Anna Bon
(Centre for International Cooperation, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

Dr. Anna Bon is with the CIS Centre for International Cooperation, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, 1081HV Amsterdam, the Netherlands Anna Bon is a researcher, project manager and lecturer at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, in Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D). Her research focuses on collaborative and co-creative design of innovative technologies to support local value chains and improve food security, to help address challenges for smallholder farmers and communities in Africa’s drylands. This includes digital voice-service design for local cereal seeds value networks in West Africa (Mali), supporting women cooperations in e- marketing of their tree products in Burkina Faso; ICT4D Community Service Learning and the Global South (with students from Malaysia, Ghana, and the Netherlands); Sustainability and Ethics in Digital Development; and AI for Sustainable Rural Development in Africa (with UDS, Ghana). She is the project coordinator of a new 10 MEUR EU-Commission supported project setting up international innovative master-level education programs for university students, teachers and industry on Digital Society, Social Innovation, and Global Citizenship. Anna is furthermore a contributor, focusing on issues related to the Global South, to two edited Digital Humanism volumes at Springer: (i) Perspectives on Digital Humanism (2022, Springer Open Access; now close to 400k downloads) and (ii) a student textbook Introduction to Digital Humanism, due to appear end of 2023 at Springer.

Àmbar Tenorio-Fornès
(Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

Ámbar Tenorio-Fornés is a free software developer and researcher. She/he holds a 5 years CS/Eng degree and a Master in Research in Computer Science. She/he is currently developing his PhD at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, funded by an institutional scholarship, and working for the awesome P2P Models project. She/he research aims to provide decentralized governance tools for Commons-Based Peer Production communities. In the past, she/he was a core part of the technical team of the P2Pvalue European research project. She/he has been visiting researcher at the University of Surrey, the University of Westminster and Kozminski University. She/he experience developing decentralized web tools includes Teem, SwellRT and Decentralized.science, using technologies such as Blockchain and IPFS.

Cédric Lombion
(Civic Literacy Initiative)

Through his work over the past 10 years, Cedric has designed, managed and fundraised for global open data and data literacy projects, navigating both high-level strategic planning and on-the-ground work with civil society organisations, governments, journalists and citizens. In the process, his and his teams’ work have reached thousands of people and hundreds of organisations across sectors as varied as government transparency, the extractives industry, environmental justice, public health and investigative journalism. Speaking English, French and Spanish, he has managed a remote team spread over multiple continents, and delivered projects in these 3 languages. He is also a coordinator of the School of Data network since 2015.

Dan McQuillan
(Goldsmiths, University of London)

After his Ph.D in Experimental Particle Physics, Dr. McQuillan founded Multikulti, a community-led multilingual website for asylum seekers & refugees. As Amnesty’s Director of E-communications, he led their delegation to the first UN Internet Governance Forum. He co-founded Social Innovation Camp  which brought together ideas, people and digital tools to prototype solutions to social problems, and ran camps in different countries including Georgia, Armenia & Kyrgyzstan. He is active in citizen science and co-founded Science for Change Kosovo. Currently, he is a Lecturer in Creative & Social Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London. His recent book is “Resisting AI: AN Anti-fascist approach to artificial intelligence.”

Elisa Bignante
(University of Turin, Department of Culture, Politics and Society)

Elisa Bignante is associate professor of Political and economic geography at the Department of Culture, Politics and Society, University of Torino. She has 20 years’ experience in researching and teaching in the field of development geography and in the use of participatory research methods and peer research approaches with local communities in the Global South. After achieving a BSc in Economics and PhD in Local Development and Territorial Planning, she focused on Development geography working extensively in international aid projects in Africa and Latin America. Her particular interests include indigenous knowledges, social marginalities, health and wellbeing, international aid, natural resource management and the use of participatory visual methods to support local communities.

