WDerrick N. Ashong, also known as "DNA",, is a producer, musician, and entrepreneur known for working with major figures including Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, and Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics.
WJulian Paul Assange is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. WikiLeaks came to international attention in 2010 when it published a series of leaks provided by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. These leaks included the Baghdad airstrike Collateral Murder video, the Afghanistan war logs, the Iraq war logs, and Cablegate. After the 2010 leaks, the United States government launched a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks.
WDaniel Julius Bernstein is an American German mathematician, cryptologist, and computer programmer. He is visiting professor at CASA at Ruhr University Bochum, as well as a Research Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Before this, he was a professor in the department of mathematics and computer science at the Eindhoven University of Technology
WDavid Bollier is an American activist, writer, and policy strategist. He is co-founder of the Commons Strategies Group, Senior Fellow at the Norman Lear Center at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, and writes technology-related reports for the Aspen Institute. Bollier collaborated with television writer/producer Norman Lear on a variety of non-television, public affairs projects from 1985 to 2010.
WJean-Claude Bradley was a chemist who actively promoted Open Science in chemistry, including at the White House, for which he was awarded the Blue Obelisk award in 2007. He coined the term "Open Notebook science". He died in May 2014. A memorial symposium was held July 14, 2014 at Cambridge University, UK.
WYasodara Córdova, also known as Yaso, is an activist, coder, designer and researcher. Her work has focused on technologies to improve the democratic process, using open data, online identity, and privacy approaches. She is currently a research fellow at the Digital Harvard Kennedy School, and affiliate to the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard. She has been part of several Ministries in Brazil, the United Nations and the W3C. As an activist, she is co-founder and advisor of multiple initiatives around Internet hacktivism.
WPrimavera De Filippi is a legal scholar, Internet activist and artist, whose work focuses on the blockchain, peer production communities and copyright law. She is permanent researcher at the CNRS and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She is author of the book Blockchain and the Law published by Harvard University Press. As an activist, she is part of Creative Commons, the Open Knowledge Foundation and the P2P Foundation, among others.
WAlexandra Asanovna Elbakyan is a Kazakhstani computer programmer and creator of the website Sci-Hub, which provides free access to research papers without regard for copyright. According to Elbakyan, Sci-Hub has served over a billion science articles to its visitors since 2011.
WEric Eldred is an American literacy advocate and the proprietor of the unincorporated Eldritch Press.
WKen Freedman is general manager of WFMU, a freeform and independent radio station. He co-hosts the comedy program Seven Second Delay with Andy Breckman, as well as hosting his own freeform radio program. Freedman is a resident of Hoboken, New Jersey.
WTomasz Ganicz, ps. Polimerek, is a Polish chemist, doctor habilitas of chemical sciences and professor extraordinarius at the Military University of Technology in Warsaw. He was the president of Wikimedia Polska (2007–2018).
WJoichi "Joi" Ito is a Japanese entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is a former director of the MIT Media Lab, former professor of the practice of media arts and sciences at MIT, and a former visiting professor of practice at the Harvard Law School. Following the exposure of his personal and professional financial ties to sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein, Ito resigned from his roles at MIT, Harvard, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, PureTech Health, and The New York Times Company on September 7, 2019.
WRonaldo Lemos is a Brazilian academic, lawyer and commentator on intellectual property, technology, and culture.
WLester Lawrence Lessig III is an American academic, attorney, and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Lessig was a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for president of the United States in the 2016 U.S. presidential election but withdrew before the primaries.
WCarl Malamud is an American technologist, author, and public domain advocate, known for his foundation Public.Resource.Org. He founded the Internet Multicasting Service. During his time with this group, he was responsible for developing the first Internet radio station, for putting the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR database on-line, and for creating the Internet 1996 World Exposition.
WRémi Mathis is a French historian and curator.
WRyan Merkley was the Chief of Staff to the office of the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, and former CEO of the American non-profit organization Creative Commons. He is an advocate for open licenses, net neutrality and open data initiatives in the public sector. Merkley is the Chair of the Open Worm Foundation board of directors and was trustee at the Quetico Foundation. He writes and speaks on issues such as the sharing economy, academic publishing and legal infrastructure for sharing content.
WEllen S. Miller is an American political activist. A proponent of open government, she co-founded the Sunlight Foundation in 2006, serving as the group's executive director until her retirement in 2014. She sits on the board of directors of the Center for Responsive Politics, for which she was the founding executive director from 1984 to 1996. In 1996, she founded the Public Campaign. Miller has served as deputy director of the Campaign for America's Future, as a senior fellow at The American Prospect, and as publisher of TomPaine.com.
WPeter Murray-Rust is a chemist currently working at the University of Cambridge. As well as his work in chemistry, Murray-Rust is also known for his support of open access and open data. However, he has also been criticised by Jeffrey Beall for his views on predatory publishers and especially his involvement with publisher MDPI.
WMichael Aaron Nielsen is a quantum physicist, science writer, and computer programming researcher living in San Francisco.
