Ownership in a Digital World by Allison Duettmann, Marta Belcher, Barry Threw, Catherine Stihler, and Jason Kwon

Marta Belcher is president and chair of Filecoin Foundation as well as the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, and general counsel and head of policy at Protocol Labs. She is also special counsel to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Marta serves on the Boards of the Zcash Foundation and the Blockchain Association and is a member of Paradigm’s Crypto Policy Council. Marta is a pioneer in cryptocurrency law and policy and has testified in U.S. Congress and state legislatures as well as speaking in European Parliament. Marta has been recognized by the Financial Times Innovative Lawyer awards, by Law360’s list of Top Attorneys Under 40, by CryptoWeekly’s list of Most Influential Women in Crypto, and as Business Intelligence Group’s Woman of the Year.

Catherine Stihler, OBE FRSE is the CEO of Creative Commons. She has been an international champion for openness as a legislator and practitioner for over 20 years. She was elected as a Member of the European Parliament for Scotland in 1999, a post which she held until 2019. While serving as an MEP, Catherine was also elected to serve as the 52nd Rector of the University of St Andrews between 2014 and 2017, and was the first elected Senior Lay Member, chairing the university governing body (University Court) from 2019 to 2022 In 2018 she was awarded an honorary doctorate in recognition of her service to the university and in 2019 the Queen recognised Catherine’s public service by awarding her an OBE. Catherine spent 18 months transforming the Open Knowledge Foundation, before joining Creative Commons as CEO in August 2020. In 2022, Catherine was elected to the national academy of Scotland, the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Allison Duettmann is the President of Foresight Institute, a nonprofit focused on advancing beneficial technologies. She started the project ExistentialHope.com to inspire a memetic shift toward positive futures and is co-authoring a book on strategies to strengthen civilization. She directs all programs at Foresight Institute and researches how to accelerate the benefits of crucial technologies with a primary focus on AI. She speaks regularly at conferences (e.g. SXSW, Effective Altruism Summit, Wall Street Journal), on podcasts (e.g. FLI’s Podcast), moderates monthly speaker salons and Foresight’s annual conference. She holds an MS in Philosophy & Public Policy from the London School of Economics, with a dissertation focus on AI Ethics.

Barry Threw (barrythrew.com) is the Executive and Artistic Director of Gray Area, a San Francisco non-profit cultural incubator applying antidisciplinary collaboration towards an equitable and regenerative future. He drifts fluidly between roles, collaborating as an executive, curator, technologist, cultural producer, and strategist to cultivate forward-looking, boundary-blurring projects integrating culture and technology. His previous leadership positions have generated innovative & influential platforms, products, teams, and businesses spanning art, music, internet, built environment, and experiential & immersive media: as Software Director with Keith McMillen Instruments, developing advanced technology to bridge traditional string instruments with computers to spark a Western new classical music movement based on the technologies and aesthetics of the 21st century; as Technical Director with Recombinant Media Labs, presenting surround cinema at installations and festivals around the world; as a founding Partner at Fabricatorz, a distributed technology studio for cultural projects with nodes in Hong Kong, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Lisbon; and as Director of Software with Obscura Digital, a San Francisco-based creative technology studio specializing in the design and execution of immersive and interactive experiences worldwide, and the first company to do architectural projection mapping. He is convinced that integrated approaches combining art, technology, science, and the humanities are necessary for economic, social, and ecological regeneration.