Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, in 1989. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread.

He is the co-founder and CTO of Inrupt.com, a tech start-up that uses, promotes and helps develop the open source Solid platform. Solid aims to give people control and agency over their data, questioning many assumptions about how the web has to work. Solid technically is a new level of standard at the web layer, which adds features never put into the original spec, such as global single sign-on, universal access control, and a universal data API so that any app can store data in any storage place. Socially Solid is a movement away from much of the issues with the current WWW, and toward a world in which users are in control, and empowered by large amounts of data, private, shared, and public.

Source: W3 Consortium

Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”) is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992.

Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultural and political divisions. Haidt is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis (2006) and of the New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind (2012) and The Coddling of the American Mind (2018, with Greg Lukianoff). He has given four TED talks. In 2019 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since 2018 he has been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction. His most recent book is the New York Times #1 bestseller The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

Kevin O’Leary, known to millions as Shark Tank’s “Mr. Wonderful,” has helped shepherd countless businesses and start-ups to success, including O’Leary Funds and O’Leary Ventures.

A celebrated entrepreneur and financial expert, he has authored multiple best-selling books on business and investing, sharing his hard-earned wisdom with audiences around the world. O’Leary has over 10 million social media followers across multiple platforms including 1.4 million on TikTok, many of them entrepreneurial small business owners.

Earlier this year, O’Leary expressed interest in working with other investors to purchase TikTok, highlighting his belief in the need for change on the platform and its potential to drive meaningful social and economic impact for many Americans. O’Leary’s crowdfunding effort for individuals to register interest at WonderfulTikTok.com will now be folded into The People’s Bid, which will help ensure individuals and small businesses have a stake in the future of TikTok.

Michelle De Mooy is director of the Tech & Public Policy program in Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. She is a leader in technology policy, focused on ensuring that emerging technologies advance human rights and democratic values.

For the Tech & Public Policy program, De Mooy is building initiatives that translate academic insights into actionable policy that drives impact. Current projects include innovative programming to reimagine policymaking, a partnership with a social media platform to provide access to data for Georgetown researchers and an AI Policy Lab.

Source: Tech & Public Policy website

Zoe Kalar (formerly known as Sue Fennessy) is a serial tech entrepreneur who has spent 35 years building four transformational companies.
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At WeAre8, she is transforming social media by eliminating anonymity and hate, transforming social media in a way that inspires and mobilizes hundreds of millions of people to make positive change in the world. WeAre8’s social technology and centralized wallet has restructured the capital flows, so that the money from advertisers is shared with people, publishers, non-profits and planet projects rather than into the pockets of a few social tech giants.

Source: We Are 8 website

Shoshana Zuboff (born November 18, 1951) is an American author, professor, social psychologist, philosopher, and scholar.

Zuboff is the author of the books In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power and The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism, co-authored with James Maxmin. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, integrates core themes of her research: the Digital Revolution, the evolution of capitalism, the historical emergence of psychological individuality, and the conditions for human development.

Source: Wikipedia

Overview: Daron Acemoglu is an Institute Professor at MIT, Faculty Co-Director of MIT’s Shaping the Future of Work Initiative, and a Research Affiliate at MIT’s newly established Blueprint Labs. He is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society, the British Academy of Sciences, the Turkish Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association, and the Society of Labor Economists. He is also a member of the Group of Thirty. He is the author of six books, including New York Times bestseller Why Nations Fail: Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (joint with James A. Robinson), Introduction to Modern Economic Growth, The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty (with James A. Robinson), and Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (with Simon Johnson). His academic work covers a wide range of areas, including political economy, economic development, economic growth, technological change, inequality, labor economics and economics of networks. Daron Acemoglu has received the inaugural T. W. Shultz Prize from the University of Chicago in 2004, and the inaugural Sherwin Rosen Award for outstanding contribution to labor economics in 2004, Distinguished Science Award from the Turkish Sciences Association in 2006, the John von Neumann Award, Rajk College, Budapest in 2007, the Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize in 2018, the Global Economy Prize in 2019, and the CME Mathematical and Statistical Research Institute prize in 2021. He was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2024 (with Co-Laureates Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson), the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in 2012, and the 2016 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award. He holds Honorary Doctorates from the University of Utrecht, the Bosporus University, University of Athens, Bilkent University, the University of Bath, Ecole Normale Superieure, Saclay Paris, and the London Business School.

