resulted in a California legislative investigation.

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Cerf, Vint

Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. He is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies and applications on the Internet and other platforms for the company.

Widely known as a "Father of the Internet," Vint is the co-designer with Robert Kahn of TCP/IP protocols and basic architecture of the Internet. In 1997, President Clinton recognized their work with the U.S. National Medal of Technology. In 2005, Vint and Bob received the highest civilian honor bestowed in the U.S., the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It recognizes the fact that their work on the software code used to transmit data across the Internet has put them "at the forefront of a digital revolution that has transformed global commerce, communication, and entertainment."

From 1994-2005, Vint served as Senior Vice President at MCI. Prior to that, he was Vice President of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), and from 1982-86 he served as Vice President of MCI. During his tenure with the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) from 1976-1982, Vint played a key role leading the development of Internet and Internet-related data packet and security technologies. 

More here.

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Cherry, Barbara

Barbara A. Cherry is Professor, formerly in the Department of Telecommunications, and now in the Media School at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Her research is primarily focused on evaluation of deregulatory policies, governance structures, international comparative analysis of infrastructure industries, and framing of analyses from a complexity theory perspective.  Dr. Cherry’s research reflects an interdisciplinary academic background integrated with policymaking experience in the telecommunications industry and government, having held positions at the FCC, the Quello Center for Telecommunication Management and Law at Michigan State University, Ameritech and AT&T.  Since 2008, Dr. Cherry has been a member of the Board of Directors of the International Telecommunications Society.  In 2017, she became a member of the Internal Board for the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, which focuses on the study of governance as it relates to a variety of research areas.  Dr. Cherry holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from Northwestern University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an M.A. in Economics and Law from Harvard University while recipient of a National Science Foundation Fellowship in Economics, and a B.S. with Highest Honors in Economics from the University of Michigan. Her Indiana University home page is http://mediaschool.indiana.edu/profile/?p=cherryb.

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Comstedt, Anders

Anders Comstedt is a consultant in telecom issues, in particular related to deregulation, alternative shared infrastructure and business development with interests in east Africa and the middle east. The Nordic summers he try to spend on his yacht among the Stockholm islands, checking rural wireless.

He has guided a few smaller ventures, including both VoIP and Cabling companies. He has managed a cross border submarine cable roll-out in Europe, and done policy change projects in developing countries. But he is more known for his early engagement as advisor to new fibre infrastructure initiatives out of being the first CEO of AB Stokab 1994 - 2002, a telecom network infrastructure provider in Stockholm, Sweden, pioneering leasing dark fibres in a large scale to all operators and end users in an area.

Affiliated to TS-Lab at KTH, The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, he talks on telecom policy issues and engages in some of the lab's capacity building projects in developing countries, including the creation of IX:es and lately the regional research and education network, Ubuntunet Alliance, in Southern and Eastern Africa, that will grow to connect African universities in a similar way to Geant in EU and Internet 2 in the US. He is co-author on some reports on transforming laggard markets to Open Access, including one on Sub Saharan Africa, but is more interested in changing processes on the ground than writing reports.

As a former chairman of the company handling domain names in the .se domain, he has been involved in the Swedish Internet development. Prior to that he has had several executive positions in the telecoms industry. This includes subsidiaries of both Telia, and the Ericsson group. He has also been an advisor in business development and developer of industrial controls. Born 1950, he has an MSEE from Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden.

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Crandall, Steve

Steve Crandall grew up in North Central Montana and did a Ph.D. in particle physics at Stony Brook and post doced at BNL.  Bell Labs during the twilight of its greatness and then into the dark ages.  A wide range of work - lithography to music to running an HCI department and learning a bit of sociology and anthropology.  Co-founded Omenti consulting on energy mostly but touching other areas: fashion industry, sports science (volleyball), STEAM, and machine learning applied to diabetes.   Also on Pixar’s Creative Advisory board.  I worry a lot about global warming. Astrophysics on the side: brown dwarfs and early solar system formation.

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Crocker, Steve

Steve Crocker is CEO and co-founder of Shinkuro, Inc.  In November 2017 he completed service as chair of the ICANN board of directors and has been doing independent writing and research since then.