Francis Saa-Dittoh
(University for Development Studies, Ghana)

Francis Saa-Dittoh is a lecturer and researcher at the University for Development Studies (UDS) in Tamale, Ghana and guest lecturer and PhD researcher at VU Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His research in the interdisciplinary field of ICT for Development centers around the design and deployment of context-aware, community-centered information systems for people in low-resource environments. He is involved in the establishment of a new Computer Science department and in the design of a new software engineering curriculum at the University for Development Studies in Ghana. He is a member of the interdisciplinary research program W4RA – the Web alliance for Regreening in Africa https://w4ra.org . As an ICT professional he is founder and director of the Ghanaian tech firm Faith IT Consult and an ICT Associate of United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS). Francis is also contributor to two edited Digital Humanism volumes at Springer: (i) Perspectives on Digital Humanism (2022, Springer Open Access; now close to 400k downloads) and (ii) a student textbook Introduction to Digital Humanism, due to appear end of 2023 at Springer. In 2023 Francis was at the Spotlight as a Champion of Change at the 10th HLF: Heidelberg Laureate Forum. https://scilogs.spektrum.de/hlf/hlff-spotlight-10th-hlf-4/

Giulio Coppi
(Access Now)

Giulio has over 15 years of international experience across the humanitarian, human rights, and academic sectors. He has worked with NRC, ICRC, OCHA, and OHCHR, among others, and has experience responding to crisis contexts in several countries. Currently he is Senior Humanitarian Officer at Access Now, where he is responsible for monitoring and advising on digital rights in the context of conflict and disaster; advancing protection from digital harm through international humanitarian law norms, customs, and principles; and promoting ethical approaches to the design and delivery of technological systems by private companies.

Grace Mutung’u
(International consultant)

Grace Mutung’u is a researcher, lawyer, and consultant with over 15 years of diverse experience in organisation building, mobilisation and technical expertise on digital rights, technology policy, and human rights advocacy. Ms. Mutung’u is a research student at the University of Nairobi researching on digital ID and social justice. She writes on topics of development, technology policy, law and culture for academic and non-academic audiences. Grace has worked in influential organizations, including Open Society Foundations, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, the Parliamentary Service Commission, the Kenya ICT Action Network (KICTANet) and the Centre for IP and IT law (CIPIT) at Strathmore University. Her academic foundation in information systems, law, and diplomacy, coupled with her passion for just tech policy, makes her a leading voice in advancing community led transformation.

Hans Akkkermans
(University for Development Studies, Ghana)

Professor Hans Akkermans is Professor Emeritus of Business Informatics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and Adjunct Professor at the University for Development Studies (UDS), Tamale, Ghana. He is the Founding Director of the interdisciplinary Network Institute at Amsterdam (networkinstitute.org) that studies the interaction between digital technology and society, in which researchers from the faculties of social sciences, humanities, law, economics, and informatics participate. He has worked for many years in knowledge engineering & management, information systems and innovative e-business modelling, with for example applications and innovations in smart electricity distribution networks and the sustainable energy transition that have been internationally field-deployed and are now in industrial and commercial use. He is a key author of a textbook on Knowledge Engineering and Management, published in 2000 by The MIT Press. His current research interests focus on the interdisciplinary research, education and community service program W4RA (Web alliance for Regreening in Africa, w4ra.org). He is furthermore Steering Committee member of the Vienna Initiative on Digital Humanism (dighum.org), and a contributor to two edited DigHum volumes at Springer: (i) Perspectives on Digital Humanism (2022, Springer Open Access; now close to 400k downloads) and (ii) a student textbook Introduction to Digital Humanism, due to appear end of 2023 at Springer. He holds a cum laude MSc and a cum laude PhD in theoretical physics in the field of nuclear reactions from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

Howard Miller
(International Consultant)

Howard Miller is a consultant and researcher working at the intersection of inclusive finance, rural development and climate change. He has fifteen years’ experience in development consultancy, public policy and financial systems across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Howard has provided strategic advice and analysis on projects linking financial inclusion to inclusive growth and resilience for clients including IFAD, FCDO, FSD Africa, CGAP, MasterCard Foundation, GIZ, IFC, USAID, UNCDF, Gates Foundation and AGRA. Most recently he led research on climate for the Center for Financial Inclusion. He works across the project cycle, from research and strategic design through implementation to project reviews and impact evaluations. He specialises in the market systems development approach. He has written extensively on topics including green inclusive finance, inclusive fintech, agricultural finance, smallholder livelihoods, and alternative data credit scoring. He previously lived and worked in Uganda and India, and is now based in Italy.

