Speakers

Jamie Bartlett is the Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think-tank Demos, where he specialises in online social movements and the impact of technology on society. He is also author of Radicals (2017) about political outsiders and The Dark Net (2014). He is a regular commentator on national and international media outlets and recently presented the two-part BBC documentary series 'The Secrets of Silicon Valley'.

Paul Bernal is a lecturer in Information Technology, Intellectual Property and Media Law at the University of East Anglia Law School. He tweets and blogs about issues connected with privacy, human rights and the Internet. He is also a Wolves fan and occasional poet.

Pandora/Blake is a queer pornographer, performer and activist. Their films have won multiple international awards and their website Dreams of Spanking has won legal battles against UK internet censorship. They are an active campaigner for sex work decriminalisation and labour rights, obscenity law reform, civil liberties and human rights, with a focus on freedom of expression, gender, sexuality and privacy. They are the recipient of a Sexual Freedom Award and are the official spokesperson for Backlash, defending freedom of sexual expression among consenting adults in the UK. They crowdfund their work via Patreon.

Matt Burgess is a journalist and author working for WIRED magazine in the UK – based in central London. He writes for the WIRED website, contributes monthly to the magazine, appear on (and occasionally edit and host) the weekly podcast. Personal interests include: cybersecurity; artificial intelligence; robots; internet rights; privacy; and data – although, I cover all stories across science, technology, business and culture.

Outside of WIRED, he writes, talks, and trains on Freedom of Information laws, openness and transparency. He created and runs the FOI Directory – which contains lists and contact details of more than 10,000 public authorities.

Matt will be running a workshop on Day 2 about how to use FOI requests to defend digital rights in your area.

Mike Butcher MBE is Editor-at-large of TechCrunch. Mike has been named one of the most influential people in European technology by Wired UK (for 5 years running) and is a regular broadcaster. He founded the The Europas Conference & Awards, the charity Techfugees and has been an advisor on startups to the British Prime Minister and the Mayor of London.

Ailidh Callander is a Legal Officer at Privacy International. Privacy International is a privacy-rights organisation fighting for the right to privacy globally. Ailidh is a Scots Law qualified solicitor. She previously worked in private practice advising a range of clients on parliamentary and public law with a focus on data protection, including a secondment to the Scottish Parliament. Ailidh also has a background in human rights law having spent time at the Scottish Human Rights Commission and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica. Ailidh received her LLB in Law and Spanish and Diploma in Professional Legal Practice from the University of Edinburgh.

Caroline Criado-Perez is a writer, broadcaster and award-winning feminist campaigner. She is published across the major national media and regularly appears in both print and broadcast as a commentator. Her first book, Do it Like a Woman, was published by Portobello in 2015 and was chosen by Bridget Christie as one of her books of the year in the Guardian. She is currently working on her second book, which will be about the gender data gap. Caroline has a degree in English language and literature from the University of Oxford, and studied behavioural and feminist economics at the LSE. She was the 2013 recipient of the Liberty Human Rights Campaigner of the Year award, and was named OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2015. She is currently campaigns director at 89up. Image credit: Tracy King

Nighat Dad is the Executive Director of Digital Rights Foundation. She is an accomplished lawyer and a human rights activist. Nighat is one of the pioneers who have been campaigning around access to open internet in Pakistan and globally. She is a TED Global Fellow for 2017, has been listed as TIME's Next Generation Leader, and is the recipient of Atlantic Council Freedom Award, and Human Rights Tulip Award.

Azmina Dhrodia is a Researcher in the Technology and Human Rights Team at the Amnesty International Secretariat. She is currently investigating the human rights implications of online violence and abuse against women on social media platforms through research and policy analysis of existing international human rights standards, national legislation, company community standards and reporting mechanisms.