Dr. Crocker has been involved in the Internet since its inception. In the late 1960's and early 1970's, while he was a graduate student at UCLA, he was part of the team that developed the protocols for the Arpanet and laid the foundation for today's Internet. He organized the Network Working Group, which was the forerunner of the modern Internet Engineering Task Force and initiated the Request for Comment (RFC) series of notes through which protocol designs are documented and shared. He remained active in the Internet standards work through the IETF and IAB. For this work, Dr. Crocker was awarded the 2002 IEEE Internet Award. Dr. Crocker experience includes research management at DARPA, USC/ISI and The Aerospace Corporation, vice president of Trusted Information Systems, and co-founder of CyberCash, Inc. and Longitude Systems, Inc. Dr. Crocker earned his BA in math and PhD in computer science at UCLA, and he studied artificial intelligence at MIT.

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Frischmann, Brett

Brett Frischmann is the Charles Widger Endowed University Professor in Law, Business and Economics at Villanova University. In this new role, Brett will promote cross-campus research, programming and collaboration; foster high-visibility academic pursuits at the national and international levels; have the ability to teach across the University; and position Villanova as a thought leader and innovator at the intersection of law, business and economics.

Brett is an affiliated scholar of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, and a trustee for the Nexa Center for Internet & Society, Politecnico di Torino. Previously, he was the 2016-2017 Microsoft Visiting Professor of Information and Technology Policy, Princeton University, and a Professor at Cardozo Law School in New York City where he taught courses in intellectual property, Internet law, and technology policy. 

Brett has published books on the relationships between infrastructural resources, governance, commons, and spillovers, including Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources (Oxford University Press, 2012), Governing Knowledge Commons (Oxford University Press, 2014, with Michael Madison and Katherine Strandburg), and Governing Medical Research Commons (Cambridge University Press, August 2017, with Michael Madison and Katherine Strandburg). Frischmann received his BA in Astrophysics from Columbia University, an MS in Earth Resources Engineering from Columbia University, and a JD from the Georgetown University Law Center. After clerking for the Honorable Fred I. Parker of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and practicing at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in Washington, DC, he joined the Loyola University, Chicago law faculty in 2002.  

His latest book is Re-engineering Humanity (Cambridge Feb/Mar 2018), which he is co-authoring with RIT philosopher Evan Selinger. The book examines techno-social engineering of humans, various ‘creep’ phenomena (e.g., boilerplate, nudge, and surveillance creep), and modern techno-driven Taylorism.

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Gillmor, Dan

Dan Gillmor is co-founder the News Co/Lab (http://newscollab.org) at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where he is a professor of practice. The News Co/Lab works with partners on experiments designed to improve the information ecosystem -- and counteract misinformation -- by focusing on the demand side of media. A former technology columnist, Dan also teaches digital media literacy for ASU Online, and is author of several books including "We the Media" and "Mediactive." More about Dan at http://dangillmor.com/about .

More about Dan here: http://dangillmor.com/about

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Goldstone, Heather

Heather Goldstone is science correspondent for WCAI and WGBH Radio, and host of Living Lab, a weekly radio interview show about science and culture. She holds a Ph.D. in ocean science from M.I.T. and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Her reporting about scientific and environmental issues on Cape Cod has appeared on NPR, PBS News Hour, The Takeaway, and PRI’s The World. She also hosted an NPR-sponsored blog, Climatide, exploring the impacts of climate change on coastal communities. She has twice been part of reporting teams that have won regional Edward R. Murrow awards. In 2014, she was recognized for the breadth of her reporting with WGBH’s Margret and Hans Rey/Curious George Producer award.

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Gonick, Lev

Lev Gonick has been teaching, working, and living on the Net since 1987.

Lev Gonick is Arizona State University's new Chief Information Officer. He will lead ASU's University Technology Office (UTO), which is responsible for providing technology services and support to ASU’s more than 72,000 on-campus students, 28,000 online students and 15,000 faculty and staff. 

Previously, Lev was CEO at DigitalC, charting the course to civic tech collaboration through technology leadership, data-driven solutions, and place-based activation. Digital C is a civic tech collaboration that partners with communities (mostly in Ohio) to design technology-driven programs and services to create smarter, more connected and more inclusive communities. 

Lev was a co-founder (in 2003) and CEO (2013-2015) of OneCommunity, the award-winning organization enabling innovation, collaboration and productivity through next generation broadband networks.

From 2001 to 2013, Lev was Chief Information Officer at Case Western Reserve University, where he and his colleagues were internationally recognized for technology innovations in community engagement, learning spaces, next generation network projects, and organizational development. Lev's innovations, including the Case Connection Zone, catalyzed national initiatives such as US Ignite, launched by the White House Office of Science and Technology Planning, and Gig.U, an effort of more than two dozen research universities to drive a broadband upgrade for America.

