Advisory board

Andy Piper (he/they), UK

Andy is a technologist, make and pen plotter artist, public speaker and podcaster.

Andy has over 20 years of experience with open source and communities. As well as running tracks at major events like FOSDEM, he has also contributed to many unconferences such as BarCamp, OggCamp, and more.

Andy is currently the Head of Communications at Mastodon.

Home page. Follow @andypiper@macaw.social.

Ben Werdmuller (he/him), US

Ben is Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica, a non-profit investigative newsroom based in the US. He previously co-founded the open-source social platforms Elgg and Known and supported early-stage mission-driven startups at Matter Ventures.

He works on projects with the potential to make the world more informed, democratic, and equal.

Home page. Follow @ben@werd.social or @werd.io.

Emelia Smith (she/her), Germany

Emelia is an experienced software engineer and founder. She’s been an advisor for IFTAS, works a lot on Mastodon and other Fediverse projects. She used to be a moderator on switter.at.

She runs the Trust and Safety task force for ActivityPub in the W3C, and her own trust and safety projects.

Home page. Follow @thisismissem@hachyderm.io.

Evan Prodromou (he/him), Canada

Evan is the research directory at the Social Web Foundation. He is one of the original pioneers of decentralized social media, one of the authors and editors of the ActivityPub standard, and author of the book “ActivityPub: Programing for the Social Web” by O’Reilly.

He is also a board member of Canadian social media cooperative CoSocial.ca.

Home page. Follow @evan@cosocial.ca.

Hannah Aubry (she/they), US

Hannah is a community builder and an advocate for open technologies with roots in communications and program management.

Currently, she serves on Mastodon’s Board of Directors and works as a developer advocate on the AWS Open Source Strategy & Marketing team where she crafts messaging and advises engineering teams on engagement with open source communities. Previously, she led Fastly’s $50 million commitment to the open internet through its Fast Forward initiative and coordinated the world’s largest multi-team system study to date as part of the S.O.N.I.C. Research Group.

If she were a bird she’d be a roseate spoonbill.

Home page. Follow @haubles@hachyderm.io or @haubl.es.

Ian Forrester (he/him), UK

Ian recently left BBC R&D where he was the senior firestarter, had a hand in their Mastodon instance, and worked on the future of social report. Huge believer in a notion of the public service internet which the fediverse plays an absolutely essential role in. Very interested beyond microblogging, regular user of peertube, pixelfed and others.

Home page. Follow @cubicgarden@mas.to or @cubicgarden.com.

Marci McCue (she/her), US

Marci is a co-founder of and heads communications for Flipboard.

Follow @marci@flipboard.com.

Melanie Bartos (she/her), Austria

Melanie is a science communicator at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She focuses on climate and social transformation topics and advocates for non-profit, privacy-friendly platforms. She leads the university’s Mastodon and Fediverse efforts under the banner of Open Science Communication.

She also chairs a community radio, co-founded wissenschaftspodcasts.de, and gives talks across Europe.

Follow @melaniebartos@chaos.social.

Thiago Skárnio (he/him), Brazil

Thiago is a multimedia producer with 20 years of experience in Brazilian Digital Culture. He has worked on training projects with the Ministry of Culture and founded Alquimídia, an organization dedicated to strengthening the Fediverse in Brazil.

Today, in addition to coordinating Alquimídia, Skárnio works as a consultant for IBRAM (Brazilian Institute of Museums) on public policies for the Fediverse and is part of initiatives such as the Movement for Digital Sovereignty and the National Network of Collaborative Producers.

Home page. Follow @skarnio@alquimidia.org.

Tommi Marmo (they/he), Italy

Currently Social Media and Community Manager for DWeb, Connections Weaver for the Village One tech coop and Fediverse activist.

Their current main personal project is Knitting Our Internet.

Home page. Follow @tommi@pan.rent.

Organizers (to be updated)

Johannes Ernst (he/him/any) is the founder and CEO of Dazzle Labs Inc., which advises organizations how to navigate the new landscape of the open social web and provides technologies to help them do so.

He pioneered user-centric identity with LID and OpenID as well as the sending of public-key encrypted and signed messages between decentralized personal data stores over HTTP, and helped create Yadis, a predecessor of the Webfinger specification, a key component of the Fediverse.

He’s helping to put a Fediverse Developer Network together, and leads development of FediTest, a test framework for interoperability of federated social media platforms.

Home page. Follow @j12t@j12t.social or @j12t.org.