Our People

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Meet our People

Team

Should display tagged user profiles like this https://summit.ngi.eu/#speakers. Tag: Landingpage-OurPeople-Team

List of current team member bios is posted in a comment below

Leadership

Should display tagged user profiles like this https://summit.ngi.eu/#speakers. Tag: Landingpage-OurPeople-Leader

List of current leader bios is posted in a comment below

Notable allies

Should display as featured posts here https://summit.ngi.eu/#Community. Tag: LandingPage-Ourpeople-Allies
List of allies is added in a comment below

A network of domain experts we can engage/hire for consultancy, fundraising and project deployment

freelancers.edgeryders.eu


Building community and collective intelligence

add just copy paste this component here https://crowdfund.edgeryders.eu/#courses. Make some slight edits to the texts in those boxes. Texts listed below



Enquiries: company@edgeryders.eu

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Team members as of 1/06/2020:

Corinna Cath-Speth, Cultural anthropologist of technology governance
Corinne Cath-Speth is a PhD student at the Oxford Internet Institute and Alan Turing Institute for AI. She is a cultural anthropologist studying Internet governance culture. Her PhD presents an ethnographic case study of human rights NGOs working in Internet governance organizations. She is interested in the Internet companies most people have never heard of but use every day and the human rights organizations targetting them to develop “human rights-respecting” computer code. Her other research interests include AI governance, digital activism and the politics of emoji design.

Prior to joining Edgeryders and the OII, she worked as a policy officer for the digital team of human rights NGO ARTICLE 19 and as a policy advisor for the US House of Representatives. She has an MSc in Social Science of the Internet from the University of Oxford and an MA in International Relations from the University of Utrecht.

Andreja Lepen
Unit coordinator, Edgeryders
Andreja is EarthOS, Edgeryders’ Climate Unit coordinator, project manager and Be.Funded owner. A political scientist by education with a Master in Public Relations and Political Communication. With more than 7 years of experience in the field of the EU policies and EU funding she has developed strong expertise in policy analysis, project management, stakeholder relations and communication. As a unit coordinator she is involved in different work from project management, communication to event management.

Marina Batinić, Research Coordinator
Research coordinator and project manager, specialized in cultural and arts management, education, and heritage with the M.A. degrees from Croatian, French and Spanish Universities. Experienced in European projects and international cooperation. Co-founder of the Culture Hub Croatia which aims to strengthen the local cultural and creative sector and foster cross-sectorial innovation through participatory projects and community building initiatives.

Giovanni Calia
Born in '82, has lived in 11 cities of 4 nations in 16 years cultivating a long experience in Marketing and Media. After a long period abroad decides to return to his own city, Matera, to be close to the his family and his beloved niece. He loves the crimping of crickets and cicadas, the infinite skies of southern Italy and the tales of the southern elders.


Leonie Schulte
Leonie Schulte is a linguistic anthropologist with a focus on language policy and migration. She is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. Leonie’s research investigates the relationship between language, integration and belonging in contemporary Germany, for which she has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin on the experiences of refugees and migrants enrolled in state-funded language integration programmes.
Leonie holds an MSc in Social Anthropology and an MPhil in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology, both from the University of Oxford. In 2019, she was a Visiting Student Research Collaborator at Princeton University’s Department of Anthropology.


Maria Euler, Community Manager
Interdisciplinary artist and design researcher as well as a community manager for edgeryders with a background in physics, fine art and a Master in Information Experience Design from the Royal Collge of Art. She searches for points of connection and entry, between disciplines, complex scientific concepts, discussion, emotional and tangible experiences and people. She pursues research studies and art-science collaborations as for example with the Bristol Laboratory for Quantum Computing and exhibited interactive installations at venues and festivals across Europe such as Sonar+D, I-Gem and VrSci. Currently, she is also involved in the PLATO project. Her goal is to enable different approaches and connections to increase the diversity and creativity of the discourse on art, science and technology. You can see some of her works here: http://mariaeuler.com/

Owen Gothill
Developer for front end applications based in Brussels, working on functionality and user interfaces that extend our connection with members and collaborators on the platform, as well as new opportunities to bind our community and strengthen our common goals.