Inside Business magazine named Lev to its Power 100 list in 2015, and Government Technology recognized Lev as one of the "Top 25 Doers, Dreamers & Drivers in Public-Sector Innovation" in 2011. That same year, Crain's Cleveland Business named Gonick one of its "10 Difference Makers" in Northeast Ohio, and Broadband Properties honored him with a Cornerstone Award for "using fiber to build an inclusive society and empower individuals." In 2010, he was honored as "Visionary of the Year" by the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors. Lev has been recognized by ComputerWorld as a Premier 100 IT leader and by CIO magazine with a CIO 100 Award.

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Googin, Roxane

Roxane Googin writes the High Tech Observer, an institutional investment advisory focused on technology evolution and economic disruption.  Unlike many observers, Roxane focuses on the entire technology stack from semiconductor fabrication to the social trends resulting from hyperscale application use.  With two teens at home, the latter impact is close up and personal.  Roxane predicted the 2000 crash (at BigHook no less!) and in 2002 predicted a technical-economic resurgence based on the emergence of the cloud computing paradigm, years before it even had a name.  Since 2011 resulting from an insight at one of Jerry’s Retreats, Roxane has tracked specifically the impact of the Techonomy, the increasingly tightly coupled co-evolution of socioeconomic and technological behavior.  Listening to hundreds of vendor conference calls as well as tracking more fundamental trends, Roxane has had a front row seat to how these trends have impacted our economy.  To that end, the prospect of discussing how both technical and socioeconomic trends impact the further evolution of information systems at BigHook this year sounds exciting.

Roxane has a BS-EE from the University of Tennessee and an MBA from UVA.

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Hallak, Shuli

Shuli Hallak is an award winning NYC-based professional photographer and artist with 15 years of experience. Her work focuses on unveiling the intricate and invisible systems upon which our every day reality operates: from cargo shipping to large-scale energy systems such as oil, coal, solar, and geothermal. Her editorial work has been published in Fortune, Fast Company, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Conde Nast Portfolio, Bloomberg News, The Guardian, Slate, Orion, and others. Her fine art work has been exhibited extensively in group and solo shows throughout the U.S.

Several years ago Shuli began photographing the physical infrastructure of the Internet to help people understand how that system works (featured in Fast Company). She became involved with ISOC-NY and took on a leadership role as EVP and ED for a few years.

This year, Shuli came back to her roots as an artist and embarked on a brand new project visualizing the electromagnetic fields of our devices. These invisible networks form beautiful patterns and images. Using resin, iron filings, and ferrofluids, she has been creating small objects that encapsulate and hold these fields for us all to see.

Shuli holds a BA in Philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis, and and MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in NYC.

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Hendricks, Dewayne L.

Dewayne Hendricks is CEO, of Tetherless Access, Inc. (TAI), a Fremont, California based company which does research, product development and deployment of broadband wired and wireless data devices and services. TAI is the new incarnation of Tetherless Access Ltd. (TAL) where he was its CEO and co-founder. TAL was founded back in 1990 and was one of the first companies to develop and deploy Part 15 unlicensed wireless metropolitan area data networks which used the TCP/IP protocols. TAL eventually went public in 1996. He is also a member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Technological Advisory Council (TAC http://www.fcc.gov/oet/tac). He has participated in the installation of wireless networks in many parts of the world such as Kenya, Tonga, Mexico, Canada and Mongolia. He has been involved with radio since his teens, when he obtained his amateur radio operator's license.

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Isenberg, David S.

David S. Isenberg spent 12 years at AT&T Bell Labs until his 1997 essay, "The Rise of the Stupid Network," was received with acclaim everywhere in the global telecommunications community with one exception–at AT&T itself! So Isenberg left AT&T in 1998 to found isen.com, LLC (an independent telecom analysis firm based in Woods Hole, Massachusetts), to publish isen.blog, and to produce conferences such as F2C: Freedom To Connect. His current projects include planning for a town-wide community network in Falmouth, Massachusetts and producing acoustic and traditional music concerts in Woods Hole.

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Jones, Matthew L.