Source: MIT Economics

Overview: Matthew Prewitt is RadicalxChange Foundation’s president, a writer and blockchain industry advisor, and a former plaintiff’s side antitrust and consumer class action litigator and federal law clerk.

Source: RadicalXChange Website

Overview: Sylvie Delacroix is the Inaugural Jeff Price Chair in Digital Law and the director of the Centre for data Futures (King’s College London). She is also a visiting professor at the University of Tohoku (Japan). Her research focuses on the role played by habit within ethical agency, the role of humility markers as conversation enablers and the potential inherent in LLMs’ participatory interfaces. She also considers bottom-up data empowerment structures and the social sustainability of the data ecosystem that makes generative AI possible. The latter work led to the first data trusts pilots worldwide being launched in 2022 in the context of the Data Trusts initiative www.datatrusts.uk. Her latest book Habitual Ethics?  was published by Bloomsbury in 2022 (open-access).

Source: Website

Overview: The trailblazing tech leader and international policy expert will be working with the Project Liberty
Institute to shape ethical governance models that help give people more control over their digital lives

The Project Liberty Institute announced today that Audrey Tang, one of the
world’s most respected civic technologists, will serve as a Senior Fellow. Tang, who has received global recognition for her work as Taiwan’s inaugural Minister of Digital Affairs, will focus on the organization’s efforts to develop more ethical governance frameworks for digital platforms and new forms of digital civic infrastructure. The Institute, a 501(c)(3) with an international partner network that includes Georgetown University, Stanford University, Sciences Po, and other leading academic institutions and civic organizations, is a critical part of Project Liberty’s mission to help people take back control of their digital lives by giving them a voice, choice, and stake in a better internet

Source: Project Liberty

Joseph Lubin is a co-founder of Ethereum and the founder of Consensys, a full-stack, global blockchain company. Lubin has established himself as a guiding force in the fast-growing blockchain industry and a powerful advocate of decentralized technology.

Founded in 2014, Consensys has cultivated a global presence, employing top entrepreneurs, computer scientists, protocol engineers, software developers, and experts in enterprise delivery. As one of the largest and most foundational entities in the blockchain technology space, Consensys’ worldwide Mesh of people, projects and companies is building the blockchain industry’s developer tools, decentralized applications, and solutions for enterprises and governments that determined to harness the power of Ethereum. The organization was referred to by The New Yorker in 2018 as “the Ethereum community’s most prominent and ubiquitous developer and promoter of decentralized apps.”

Source: Consensys

Current Position: US Senator since 2007
Affiliation: Democrat
Former Position: Hennepin County Attorney from 1999 – 2007
Other Positions:  Chair, Judiciary Committee;  Chair, Rules and Administration Committee; Chair, Senate Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee

Before seeking public office, besides working as a prosecutor, Klobuchar was a partner at the Minnesota law firms Dorsey & Whitney and Gray Plant Mooty, where she specialized in “regulatory work in telecommunications law”.

Klobuchar’s political positions align with modern liberalism. She has focused on healthcare reform, consumer protection, agriculture, and climate change. She is known for her folksy, Midwestern demeanor and ability to win in rural Minnesota.

Featured Quote: 
When high school kids in northern Minnesota are doing their bio quizzes in liquor store parking lots because we don’t have high speed broadband statewide, you know it is time to pass a federal infrastructure bill. Like, now!

Current: US Representative of WA District 5 since 2005
Affiliation: Republican
Leadership: Chair, Committee on Energy and Commerce
District: Eastern Washington counties of Ferry, Stevens, Pend Oreille, Lincoln, Spokane, Whitman, Walla Walla, Columbia, Garfield, and Asotin, along with parts of Adams and Franklin. It is centered on Spokane.
Next Election: 

History: McMorris Rodgers earned an Executive MBA from the University of Washington in 2002.

McMorris Rodgers previously served in the Washington House of Representatives. From 2013 to 2019, she chaired the House Republican Conference.  She gained national attention in 2014, when she delivered the Republican response to President Barack Obama’s 2014 State of the Union Address.

Featured Quote:  Big Tech has broken my trust. They’ve failed to promote free speech & they censor political viewpoints they disagree with. But, do you know what has convinced me Big Tech is a destructive force? It’s how they’ve abused their power to manipulate and harm our children.

Featured Video: GOP Lawmakers seek NIH records on research funding, COVID-19 origins