Zmorda Jedidi
Data scientist, with previous experiences in the supply chain management field, during the past ten years, Zmorda developed a real interest in social entrepreneurship. She started contributing as a marketing manager with the Enactus team at her engineering school.
As a participant of the Mobnet exchange program, she conducted a study to evaluate the profitability of the social innovation hubs and co-working spaces based in Europe and North Africa by exploring their income-generating activities. Moreover, she contributed to designing ideation, incubation programs, and events with local NGOs in Tunisia and within the Edgeryders community. Furthermore, she held the position of social innovation advisor of the social incubator program for Women Charek’ in Tunis.
She is also the co-founder and operations manager of OCI Lab, the first online peer to peer incubator in MENA.

Daniel Hires, Community Manager
Daniel is a TCK born in Korea and raised between Germany and the US. He spent 8 years building and growing the social innovation ecosystem in Berlin and Germany. He co-founded MakeSense in Berlin, a global community that engages citizens in social innovation, facilitated and trained facilitators of design thinking workshops, and works with impact startups as coach, trainer, and mentor. He also founded the Silent Climate Parade Berlin, a silent disco parade as an artivist demonstration for a sustainable future and has spoken about community activism at TEDx. More recently, he helped UN Environment on building community and rethinking their green startup incubation program across 8 MENA countries from Lebanon to Morocco. Read more on his website.

Kaja Farszky
Professional musician working in the international field of contemporary music. Born in Croatia, has been educated in Zagreb, Barcelona and Ghent, and based in Brussels since 2016. Funding member and co-artistic director of the collective Down the Rabbit Hole in Belgium since 2017. Among being a professional musician, she is interested in production work and keeps expanding her skills along side of playing music. She joined Edgeryders in winter 2019 as administrative assistant. For more info of her work visit www.kajafarszky.com


Volha Martynenka
MFA, born in Minsk, Belarus. Connection to local communities and social activism have always been important to me while growing up in the post-Soviet country. People there are used to mistrust the authorities and to rely on mutual support. I have a background in journalism, social activism, and art. I was studying media art at the Bauhaus University in Weimar and participated in numerous multidisciplinary exhibitions and festivals, used to teach video art in Minsk.
I am good at learning languages and able to speak Polish, Russian, Belarusian, German, and English fluently. In 2018-2019 I took part in the Lane Kirkland Scholarship program at the University of Wroclaw. Currently, I work in tech as a project manager.

Matteo Uguzzoni
An architect and a game designer. His practice focus on creating transformative experience blending real life game and theater based in Baltimore, US. He designed project that spans from a chase zombie night experience until the global roadshow presentation of world leading brands. Passing through pervasive games, e-learning, immersive experience, pitch workshops and products to improve our way to live and work. Co-Founder of Livello7 and Urban Games Factory. Project Manager of the Nomadic branch of Trust in Play - the European School of Urban Game Design.
Host of “the Playcast” a podcast about urban games, immersive experience and everything in between.
Urban Games Factory – esperienze immersive-interattive, http://trustinplay.eu/ , theplaycast.co

Leadership as of 1/06/2020:

Matthias Ansorg, Co-founder and CTO
Matthias is a computer scientist and technology generalist with a long experience in open source software and hardware development. A social innovator and digital entrepreneur who has studied alternative value measurement and non-monetary economic exchange mechanisms extensively for his award-winning commons funding platform PayCoupons (former Makerfox). Solid expertise in software development, integration and maintenance; has built the edgeryders.eu online platform.

Hugi Ásgeirsson, Director
Co-creator of participatory events. Coder of tools for creative communities. Art lover. Occasional nature-dweller. Data-devouring analyst. Graph-enthusiast.
And I like to make decentralised communities tick and tock. Born in Iceland, raised in Sweden, lived in China. Based in Stockholm.