Matthew L. Jones teaches at Columbia. Right now, he’s writing about the history of the data sciences, communications surveillance agencies and the places they meet. He recently published the first account of how hacking for snooping around became legit internationally (The spy who pwned me), the centrality of database infrastructure for understanding data mining, including Google’s pagerank, and a book, Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage (Chicago)

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Jordan, Katie

Katie Jordan is the Senior Policy Advisor, North America at the Internet Society. She joined the organization in March 2018 and currently supports, develops, and advocates for the Internet Society's Internet-related public policy positions on access, security, and privacy in the United States and Canada.

Katie received her B.A. from the University of Virginia, where she majored in Foreign Affairs and Media Studies. After graduation, she worked as a Google Public Policy Fellow at New America's Open Technology Institute and as a Policy and Program Manager at Next Century Cities. Most recently, she served as the Development Manager at Public Knowledge, where she led development efforts and explored emerging technologies.

Maher, Katherine

Katherine Maher is the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia and its sister projects. She is a longtime advocate for free and open societies, and an expert in leveraging technology for social impact.

Katherine was appointed Executive Director in July 2016, after serving as the organization’s first Chief Communications Officer. She has lived and worked around the world, leading the introduction of technology and innovation in human rights, good governance, and international development. She was a founding member of the UNICEF Innovation team, where she helped introduce open source innovation for health and child welfare. She has worked with the National Democratic Institute, the World Bank, and Access Now on programs supporting innovative technologies for democratic participation, civic engagement, youth entrepreneurship, open government, and human rights.

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Mak, Cayden

Cayden Mak is Executive Director at 18MillionRising.org, an online hub for Asian American social movements. In their previous role as Chief Technology Officer, they were the driving force and product manager behind VoterVOX, a community-designed matching tool to help find personalized volunteer translation assistance for limited English proficient voters. Their writing can be found in Civicist, The Grassroots Fundraising Journal, and other publications that concern themselves with people power and the internet.

Prior to 18MR.org, they completed coursework towards a Master of Fine Arts, taught intro media studies courses, organized marginalized academic labor, and contested corporate power at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. While in graduate school, they co-founded New York Students Rising, a network of student organizers working for justice and equity in public higher education in New York State, and Youngist, a young people-powered movement media network.

In their spare time, they try to stay up on critical theory, organize locally in Oakland, California to build community-designed affordable housing, and contributing to organizing the Allied Media Conference in Detroit, MI.

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Meijer, Roelof

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Michalski, Jerry

Jerry Michalski is on a quest to deepen our understanding of trust: how society lost trust in the average human, how that’s affected our world and how we’re earning it back. He believes trust is the new differentiator, especially in today’s global trust implosion.

He’s building a platform for this quest on Patreon, which is like Kickstarter but for ongoing patronage (and yes, he’d love your support, even at $1/mo.). Several of you are already backing him, for which he thanks you profusely.

Long ago on a planet far, far away Jerry helped Esther Dyson write the newsletter Release 1.0 (now archived here) and run the conference PC Forum. In the middle of that period, two significant things happened: he realized he hated the word “consumer,” and he adopted a mind-mapping app called TheBrain, which most of you are in, at JerrysBrain.com. Now he curates the world’s largest published mind map.

In 2010 Jerry founded REX, the Relationship Economy Expedition, a cohort of corporate leaders working together to navigate the massive wave of change breaking over us now. He loves convening and facilitating and invented Jerry’s Weekend Retreat in 1996. In 1984, his inboard brain was blown by taking courses from Russ Ackoff at Penn.

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Miloshevic, Désirée

Désirée Zeljka Miloshevic is the Internet Public servant and works out of Europe for Afilias Plc, a global domain name registry.

She served as the Special Advisor to the United Nations Internet Governance Forum Multi-stakeholder Advisory Group Chair, MAG, 2006-2009, as Secretary of the Board for Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility from 2004-2007; Creative Commons UK 2004- 2006; the Irish ENUM Forum Policy Advisory Board 2005-2007 and ICANN EU Regional At-large Organisation (2006-2012).

She serves on the board of Internet Society (2004-2010); (2012-2019); Share Foundation (www.labs.rs) and Advisory Council of Open Rights Group UK. She chairs the board of Domen JV, a registry for .ME. She spent 2 years 2008 and 2012 at the Oxford Internet Institute researching Internet governance institutions processes and the topic of trust.

As of 2015 she runs descon.me – an annual multidisciplinary 48 hours hackathon unconference in Belgrade, which builds capacity and awareness of security issues around the Internet of (broken) Things, Personal data, robots and wearables.

