Meet the Real Social Media "Influencers" by by Kegan Dougal, Rabble, Bryan Newbold, Christine Lemmer-Webber, Danny O'Brien, and Randy Farmer

Presented by Kegan Dougal, Rabble, Bryan Newbold, Christine Lemmer-Webber, Danny O'Brien, and Randy Farmer

Builders working on the future of social media answer your questions about what a better social media world looks like and what they're doing to get there.

WE ALL AGREED THE TITLE IS NOT THE BEST, BUT OUR FRIEND WHO WROTE IT HAS COVID NOW AND COULDN'T COME SO IT IS A MEMORIAL TITLE NOW.  PLUS I CAN'T EDIT IT IN THE CMS SO WE ARE STUCK WITH IT. - IMAGINE IT IS CALLED "SOCIAL MEDIA ENGINEERS, LIKE 'RINGWORLD ENGINEERS'" SIGNED DANNY "ALL CAPS" O'B

Rabble Henshaw-Plath
CEO and Founder, Nos

Evan Henshaw-Plath, known as Rabble, is a pioneering technologist and activist renowned for their work in social media and decentralized technologies. As the first employee and lead developer at Odeo, where they helped create Twitter, Rabble has been at the forefront of digital communication innovation. Their commitment to user-centric, community-driven platforms is evident in their work with nos.social, a decentralized social media app using the Nostr protocol, and their role in relaunching Causes.com to empower grassroots activism. They also helped create the Indymedia.org tech team, advancing grassroots media. A former researcher at the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media and an Edmund Hillary Fellow, Rabble combines technical expertise with a passion for political organizing and social justice, envisioning a future where digital communities thrive independently of centralized control, focusing on building digital commons-based communities.

 

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Christine Lemmer-Webber
CEO, Spritely Institute

Christine has devoted her life to advancing user freedom. Realizing that the federated social web was fractured by a variety of incompatible protocols, she co-authored and shepherded ActivityPub's standardization. She has also contributed to many other free and open source projects, including co-founding MediaGoblin.

Christine established the open source Spritely Project to solve known problems in existing centralized and decentralized social media platforms and to re-imagine the way we build networked applications - work that now continues here at the Spritely Institute under her guidance as Executive Director.

 

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Randy Farmer
Spritely Networked Communities Institute

Randy Farmer has been creating technical standards and community platforms for more than 40 years - learning the power of collaboration and overcoming the challenges of connecting people to each other online.

Along the way, it was necessary for him to co-invent many of the foundational patterns and technologies we see deployed today, such as the JSON message protocol, social newsfeeds, virtual worlds, and avatars (see his more than two dozen now expired patents). He has founded several startups, in senior executive roles, for the last two decades - most recently as the CEO of a multiplayer mobile gaming company.

In 1995 Randy co-founded Electric Communities, which prototyped and proved the design of smart contracts, capabilities, and distributed objects. Much of Spritely's architecture is inspired by publications about Electric Communities Habitat; this lead Christine Lemmer Webber and Randy to begin talking, leading to the decision to co-found the Spritely Networked Communities Institute together.

 

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Danny O'Brien
International Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Danny O'Brien has been an activist for online free speech and privacy for over 20 years. In his home country of the UK, he fought against repressive anti-encryption law, and helped make the UK Parliament more transparent with FaxYourMP.  He was EFF's activist from 2005 to 2007, and its international outreach coordinator from 2007-2009. After three years working to protect at-risk online reporters with the Committee to Protect Journalists, he returned to EFF in 2013 to supervise EFF's global strategy. He is also the co-founder of the Open Rights Group, Britain's own digital civil liberties organization.

In a previous life, Danny wrote and performed the only one-man show about Usenet to have a successful run in London's West End. His geek gossip zine, Need To Know, won a special commendation for services to newsgathering at the first Interactive BAFTAs. He also coined the term "life hack."

It has been over a decade since he was first commissioned to write a book on combating procrastination.

 

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Bryan Newbold
Engineer, Bluesky

Bryan works at Bluesky, a startup company building a federated social media protocol called "atproto". Until a few months ago he worked at the Internet Archive collecting scientific research datasets and publications, and created scholar.archive.org. And before that he worked on infrastructure at Stripe, attended the Recurse Center in New York City, and built Atomic Magnetometers for a small New Jersey company called Twinleaf.

Over that same time period he climbed up and down the ladder of abstraction, obtaining an undergraduate degree in physics (at MIT), operating under-ice robots in Antarctica, developing open hardware lab instrumentation for large-scale brain probing (at LeafLabs), cataloging hundreds of millions of electronics components (at Octopart), and improved production service reliability at Stripe (a financial infrastructure start-up).

Bryan is a transplant from the East Coast and enjoys the road biking, large trees, generous salads, used book stores, and world-class tech non-profits found all around the Bay Area.

 

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Kegan Dougal
Staff Software Engineer, Element

Kegan is one of the core developers behind Matrix, having worked on the protocol since the beginning. He enjoys deeply technical problems and the liberation of communication which Matrix provides to the wider world. In recent times he has focused on what the protocol will look like in the future including account portability, P2P, faster client syncing and low bandwidth protocols to name a few.

 

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