John Coate, Director and Community Manager
John was employee number two at The WELL, where he was instrumental in creating the online community that Wired Magazine called the “world’s most influential”. There he was the first to work as what is now known as an “online community manager” and he wrote the first treatise on building online community. He co-founded the first major news website, sfgate.com, which today has more than thirty million monthly visitors and more than 476K Twitter followers. He was the online manager of a teen social network and game site that had thousands of members. He managed a regional media organisation that combined terrestrial radio and the internet in innovative ways. Through it all the core of his community knowledge comes from direct personal experience living and working with others who are consciously building lasting relationships as the building blocks of community.

Amelia Hassoun, Lead Ethnographer
An anthropologist with a research focus on the social impacts of digital technologies. Has extensive ethnographic research experience both online and offline, in both public and private sector, focusing on the power of participatory communities to facilitate transparent, efficient solutions to public problems. Has technical experience designing and developing a bespoke patient information website, as well as interviewing community members, gathering and analysing qualitative and quantitative data, and generating ethnographic reports. Currently a doctoral researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute analysing community-based civic technology initiatives, ethnographically examining how community members creatively interact with and rework “smart” urban technologies.

Alberto Cottica, Co-Founder and Research Director
I am an expert on collaborative governance and participation, with proven track record of managing processes of ICT-enabled design and delivery of public policy – and even public services – in collaboration with citizens.

I have firsthand experience in establishing, nurturing and running communities of citizens that work towards common goals, sometimes in alliance with government). I also have a proven track record of driving adoption of innovative practices – and, more importantly, of a practice of openness and transparency in policy delivery – in fairly conservative large organisations, including government agencies. To achieve this, I had to hone my advocacy skills, and use them successfully to build positive narratives that change is possible, and we need not be scared of it.

I study participation through data analysis. That led me to build up substantial skills as a data scientist, and in particular a network scientist, both in business and in academia.

Nadia Alter, Co-Founder
Engineer and designer by training. Born in Sweden to African parents, raised in Europe and Asia. Nadia’s role in Edgeryders to serve our global community via the not-for-profit company that builds and manages the infrastructure sustaining it. In practice this translates into laying out the vision, business development and building strategic partnerships.

Noemi Salantiu, Co-Founder and Community Manager
Digital storyteller, expert online collaborator and a co-founder of Edgeryders. In the past eight years she has shaped Edgeryders into a sustainable community organisation where all projects actively involve members and focus on fulfilling their aspirations for personal and professional development. Most edgeryders community events have her print as a soft people organiser aka cat herding. She has worked for innovation in Culture, Development, Social & Civic activism, trying to infuse community and participation in the cities agendas, and building bridges. The Culture Squad is where she wants to do more production work and less consultancy.

Notable allies as of 1/06/2020:

Robin Chase: Robin Chase is an American transportation entrepreneur. She is co-founder and former CEO of Zipcar[1]. She is also the founder and former CEO of Buzzcar, a peer-to-peer car-sharing service, acquired by Drivy.[2] She also started the defunct GoLoco.org,[3] a transportation network company. She is co-founder and executive chairman of Veniam, a vehicle network communications company. She authored the book, Peers Inc: How People and Platforms are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism.

Cory Doctorow: Award-winning Science Fiction Author and Journalist
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger — the author of novels such as Walkaway, Pirate Cinema, Little Brother, Rapture of the Nerds and Makers. He is an MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University, a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of South Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. He is a digital rights advocate and fights for a fair copyright.

Vinay Gupta, Founder Hexayurt & Mattereum
Visionary serial-entrepreneur and coder and well known in the Blockchain community. Gupta helped coordinate Ethereum’s 2015 release, working as a project manager on strategy and communications. He worked as the strategic architect of Consensys, the leading crypto venture studio, and as the designer of Dubai’s National Blockchain strategy. In addition to being the Blockchain Fellow for Digital Catapult, a UK government-funded initiative to increase the amount of innovation in the country, he has two current projects. The first is Hexayurt Capital, a fund designed to invest in the Internet of Agreements, which is defined as the world enabled by smart contracts. It hopes to invest in companies that tackle real world problems like logistics and global trade. His second project is called Mattereum, billed as a court that understands the nature of cryptocurrencies, making physical property and intellectual property transactable on a blockchain.