Rick Falkvinge is Head of Privacy at Private Internet Access. A Swedish information technology entrepreneur and founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, he is also a political evangelist for the Pirates, spreading their ideas across the world. He has a website and tweets @Falkvinge

89up staff member Yara Rodrigues Fowler is fiction writer and campaigner. She created the GE2017 Tinder Bot and is a trustee of Latin American Women's Aid. On Day 2 she will discuss the basics of online campaigning and share her experience with outside-the-box campaign strategies.

Maria Farrell is an Internet policy development specialist and an ORG Board member. She worked for many years in policy development and corporate affairs at ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. http://mariafarrell.com

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her website pelicancrossing.net has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted at the net.wars Pinboard pinboard.in/u:net.wars. Follow her on Twitter at @wendyg

89up CEO Mike Harris has nearly a decade's experience of government relations and strategic communications for business and charitable clients. His workshop on Day 2 will explore how to connect and influence MPs.

Myles Jackman is ORG’s Legal Director. He was the defence solicitor in the landmark R v Peacock case, in 2012, which was seen as a test of the Obscene Publications Act 1959. He also successfully defended Simon Walsh, in another 2012 case, seen as a test of Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008. During the latter trial he was the first acting solicitor allowed to live tweet from a British trial. The same year, he was awarded the Junior Lawyer of the Year Excellence Award by the Law Society of England and Wales. He has a website.

Tracy King is a writer and producer. She is best known for her science outreach projects including the viral animation and bestselling graphic novel 'Tim Minchin's Storm' and astronaut Chris Hadfield's 'It's Not Rocket Science'. She writes a monthly print column on digital and technology culture in Custom PC magazine, and her work has appeared in the Guardian, Stylist and New Statesmen among others.

Graham Linehan is a television writer, actor and director who, often in partnership with Arthur Mathews, has written or co-written a number of popular television comedies. He is most noted for his involvement in Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd (in which the ORG logo has featured on set). He also co-wrote the first series of Big Train and created the 2009 #welovetheNHS Twitter hashtag campaign in response to US Republican attacks on the NHS.

Helen Lewis is deputy editor of the New Statesman, and has written for the New York Times, Sunday Times and the Guardian, among others. She is a regular host of the BBC’s Week in Westminster, and a regular panellist on the Sunday Politics. She tweets: @helenlewis

Rachel Logan is the Law & Human Rights Programme Director at Amnesty International UK, where she leads the organisation’s work on domestic human rights concerns and advises on international human rights and humanitarian law. She is also a Barrister and Associate Member of Matrix Chambers, where she was previously in private practice. Rachel’s specialisms include issues around counter-terrorism, protection from harm and LGBTI rights. She has worked on some of the landmark cases in the UK around privacy and mass surveillance.

Nanjira Sambuli leads the Web Foundation’s advocacy efforts to promote digital equality in access to and use of the Web. A Nairobi-based researcher and analyst, Nanjira brings broad expertise as an advocate and consultant working at the intersection of governance, media, culture and society. Nanjira is also a columnist for the Daily Nation newspaper in Kenya, a member of DFID’s Digital Advisory Panel and served as a deputy on the United Nations High Level Panel for Women’s Economic Empowerment (2016-17).

Noel Sharkey PhD, DSc FIET, FBCS CITP FRIN FRSA is Professor of AI and Robotics and Co-director of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics and Chair of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. He has moved freely across academic disciplines, lecturing in departments of engineering, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, artificial intelligence and computer science, in both the UK (Essex, Exeter and Sheffield) and US (Yale and Stanford). His current research passion is on the ethics of robot applications.

Audrey Tang, a civic hacker and Taiwan’s Digital Minister in charge of Social Enterprise, is known for revitalizing global open source communities such as Perl and Haskell. Audrey served on Taiwan national development council’s open data committee and K-12 curriculum committee; and led the country’s first e-Rulemaking project. She was a consultant with Apple on computational linguistics, with Oxford University Press on crowd lexicography, and with Socialtext on social interaction design. She actively contributes to Taiwan’s g0v (“gov-zero”), a vibrant community focusing on creating tools for civil society, with the call to “fork the government”. Credit: Medialab Prado (CC BY-SA 2.0)