Désirée's decade-plus of close and productive interactions with regulators, intergovernmental leaders, academics, artists, and community activists throughout the world provide her with a unique set of resources with which to engage the often complex, cross-sectoral challenges of Internet technical coordination and governance.

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Mitchell, Christopher

Christopher Mitchell is the Director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Minneapolis. He has a Master's degree in Public Policy with a focus on Science / Technology from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.

Christopher's work focuses on telecommunications--helping communities ensure the networks upon which they depend, are accountable to the community. He has published several reports, articles, and interviews while also offering technical assistance to communities around the country. He can be contacted at christopher@ilsr.org

He is also a sports photographer, running his own company that contracts regularly with the University of Minnesota as well as other clients from area colleges to youth sports organizations. See some of his photography here.

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Mohan, Ram

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Neches, Philip

Philip M. Neches is a venture partner at Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator in New York City. He is also an independent consultant working with early-stage companies in the information technology and communications service industries on their technical, market, and business strategies as an advisor, board member, and investor. A world- renowned authority on databases, he was the founder and chief scientist of Teradata Corporation. He began his career at Transaction Technology Inc., a subsidiary of Citigroup, where he led analysis of consumer banking networks, including the first large-scale deployment of automated teller machines (ATMs) in the United States. Later at Teradata, he pioneered the application of parallel processing to commercial applications. As senior vice president and chief scientist for NCR Corporation, he led both the repositioning of NCR’s computer product family and the product plan for a merger with AT&T. Dr. Neches served as vice president and chief technical officer of Multimedia Products and Services Group at AT&T Corporation. He has served on the board of directors of ExpandBeyond, Inc., and on the advisory boards of EarthLink, Tacoda Systems, Luxtera, and the Technology Group of Merrill Lynch. Other prior directorships include MCC, Semitech, Dayton Public Radio, DemoGraFx, MediaMap, PeopleLink, and VendQuest. He serves on the Caltech board of trustees and sits on its technology transfer committee and chairs the student experience committee. Dr. Neches holds B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Caltech.

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Odlyzko, Andrew

Andrew Odlyzko is a Professor in the School of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota. He is engaged in a variety of projects, from mathematics to security and Internet traffic monitoring. His main task currently is to write a book that compares the Internet bubble to the British Railway Mania of the 1840s, and explores the implications for future of technology diffusion. His home page is http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko

Between 2001 and 2008, he also was at various times the founding director of the interdisciplinary Digital Technology Center, Interim Director of the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute, Assistant Vice President for Research, and held an ADC Professorship, all at the University of Minnesota. Before moving to Minneapolis in 2001, he devoted 26 years to research and research management at Bell Telephone Laboratories, AT&T Bell Labs, and AT&T Labs, as that organization evolved and changed its name.

He has written over 150 technical papers in computational complexity, cryptography, number theory, combinatorics, coding theory, analysis, probability theory, and related fields, and has three patents. He has an honorary doctorate from Univ. Marne la Vallee and serves on editorial boards of over 20 technical journals, as well as on several advisory and supervisory bodies.

He has managed projects in diverse areas, such as security, formal verification methods, parallel and distributed computation, and auction technology. In recent years he has also been working on electronic publishing, electronic commerce, and economics of data networks, and is the author of such widely cited papers as "Tragic loss or good riddance: The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals," "The bumpy road of electronic commerce," "Paris Metro Pricing for the Internet," "Content is not king," and "The history of communications and its implications for the Internet." He may be known best for an early debunking of the myth of Internet traffic doubling every three or four months and for demonstrating that connectivity has traditionally mattered much more for society than content.

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Parsons, Rebecca

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Pepper, Robert

Robert Pepper leads Global Connectivity and Technology Policy at Facebook, joining the company in 2016. He was formerly Vice President for Global Technology Policy at Cisco. He is responsible for the international aspects of Facebook's advanced technology policy, working in areas such as broadband, IP enabled services, wireless, security and privacy and ICT development.

At Cisco, Pepper worked with governments and business leaders across the world in areas such as broadband, IP enabled services, wireless and spectrum policy, security, privacy, Internet governance and ICT development.

He joined Cisco in July 2005 from the FCC where he served as Chief of the Office of Plans and Policy and Chief of Policy Development beginning in 1989 where he led teams developing policies promoting the development of the Internet, implementing telecommunications legislation, planning for the transition to digital television, and designing and implementing the first U.S. spectrum auctions.

