Speakers Speakers (Decidim Fest 2022)

Adriana Groh is currently leading the Sovereign Tech Fund, a new programme with the German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate to invest in open digital infrastructures. Previously, she built a project on digital sovereignty, participation and data commons at The New Institute in Hamburg and was the director of the Prototype Fund, an innovation fund of the Open Knowledge Foundation and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Her interest lies on applying democratic principles to the field of innovation and digitalization and she co-initiated several tech projects, such as a chat app for the 2017 and 2021 federal elections in Germany and the #WeVsVirus Hackathon 2020 with close to 30.000 participants.

Andrea G. Rodríguez is the principal researcher for the European digital agenda at the Belgian think tank European Policy (EPC) in Brussels. Previously she was a researcher and project manager at CIDOB and the principal investigator of the Global Observatory of Urban Artificial intelligence. Since 2020 Andrea is part of the European Cybersecurity Forum Committee and has been involved in initiatives such as the NATO 2030 process. In 2021, the Fundación Cibervoluntarios, with the support of the Ministry of Social Affairs and Agenda 2030, named her one of the 13 Spanish women to follow in technology.

Arnaud Pinxteren was born in 1977 in Laeken, in the North of Brussels, where he still lives with his family today. Trained economist, he entered politics in 2003 with Ecolo, the French-speaking environmental party.

In 2009, he was elected as a member of the Brussels Parliament, before becoming, at the end of 2018, alderman of the City of Brussels, in charge of Early Childhood, Citizen Participation, and Urban Renovation.

He pays particular attention to making Brussels a green and pioneering city. A city designed for and with its inhabitants. A city that boosts the projects of its citizens, allowing everyone to grow and flourish.

Arnau Monterde is the Director of Democratic Innovation at the Barcelona City Council. He is one of the cofounders of Decidim project. He has also promoted the Laboratory of Democratic Innovation in Barcelona. He was the coordinator of the tecnopolitica.net project at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3-UOC). He studies emerging forms of political participation and democracy in the network society. He holds a PhD in Information and Knowledge Society by the Open University of Catalunya.

Ben Tarnoff is a tech worker, writer, and co-founder of Logic Magazine. His most recent book is Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do—and How They Do It, co-authored with Moira Weigel. He has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, the New Republic, and Jacobin. He has recently published "Internet for the People. The Fight for Our Digital Future" Why is the internet so broken, and what could ever possibly fix it? (2022).

He is a Professor of Biology at the University of Washington.

The unifying theme running throughout his work is the concept of information. Within biology, he studies how communication evolves and how the process of evolution encodes information in genomes. In the philosophy and sociology of science, he studies how norms and institutions influence scholars’ research strategies and, in turn, our scientific understanding of the world. Within informatics, he studies how citations and other traces of scholarly activity can be used to better navigate the overwhelming volume of scholarly literature. Lately he´s become concerned with the spread of disinformation on social networks, and is trying to figure out what we can do about it.

Dr. Cintia Smith is Secretary of Innovation and Open Government of the Government of Monterrey.

She has a Ph.D. in Philosophy with a concentration in Political Science from the Autonomous University of Nuevo León, a Master of Political Science with a specialty in Communication from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Studies, Monterrey Campus and a Degree in Political Science from the Catholic University of Córdoba, Argentina.

From 2002 to 2021 she was a full-time professor at the School of Social Sciences and Government in the Department of Political Science and International Relations Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Studies, Monterrey Campus, and in 2020 he was part of the Selection Committee of the Nuevo León State Anti-Corruption System.

She is the author and co-author of more than 10 publications on political communication, the political role of television, the media and electoral processes, in specialized magazines in Mexico, Spain and Argentina.

She was awarded the 2016 UANL Research Prize (Social Sciences).

Jill Toh is co-founder and secretary of the Racism and Technology Center. She is also a PhD researcher at the Institute for Information Law of the University of Amsterdam, and her interdisciplinary research looks at the intersections of data, technology, labour and social justice. Previously, she co-managed Human Library events in Singapore, and she currently co-advises the Platform Workers Litigation Project, which aims to empower platform workers in asserting their data rights in the context of increasingly prevalent workplace surveillance technologies.

Luce Prignano is currently a researcher at the University of Barcelona. Trained as a physicist, she has been using the lens of complex systems for more than ten years to meddle in other fields of knowledge, such as archaeology, media studies, and social psychology.

She is a founding member of the cultural association Heuristica (http://heuristica.barcelona/) where she coordinates projects for participatory science education and techno-scientific empowerment of citizens and communities.