Joshua Harvey
(Catholic Relief Service)

Through his consulting practice, Josh designs strategies and systems for governments, UN, and humanitarian and development actors.  In addition to his consulting practice, he currently serves as chief advisor for the EC-funded Young Service Designers initiative and as Head Coach for IFRC Solferino Academy’s FutureFellows programme. Previously, Josh was the founding director of CARE’s Research + Design team, providing design, strategy, and futures and foresight as services across the organization’s global footprint. Prior to CARE, Josh led UNICEF’s Innovations Lab where he led design and development of products and programmes now employed in more than 40 countries around the world.  He’s a frequent featured speaker on design and social innovation, and his work and commentary has featured in academic and popular publications on social innovation and social design.

Lourdes Rodriguez
(Senior Foresight Consultant)

With a Master’s Degree in Psychology, Lourdes combines her career as a senior trend analyst and foresight practitioner with over 15 years of experience lecturing and facilitating workshops and seminars for senior executives, organizations, and public institutions worldwide. Recognized by Forbes magazine as one of the leading futurists in Spain  (2021, 2022), she currently serves as Director of Foresight at Mindset, an organization dedicated to designing transformative learning experiences. In parallel, she is Co-Executive Director at Teach the Future, advancing the integration of futures thinking into education, and collaborates as an external expert for the European Commission on foresight and emerging technologies.

Paola Fava
(JengaLab ETS)

Co-founder and project manager at Gnucoop. Since 2015, she has been managing a worldwide project for UNHCR to develop an application that gathers and manages medical records, elaborates public health statistics and indicators for UNHCR refugee camps around the globe. She has 10 years of experience as innovation officer and ICT4D project manager for NGOs working in several countries, such as Malawi, Madagascar, Comoros Islands and Guatemala.

Ruxandra Anca-Pandea
(Council of Europe)

Ruxandra Pandea has been involved with human rights and human rights education for more than 15 years as activist, trainer and professor. She has been involved with youth and professional civil society organisations, and has worked with the Council of Europe, Youth Department in the period 2011-2017 focusing on human rights education, youth participation in the governance of the internet and training of human rights online defenders among others. She holds a Ph.D. in History.

Simone Sala
(JengaLab ETS)

Consultant in the communication and development sector of the Food and Agriculture organisation (FAO). From 2004 on, he focuses on the research and practice of applying ICT to sustainable development. He worked with universities (Columbia University, MIT IDI, UniMi, USI-Lugano), NGOs, FAO and Italian Development Cooperation in Africa, Asia, Caribbeans and Middle East. Currently, his team works on techniques aimed at facilitating the collaboration between smallholders and other actors in rural areas.

Stuart Campo
(International Organisation of Migration)

Stuart Campo (@stucampo) is a Researcher with the Signal Program on Human Security and Technology at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In this capacity, he supports translational research on humanitarian technologies, standards and ethics. Prior to joining Signal, Stuart served as the Senior Innovation Deployment Specialist with UNICEF’s Global Innovation Center. During his tenure at UNICEF, Stuart held extended assignments in Kenya, Madagascar, and South Sudan, and supported the design and activation of technological and social innovation initiatives in over 35 countries. Stuart studied Politics at Princeton University, and is currently based in Rotterdam.

Elisa Criscione
(Digital Coffee Future & Expressing Origin)

Elisa is the Creator of Digital Coffee Future and the Founder and Lead Consultant of Expressing Origin, a consultancy whose mission is to support coffee stakeholders to digitalize their value chains and tech providers to improve their solutions. Before fully-dedicating to coffee, she deepened her understanding of the application of digital solutions in Ghana and worked in Colombia in the sustainable development arena where she first entered in contact with coffee. She holds an MSc in Food Policy from the City University of London and a BSc in Food & Agriculture from the University of Gastronomic Sciences. She speaks Italian, English and Spanish.