He serves on the board of the U.S. Telecommunications Training Institute (USTTI) and advisory boards for Columbia University and Michigan State University, and is a Communications Program Fellow at the Aspen Institute. He is a member of the U.S. Department of Commerce's Spectrum Management Advisory Committee, the UK's Ofcom Spectrum Advisory Board and the U.S. Department of State's Advisory Committee on International Communications and Information Policy.

Pepper received his B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Rantanen, Matthew

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Rinne, April

April Rinne is a global authority, advocate, ally and adventurer. She sees trends early, understands their potential, and helps others do the same. She’s a global citizen who brings insights, access and perspective to companies, governments, investors and organizations worldwide. But April is not only a thought leader; she’s also a doer. She connects people, ideas and resources, says, "Wow, that's what the world needs!" and then makes it happen.

April advises startups and established companies, local and national governments, policy makers, think tanks and investors, working across for-profit and non-profit models. Her areas of expertise include the future of work; policy reform; global expansion; sustainable development; travel and tourism; cities; and emerging markets. She is known for her skill in bridging the private, public and social sectors, seeing shifts and opportunities before they go mainstream, and having a keen eye towards responsible, inclusive business.
She's spoken at Davos, before the EU Commission, and at many industry conferences and private workshops.

April holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an M.A. in International Business and Finance from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and a B.A. summa cum laude from Emory University. She is a Fulbright Scholar and has also studied at Oxford University, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and the European University Institute.

April is a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum where she co-founded the Sharing Economy Working Group. She is a member of the Global Futures Council for the Future of Mobility and the Urbanization Advisory Group. She is a member of China’s National Sharing Economy Committee and serves on the Advisory Boards of the Sharing Cities Alliance, Seoul Sharing City (South Korea), Amsterdam Sharing City (The Netherlands), and several other organizations around the world.
           
Previously, April was Chief Strategy Officer at Collaborative Lab, a private lawyer specializing in international microfinance, impact investing and regulatory reform; global director of WaterCredit at Water.org; adjunct faculty at the International Development Law Organization; director of new venture development at Unitus Investment Group; Board director of the World Wide Web Foundation; and advisor to numerous social enterprises and financial institutions.

Her other interests include: Running (1:45 half marathon), yoga (RYT 200 certification), swimming, and hiking (from the Himalayas to Aconcagua). Extended solo travel. Maps. Photography. Architecture. Finding the world’s best cinnamon roll. And don’t compete with her on handstands – you’ll lose.

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• Cultivating Flows: How Ideas Become Thriving Organizations with Herman Wagter, which explored patterns for healthy emergence, through leading edge practitioners;
• Thrivability: Breaking Through to a World That Works;
• popular articles on organizational design strategies, and her work on innovation, thrivability, philanthropy, and cultural shifts has been highlighted in The Economist, Harvard Business Review, and Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Saitta, Eleanor

Eleanor Saitta currently lists her organizational affiliation as Systems Structure, Ltd. She is a hacker, designer, artist, writer, and barbarian. She makes a living and a vocation of understanding how complex transdiciplinary systems and stories fail and redesigning them to fail better. Saitta runs Systems Structure Ltd., a boutique security architecture and strategy consultancy that works with firms seeking to build or grow security practices or specific high-exposure products, advises news organizations and NGOs targeted by nation states, and builds immersive transmedia participation events. She is also a member of the advisory boards of the International Modern Media Institute, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Geeks Without Bounds (GWoB), the IFTF Governance Futures Lab, and the Calyx Institute, and works on the Trike security ecosystem modeling project and the Briar/Bramble distributed messaging system.

Saitta is a regular speaker at conferences, universities, and other institutions including the O'Reilly Velocity, KiwiCon, CCC Congress, Hack in The Box, Transmediale, ToorCon, Knutepunk, HOPE, Arse Electronika, Harvard, Yale, and the London ICA. She lives at the private performance venue The Attic in Helsinki, Finland, and travels regularly through Berlin, London, and NYC. She can be found at https://dymaxion.org and on Twitter as @Dymaxion.

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Searls, Doc

Doc Searls  is author of The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto (with fellow BigHooker David Weinberger, plus Chris Locke and Rick Levine). He is also a fellow of the Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an alumnus fellow of the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, where he continues to run ProjectVRM, which fosters development of tools for increasing individual human agency in the networked world.