Malcolm is a Barcelona-based lawyer who has specialised for over 20 years in information technology law, with an emphasis on free software and free data. He has advised several public and private open source projects, and is a member of the Free Software Foundation Europe. He is a partner at Across Legal, co-head of the technology and intellectual property law department. He has collaborated with the Decidim project since its inception, helping the project on licensing, governance and personal data.

Marc Serra Solé, Councillor for Citizenship and Participation Rights of Barcelona City Council and Councillor for the district of Sants Montjuïc. Jurist and sociologist. He worked during the 2015-2019 mandate as advisor of the third tenure of mayor in the Area of Citizenship Rights, Participation and Transparency from where, among other things, was one of the promoters of the new Office for Non-Discrimination and one of those responsible for active registration policies and the Neighbourhood Document to prevent the expulsion and detention of immigrants in an irregular situation. In addition, he has been coordinator of the strategy of the popular accusation in the case for the police charges of 1 October in which the City Council of Barcelona is personified. Previously he was part of the platform "Tanquem els CIE" and collaborated with several entities of defense of the human rights of the city. He co-directed the documentary "Tarajal: desmuntant la impunitat a la frontera sud".

Nereida Carrillo holds a PhD in Journalism and Communication from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). She leads the Learn to Check project (www.learntocheck.org), an educational and informative initiative to combat disinformation and encourage the critical consumption of information.

In the last five years, she has given workshops for more than 1,500 young people in collaboration with the US Consulate in Barcelona and the US Embassy in Madrid, the Mobile World Capital Barcelona Foundation, the Consell Audiovisual de Catalunya and the Col-legi de Periodistes de Catalunya. She has also taught media education courses for adults: journalists, librarians, families, senior citizens and teachers. She teaches journalism at the UAB. As a journalist, she has worked for the ARA newspaper, the SER channel and the TV3 news website. She is the author of Fake Over (Flamboyant publishing house) and El periodismo volátil (UOC publishing house).

Pablo Aragón is a research scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation and an adjunct professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. His research focuses on understanding social and political phenomena through the analysis of data from the Internet. He is particularly interested in characterizing online participation in civic technologies, the online network structures of grassroots movements and political parties, and the technopolitical dimension of networked democracy. Pablo is also a board member of Decidim, and co-founder of the Democratic Innovation Lab of Barcelona and the DatAnalysis15M research network.

Dr. Sarah Sayeed, Chair and Executive Director of the Civic Engagement Commission, is a Bronx resident and has been dedicated to building an inclusive public square for almost two decades. For the past three and a half years, Sayeed has been a Senior Advisor in the Mayor’s Community Affairs Unit, where she has strengthened the civic engagement of a diverse, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual Muslim constituency. Prior to this, she worked for over seven years at the Interfaith Center of New York, bringing together New York’s diverse grassroots religious leaders with secular and city agencies, and implementing an extended collaboration between Catholic and Muslim social service providers.

Sayeed also taught Communications to graduates and undergraduates at Baruch’s School of Public Affairs for five years. Through her years of volunteer work with diverse Muslim organizations, including Women in Islam, Inc., she has been an avid promoter of interfaith relations and Muslim women’s public engagement. Sarah holds a B.A. in Sociology and Near East Studies from Princeton University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Communications from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. She also holds a certificate in Reconciliation Leadership through the Institute for Global Leadership and is an alumna of the American Muslim Civic Leadership Institute (AMCLI) Fellows program.

Simona Levi is a theatre director, playwright, activist, technopolitical strategist, cultural manager and curator, and lecturer. She is an activist in the field of freedom of expression and information, digital rights, the free flow of culture and knowledge, strategic use of digital tools for collective action, institutional accountability, protection of whistleblowers and the fight against corruption and disinformation. She has also participated in movements in defence of the right to housing and use of public space.

She is one of the founders of Xnet, the Free Culture Forum, the anticorruption movement 15MpaRato, and the Citizens Group against Corruption at both Catalan and Spanish levels

She is coauthor of #FakeYou, Fake news and disinformation (2019), Votar y Cobrar - La impunidad como forma de gobierno (2017) and Tecnopolítica, internet y r-evoluciones - Sobre la centralidad de redes digitales en el #15M (2012).

Yasuhiro Okada is the current Mayor of the city of Kakogawa, in Japan. He has held the position since 2014. He is a U.S. Certified Public Accountant (WA) and holds a Master of Science from Harvard Sch. of Public Health.

He and his team introduced ICT watching service throughout the city by installing 1,475 security cameras and location information service. (Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Award for Advanced Urban Development Competition 2018) They also announced an innovative disaster information transmission system using broadcasting signals of terrestrial digital television in 2021. They are pursuing further enhancement of life satisfaction and well-being, strengthening dialogue with citizens.