WJonas Öberg is a free and open-source software activist, describing himself as an instigator in the world of free, having worked with the Free Software Foundation Europe, GNU Project, FSCONS, Creative Commons and the Shuttleworth Foundation. He started to develop software in 1991 and installed his first GNU/Linux operating system in 1993 after which he eventually joined as a webmaster for the GNU Project. In the late 1990s, he spent some time at the MIT AI Labs where he met with Richard Stallman and others from the Free Software Foundation, joining them for The Bazaar conference in New York. Since 2002, he has been on the award committee for the Free Software Foundation's Free Software Awards.
WPatricia Ocampo is an Argentine activist involved in community development and creation of libraries in Misiones Province. By 2014, she had worked with community organizers and celebrities to found 20 libraries. The organization she co-founded provides basic assistance to those in poverty and with disabilities and attempts to empower people through education and access to books and libraries. She is also involved in trying to stop child labor in Argentina, specifically in the yerba mate regions.
WTim O'Reilly is the founder of O'Reilly Media. He popularised the terms open source and Web 2.0.
WNina Carolyn Paley is an American cartoonist, animator, and free culture activist. She was the artist and often the writer of the comic strips Nina's Adventures and Fluff, but most of her recent work has been in animation. She is perhaps best known for creating the 2008 animated feature film Sita Sings the Blues, based on the Ramayana, with parallels to her personal life. In 2018, she completed her second animated feature, Seder-Masochism, a retelling of the Book of Exodus as patriarchy emerging from goddess worship.
WRufus Pollock is a researcher, activist and social entrepreneur. He has been a leading figure in the global open knowledge and open data movements, starting with his founding in 2004 of the non-profit Open Knowledge Foundation which he led until 2015. From 2007-2010 he was the Mead Fellow in Economics at the University of Cambridge and from 2010-2013 he was a Shuttleworth Foundation fellow. In 2012 was appointed an Ashoka Fellow and remains an Associate of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge and continues to serve on the board of Open Knowledge International. Since leaving Open Knowledge International, his work has moved to focus more on broader issues of social transformation and in 2016 he co-founded a new non-profit "Life Itself". However, he has continued to work actively on the economics and politics of the information age, including publishing "The Open Revolution: Rewriting the Rules of the Information Age" in 2018.
WJason Rohrer is an American computer programmer, writer, musician, and game designer. He publishes most of his software into the public domain and charges for commercial platform distributed versions of his games, like on the iPhone appstore or Steam. He is a graduate of Cornell University. From 2004 until 2011 he practiced simple living, stating in 2009 that his family of four had an annual budget of less than $14,500. They have since relocated from Las Cruces, New Mexico to Davis, California. In 2005 Jason Rohrer worked on a local currency, called North Country Notes (NCN), for Potsdam, New York. In 2016 Rohrer became the first videogame artist to have a solo retrospective in an art museum. His exhibition, The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer, was on view at The Davis Museum at Wellesley College until June 2016.
WDouglas Mark Rushkoff is an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist, and documentarian. He is best known for his association with the early cyberpunk culture and his advocacy of open source solutions to social problems.
WGwenn Seemel is an American painter. She paints contemporary portraits and releases her work under free licenses.
WWendy Seltzer is an American attorney and a staff member at the World Wide Web Consortium, where she is the chair of the Improving Web Advertising Business Group. She was previously with Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy. Seltzer is also a Fellow with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, where she founded and leads the Lumen clearinghouse, which is aimed at helping Internet users to understand their rights in response to cease-and-desist threats related to intellectual property and other legal demands.
WSir Bent Skovmand was a Danish plant scientist and conservationist. Time Magazine wrote in 1991 that Skovmand, "'while not exactly a household name,' had had 'more to do with the welfare of the world's five billion people than many heads of state.'"
WAaron Hillel Swartz was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist. He was involved in the development of the web feed format RSS, the Markdown publishing format, the organization Creative Commons, and the website framework web.py, and joined the social news site Reddit six months after its founding. He was given the title of co-founder of Reddit by Y Combinator owner Paul Graham after the formation of Not a Bug, Inc.. Swartz's work also focused on civic awareness and activism. He helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee in 2009 to learn more about effective online activism. In 2010, he became a research fellow at Harvard University's Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption, directed by Lawrence Lessig. He founded the online group Demand Progress, known for its campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act.
WWouter Tebbens, is a Dutch activist, researcher and social entrepreneur on Free Knowledge.
WWilliam Hurley, commonly known as whurley, is an American tech entrepreneur and investor who founded Chaotic Moon Studios, Honest Dollar, Strangeworks, Ecliptic Capital, and philanthropic efforts including CERN's Entrepreneurship Student Programme and Equals: The Global Partnership for Gender Equality in the Digital Age. He is an open source advocate and systems theorist, and is regularly interviewed by the press on technology and related topics.
WDavid A. Wiley is chief academic officer of Lumen Learning, Education Fellow at Creative Commons, and former adjunct faculty of instructional psychology & technology at Brigham Young University where he was previously an associate professor. Wiley's work on open content, open educational resources, and informal online learning communities has been reported in many international outlets, including The New York Times, The Hindu, MIT Technology Review, and WIRED. Wiley was also previously a member of the advisory committee of University of the People.