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

Faisal M. Lalani is a global community organizer with a background in building international coalitions, advising policymakers, and preserving human rights and democracy. He has worked all over the world — including in Nepal, South Africa, India, the UK, Sri Lanka, and the US — and has expertise in digital rights, education reform, public health, climate and energy transitions, clinical psychology, foreign policy, and social movements.

Source: CIP Website

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.

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

David Ryan Polgar is the Founder and President of All Tech Is Human, an organization that has become synonymous with the Responsible Tech movement. His work building a large and diverse community of individuals coming together to tackle wicked problems was recently covered in the MIT Technology Review and also a chapter in Greg Epstein’s recent book, Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation. With All Tech Is Human, David has built a global community of over 55k individuals working towards a better tech future, a Slack community of 14k members across 115 countries, spearheaded the popular Responsible Tech Guide, and put together dozens of convenings in NYC, SF, DC, and London.

David is also an international speaker and regular commentator on increasing ethical considerations regarding emerging technology, improving social media platforms, and the need for a collaborative, multi-stakeholder, and multidisciplinary approach to building a tech future aligned with the public interest. His commentary has been featured in The Guardian, TODAY show, BBC World News, MSNBC, Fast Company, Associated Press, LA Times, USA Today, and many more. He has been on stage at Harvard Business School, Yale School of Management, Columbia Business School, Princeton University, NATO’s Stratcom Summit (Istanbul), TechChill (Latvia), The Next Web (Amsterdam), FutureNow (Slovakia), Infoshare (Poland), and more.

His work with All Tech Is Human is focused on creating a better approach to tackling the thorniest issues in tech and society. This approach involves leveraging the community’s collective intelligence, diversifying the underlying tech pipeline, and moving at the speed of tech. All Tech Is Human provides a unique sandbox that unites stakeholders to surface values, tensions, tradeoffs, and best practices. David has served on multiple advisory boards, including TikTok’s Content Advisory Council (US) and Teleperformance’s Trust & Safety Council.

Source: LinkedIn

Divya Siddarth is the executive director and co-founder of CIP. Previously, she has been a political economist and social technologist in Microsoft’s Office of the CTO, the AI and Democracy lead at the U.K.’s AI Safety Institute, and held positions at the Ethics in AI Institute at Oxford, the Ostrom Workshop, and the Harvard Safra Center. She graduated from Stanford with a B.S. in Computational Decision Analysis in 2018.

Source: CIP Website

Joe Riley is the Chief Executive Officer at Project Liberty and Project Liberty Labs where he leads the team building solutions that empower individuals to exercise greater autonomy and control over their data, translating principles into practical, consumer-facing solutions.

Outside of his position at Project Liberty, he is the Chief Financial and Operating Officer at McCourt Global. He joined the McCourt enterprise in 2019 and oversees the financial management of McCourt’s portfolio in Europe and the United States. He previously served as Managing Member and Chief Administrative Officer of the Psilos Group, a healthcare-focused private equity firm. There, he oversaw finance and treasury operations, fundraising and investor relations, regulatory compliance, infrastructure, and administration. Joe spent six years at PwC, where he served as a key accounting partner to Apollo, advising them on buyout transactions in the healthcare and media sectors.

He holds a MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a BS from Georgetown University.

Sarah Nicole is a governance specialist bridging the technical and policy worlds of emerging technologies. She has shaped tech policy at Microsoft during France’s EU presidency in 2022 and supported Huawei’s public affairs and cybersecurity strategy. She frequently publishes and speaks publicly on the governance of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, decentralized systems, quantum computing, and immersive environments. She serves as an Expert Next Generation of Emerging and Critical Digital Technologies for the European Commission, and a Point of contact Data Governance for the Internet Technical Advisory Committee at the OECD. Sarah Nicole also dedicated a decade to leading Graine d’Orateur 93, a nonprofit equipping students with rhetoric and critical thinking skills. This led her to co-create “J’Aime à Dire,” France’s first public television program giving young people a platform to debate without competition.

As Policy & Research Manager at Project Liberty Institute, Sarah designs governance frameworks for open protocols such as the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP) alongside Internet pioneers. Through strategic international initiatives, she advances human-centered data governance and business models. She works closely with governments and international organizations to help shape better digital systems for citizens.

Her international experience spans Paris, Brussels, Geneva, Boston, Shanghai, and Washington D.C. She holds Master’s degrees from Sciences Po in European Affairs and Digital Policy, and from Shanghai JiaoTong University in International Relations, with executive education from MIT and Kyoto University.

Paul Fehlinger is Senior Director of Policy, Investment & Innovation at Project Liberty Institute, where he leads global strategic initiatives at the intersection of capital, entrepreneurship, and governance to shape the future of the AI and data economy. He works with institutional LPs, venture investors, family offices, founders, and policymakers across North America, Europe, and Asia to advance investment frameworks, governance models, and incentives that influence how technology is built and scaled.

His insights on tech, investment, and governance have been featured by The Economist, The New York Times, Politico, Fortune, New Private Markets, ImpactAlpha, or Mary Meeker. He frequently speaks at leading investor, policy, and technology forums, including SuperVenture, Private Equity International, FRAME, Norrsken Impact Week, and the AI Action Summit. He has served on advisory groups for the World Economic Forum and other international initiatives. He is also the publisher of VC+POLICY and works with Harvard and the Hertie School on venture and regulated markets.

Previously, Paul spent over a decade as an entrepreneur, co-founding and scaling a pioneering global multistakeholder platform for cross-border digital markets, partnering with senior leaders across governments, leading technology companies, and institutions, including the UN, OECD, EU, and G7.

Emma Lembke is a leading Gen Z digital rights advocate. A 2025 graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, where she studied political science and psychology, Lembke now serves on the Gen Z Advisory Board of the Sustainable Media Center. She will be joining the organization full-time in New York working on youth-led strategies for platform accountability and digital reform.

At SXSW 2025, Lembke delivered a keynote introducing ACTV8.Media, a groundbreaking co-design incubator developed in partnership with the Sustainable Media Center. ACTV8 empowers Gen Z creators to build the next generation of social technologies—with mental health, safety, and civic well-being baked into the code.

Lembke has testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, met with White House officials, and been featured in The New York Times, NPR, CBS News, and Bloomberg. She was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2024.

Source: Sustainable Media Center

Wendy Seltzer is a lawyer and technologist, currently consulting through the Law Office of Wendy Seltzer.

As Principal Identity Architect at Tucows, she helped to found the Arya Association for interoperable trust and identity recognition. She previously served as Strategy Lead and Counsel to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT, improving the Web’s security, availability, and interoperability through standards. As a Fellow with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Wendy founded the Lumen Project (formerly Chilling Effects Clearinghouse), the web’s pioneering transparency report to measure the impact of legal takedown demands online. Wendy co-authored the second edition of Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion. She seeks to improve technology policy in support of user-driven innovation and secure communication.

Source: IETF Datatracker

Sara holds a Ph.D. in Professional Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, Masters’ degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Bryn Mawr College, and a B.A. from Swarthmore College as well as a certificate in Business Administration from the Wharton Graduate School.

She is very interested in emerging technologies, particularly the social aspects of their adoption and use. An expert at working with and making sense of quantitative data, Sara is equally skilled at grasping the subtleties of personality and organizational culture. Her unique professional background, together with her extensive overseas experience, enable Sara to see and sense things others do not. Thus, she helps clients craft novel and effective strategies, while remaining true to their identities and aspirations. She particularly enjoys working with clients on emerging issues, where innovation is not an option but a necessity.

Source: Behavioral Economics Website