A lifelong journalist, Doc has been an editor of Linux Journal since 1996 and of his own blog since 1998. He also has published more than 70,000 photos, most of which are permissively licensed via Creative Commons to encourage use and re-use, which is why hundreds of them accompany Wikipedia articles, via Wikimedia Commons. While at BigHook, Doc shoots a lot. All those photos go to David.

Doc's current work has two vectors. One is saving journalism from drowning in sea of "content" rewarded by tracking-based advertising. (Note: not the brand or search kind.) The other is saving the Internet from enclosure by giant companies (even ones that mean well), giant governments, and our own mental models. His thinking on the latter is far from finished, but he needs to conclude something in time for the Ostrom Memorial Lecture he'll give at the Ostrom Workshop next month on the 10th anniversary of Lin Ostrom's Nobel Prize. He looks forward to conversations with fellow BigHookers on both topics.

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Seltzer, Wendy

Wendy Seltzer is Strategy Lead at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), improving the Web's security, availability, and interoperability through standards. As a Fellow with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Wendy founded the Lumen Project (formerly Chilling Effects Clearinghouse), helping to measure the impact of legal takedown demands on the Internet. She seeks to improve technology policy in support of user-driven innovation and secure communication.

Wendy has been a Fellow with Yale Law School's Information Society Project, Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy and the University of Colorado's Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship. She has taught Intellectual Property, Internet Law, Antitrust, Copyright, and Information Privacy at American University Washington College of Law, Northeastern Law School, and Brooklyn Law School and was a Visiting Fellow with the Oxford Internet Institute, teaching a course at the Said Business School. Previously, she was a staff attorney with Electronic Frontier Foundation, specializing in intellectual property and First Amendment issues, and a litigator with Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel. She serves on the Advisory Board of Simply Secure; served on the founding boards of the Tor Project and the Open Source Hardware Association, and on the boards of ICANN and the World Wide Web Foundation.

Wendy speaks and writes on copyright, trademark, patent, open source, privacy, web security, and the public interest online. She has an A.B. from Harvard College and J.D. from Harvard Law School, and occasionally takes a break from legal code to program.

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Turner, Brough

Brough Turner [pronounced "Bruff"] is a communications industry engineer and entrepreneur. He is founder of netBlazr Inc., a startup working to change the landscape for broadband Internet access in urban areas. Previously Brough was co-founder and CTO of Natural MicroSystems and NMS Communications. While his leading interests are technology and innovation, his career has included roles in engineering, operations, finance, marketing and customer support. In the 90s and 2000s he wrote widely on telecommunications topics in trade and general business publications and was a frequent speaker at telecom industry events around the world. While currently focused on netBlazr, Brough occasionally blogs at http://blogs.broughturner.com on communications-related technology, economic and social issues.

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Vasile, James

James Vasile has fifteen years experience as a user, developer, advocate and advisor in the free and open source software world. His expertise is in software licensing and community-building, as well as non-profit and small business startup. He focuses on free software and open source production, although his work and interests often take him far beyond the world of software. Much of what James does involves teaching people how to build successful businesses around free software and ensuring licensing alignment in multisource FOSS stacks.

In addition to his work with OTS, James is the founding Director of the Open Internet Tools Project. He is also a founding member of the board of Overview Services, which makes open source software that powers Pulitzer-winning data journalism.

Previously, James was a Senior Fellow at the Software Freedom Law Center, where he advised and supported a wide range of free software efforts.

A former Director of the FreedomBox Foundation, James remains active in several technology development efforts. His FreedomBox work has been recognized by an Innovation Award at Contact Summit 2011 as well as an Ashoka ChangeMaker's award for Citizen's Media.

James frequently speaks and writes about technology trends and free software. His FreedomBox talk at Elevate Festival, for example, has been received well, and his writing on FOSS project managementand work on extension licensing and derivative workshave been widely read.

James was a founding board member of Open Source Matters, the non-profit that supports Joomla. He began his career at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. You can learn more about him from his LinkedIn profile.

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Whitt, Richard S.

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Wizner, Ben

Ben Wizner is the director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. For nearly 15 years, he has worked at the intersection of civil liberties and national security, litigating numerous cases involving airport security policies, government watch lists, surveillance practices, targeted killing, and torture. He appears regularly in the global media, has testified before Congress, and is an adjunct professor at New York University School of Law. Since July of 2013, he has been the principal legal advisor to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Ben is a graduate of Harvard College and New York University School of Law and was a law clerk to the Hon. Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

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