Fabrizio Barca: Founder , Forum on Inequalities and diversity I Ex General Director , Italian Ministry of Economy & Finance . Fabrizio Barca is an economist and politician. He has held the positions of head of the Research Division of the Bank of Italy, head of the Department for Development and Cohesion Policies at the Italian Treasury, and General Director of the Ministry of Economy and Finance. He was president of the Committee for territorial policies of the OECD from 1999 to 2006 , and in 2009 he created the independent report on cohesion policies for the European Commission: An Agenda for a reformed cohesion policy. From November 2011 to April 2013 he was a minister without portfolio with responsibility for territorial cohesion in the Monti government.

The art and science of building community and collective intelligence

add just copy paste this component here https://crowdfund.edgeryders.eu/#courses. Make some slight edits to the texts in those boxes. Texts listed below

Experienced community management

@johncoate @noemi and @MariaEuler help ensure the space is welcoming and inclusive, connect people across shared interests and help move the conversations forward towards action. But what do we mean when we say “community” and “community management”? Materials from a course we developed to teach others how to do this:

A team of researchers to help us turn our conversations into collective intelligence

@amelia @Leonie @CCS read all posts and conversation threads, then tag them. @Alberto then turns them into visualisations which allow us to get a bigger picture of what the conversation looks like. Together their work results in an easy to understand, visual overview of what connections people in the different discussions are making between experiences, topics, concepts and initiatives. These videos we made for a course give a good idea of what this involves:

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Fellowship Alumni as of 1/06/2020:

Peter Bihr

Peter Bihr explores how emerging technologies can have a positive social impact. At the core of his work is the mission to align emerging technologies and citizen empowerment. To do this, he works at the intersection of technology, governance, policy and social impact — with foundations, public and private sector. He is the founder of The Waving Cat, a boutique research and strategic advisory firm. He co-founded ThingsCon, a non-profit that explores fair, responsible, and human-centric technologies for IoT and beyond. Peter was a Mozilla Fellow (2018-19) and an Edgeryders Fellow (2019). He tweets at @peterbihr and blogs at thewavingcat.com. Interested in working together?

Zenna

Yosser Belguith

Gehan Macleod

A hoarder of bits of thinking and half formed disruptive thoughts with occasional bouts of fundamentalism about things that should be simple. Lives in Glasgow, Scotland, and is a co-founder of the GalGael Trust , an organisation which provides learning experiences anchored in practical activities that offer purpose and meaning. Gehan has been speaking publicly about deep solidarity in the face of collapse (learn more).

Francis Coughlin

A revolutionary doctor, member in the Woodbine Center in Ridgewood, Queens (Woodbine.nyc ), a volunteer-run experimental hub for developing the practices, skills, and tools needed to build autonomy. Frank works in a group of circa twenty health professionals and informally trained practitioners running workshops and skill sharing community activities: from learning basic first aid and wound care, to alternative medicine and fitness techniques. In 2020, they have been actively supporting the local community during covid19, through activism and mutual aid food rescue and delivery.

Winnie Poncelet

Winnie Poncelet has a bioengineer and a circular economy practitioner and expert in Belgium. He has a track record as a social entrepreneur, focusing on strategy and business development. He co-founded innovative initiatives such as ReaGent and Ekoli and has facilitated citizen science projects internationally. He co-founded Glimps, a bio design agency where he pioneered a biomaterial based on solid state fermentation with fungi, similar to tempeh. He has consulted for the Flemish Government and industry parties in all things circular economy and he has been a keynote speaker at various circular innovation events as well as a Tedx speaker.

@noemi perhaps you have bios of some of these people from the OpenCare fellowship Period?

Updated with the latest info I have found lying around on the Internet. We’ll give them a heads up because there might be important things they want to change.

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we also need a section on community heros.