Tosan J. Mogbeyiteren
(Black Swan Tech Ltd)

Tosan is a medical doctor and public health specialist with over 13 years’ experience leading multi-disciplinary teams to solve development challenges in resource-poor settings in Nigeria. He has spent the better part of the past decade supervising the conceptualization, development and successful deployment of high-traction web applications and mobile platforms in partnership with government institutions and international partners, some of which have been used by millions. He has also done policy research work in Education and public health, including Routine Immunization and Antenatal care. He has led multiple interventions with country-level impact, new knowledge, in terms of both technologies and implementation science in low resource settings. He is the founder/CEO and currently the Global Program Director of WeMUNIZE at Black Swan Tech Ltd, a software startup that builds enterprise-level software solutions that international partners and governments deploy for positive impact, with particular focus on resource-poor settings.

Ermanno Pietrosemoli
(The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics & Fundacion Escuela Latinoamericana de Redes)

As a professor of telecommunications and head of the Telecommunications Laboratory at the Universidad de los Andes (ULA) in Venezuela for 30 years, Ermanno Pietrosemoli was instrumental in building ULA’s direct connection to the Internet backbone in Homestead, Florida. He was also one of the founders of Escuela Latinoamericana de Redes (EsLaRed), an organization that has been promoting information and communications technologies in Latin America since 1992, and currently serves as its president. Pietrosemoli has worked as a telecommunications consultant in several organizations, both public and private, and since 2010 has been a full-time member of the Telecommunications/ICT4D Laboratory at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy.
He holds the world’s record for the longest WiFi connection at 382 km and has been promoting low-cost data communications technologies for Internet access by teaching in many countries, as well as building wireless links in Argentina, Comoros, Ecuador, U.S., Spain, Italy, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mexico, Micronesia, Morocco, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Peru, Trinidad, Senegal, Seychelles, Venezuela, and Zambia.
He is one of the authors of the book Wireless Networks in the Developing World, which has been translated into Arabic, Burmese, Indonesian, French, Portuguese and Spanish.

Saira Khan
(Signal Program, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative)

Saira Khan is a researcher and geospatial analyst for two programs at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative: The Signal Program on Human Security and Technology (Signal Program) and the Humanitarian Geoanalytics Research and Education Program (HumGeo). She primarily uses GIS and satellite imagery as tools to analyze damage as a result of conflict and disaster, population displacement, and monitor environmental variability in numerous humanitarian crises across sub-Saharan Africa, Syria, and Bangladesh. She further works to develop and document methodologies that are used in trainings and workshops to advance the use of geospatial analysis by humanitarian professionals and university students. She has worked collaboratively with numerous organizations including the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the World Food Programme (WFP), the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), World Vision International (WVI) among others. She graduated with a Masters in Geographic Information Science from Clark University; she also holds a BA in Geography and International Development & Social Change from Clark University. During her studies she also worked with DisasterNet at HHI and at the National Weather Service as well as the Office for Coastal Management at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Mac Glovinsky
(The Learning Passport – UNICEF and Microsoft)

Winner of TIME 100 best inventions 2021, Fast Co 2021 world changing ideas finalist, 2020 PMI most influential project (3rd overall). Mac is technology leader and executive. Seasoned innovator and cross functional manager with a deep history delivering enterprise products to global audiences. He is currently chief of the Learning Passport, delivering digital education and skilling experiences to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Marco Zennaro
(The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics)

Marco Zennaro coordinates the Science, Technology and Innovation Unit of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Italy. He hold a PhD from KTH – the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. I am also a Visiting Professor at Kobe Institute of Computing (KIC) in Kobe, Japan. His research interests are in the area of ICT4D. More specifically, he focuses on Internet of Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks and their applications in Developing Countries.
He has organized workshops in more than 30 countries and has been Focal Point for the ITU Centre of Excellence in IoT, Big Data and Statistics. He has been a Staff Associate of the African Centre of Excellence in Internet of Things at University of Rwanda since its inception. In 2013 he has been nominated Sensemaking Senior Research Fellow of the MIT International Development Initiative and has served as a member of the UNESCO Chair in ICT4D since 2004.