Funding the Commons San Francisco 2025

Aleksandra Smilek is a foresight strategist and creative director with a decade of experience designing and implementing innovative solutions at the intersection of science, technology, and culture. Her career includes roles across Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, reflecting her global perspective and ability to navigate diverse contexts.

Aleksandra previously worked as a strategist at the Auditoire agency and now consults for various tech and science organizations through her organization Nodes. She consult for the Foresight Institute, Protocol Labs, Molecule.xyz, Accenture, Dassault Systèmes, Cartier, Mauboussin, and Intel.

Passionate about enhancing the accessibility and interactivity of scientific dialogue, Aleksandra applies her expertise to build tools and frameworks that empower researchers to share data and insights more effectively.

Allison Duettmann is the president and CEO of Foresight Institute, a leading San Francisco non-profit founded in 1986 to advance frontier technology for the benefit of life. She directs the institute’s biotechnology, nanotechnology, neurotechnology, and AI grants, fellowships, prizes, and technology trees. She founded Existentialhope.com, co-initiated Foresight's AI Safety Grant Program, The Norm Hardy Prize for Computer Security, and The Longevity Prize. She advises companies and projects, such as Lionheart, Cosmica, and The Roots of Progress Fellowship, and is on the Biomarker of Aging Consortium Steering Committee. She co-edited Superintelligence: Coordination & Strategy, co-authored Gaming the Future, and holds an MS in Philosophy & Public Policy from the London School of Economics, focusing on AI.

Anna Kazlauskas is the creator of the Vana protocol and the CEO of Open Data Labs, a San Francisco-based research and technology company that emerged from the MIT Media Lab. With a background in computer science and economics from MIT, Anna is focused on building technical solutions that empower users to own their data and capture value from the AI models they help create.

Prior to founding Vana, Anna was an early core engineer at Celo, where she worked on making blockchain technology accessible on mobile devices to serve the billions of people who need financial services. She previously co-founded Iambiq, a Y Combinator-backed company that applied machine learning to document processing. Her research experience spans AI work at MIT's CSAIL as well as economic research at institutions including the World Bank, Federal Reserve, and European Central Bank.

Anna's vision for Vana centers on transforming personal data into a new asset class that can power decentralized AI while ensuring individuals maintain sovereignty over their information. Through her work, she aims to create a more equitable AI economy where users have both ownership and influence over the models their data helps create.

Ann Pace is a scientific research organizational leader. Ann started her career as a pharmaceutical scientist at Pfizer Central Research in Connecticut, working on dosage form development. Her Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at UC San Francisco focussed on studying how specific genetic changes lead to tumor growth. She performed research in signal transduction using functional genomics approaches as an NIH postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. Ann went on to work in gene discovery, sequencing and bioinformatic analysis at a Silicon Valley biotech firm before returning to academia to help start and lead several new endeavors at UC Santa Cruz including the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering (CBSE), the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3), the Institute for the Biology of Stem Cells (IBSC), and the Genomics Institute (GI).

Chris is a co-founder and CTO at Lit Protocol. He created the first hardware wallet in 2013, and has been working in Cryptocurrency ever since.

Christine Peterson is Co-founder and Senior Fellow of Foresight Institute. She lectures and writes about nanotechnology, AI, and longevity, working as a connector to further key projects. She is co-author of Unbounding the Future: the Nanotechnology Revolution (Morrow, also free online), Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to Work (knOwhere Press, also free online), and Gaming the Future (Foresight Institute, also free on Substack). She advises the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Global Healthspan Policy Institute, Ludlow Institute, Animal Pain Research Institute, National Space Society, biotech Ligandal, and serves as Board Observer at California Institute for Machine Consciousness. She coined the term ‘open source software.’ She holds a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from MIT.

Philosopher and entrepreneur with a background in law and behavioural science.

Daniel Wolfe is Executive Director of the UCSF UC Berkeley Joint Program in Computational Precision Health (CPH), which is pioneering a new discipline joining the power of AI, clinical/public health excellence, and equity. Wolfe was a 2023 Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center resident for work advancing good governance and responsible use of artificial intelligence, and received the Revson Fellowship for individuals who have made a substantial contribution to the city of New York..
He was previously a director of the Public Health Program at the Open Society Foundations, working in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe to support health, human rights, and access to medicine for marginalized populations. He has been a senior consultant at the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, community scholar at Columbia University’s Center for History and Ethics of Public Health, and was Director of Communications at Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the largest and oldest AIDS organization in the United States. He is the author of book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed and popular publications including Drug Safety, Future Virology, the International Journal of Drug Policy, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Journal of Medical Ethics, the International Herald Tribune, the Lancet, Lancet Global Health, the Nation, and the New York Times Book Review. Wolfe holds a BA in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University, and a Masters in Public Health and a Masters in Philosophy from Columbia University.

Danny O'Brien is Senior Fellow and DWeb Strategy at the Filecoin Foundation and the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web. He has been a tech journalist, developer, and activist for online free speech, privacy, and an open internet for over 20 years, including over a decade at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

His work within the technology sector has included being a founding employee at the Virgin brand's ISP, Virgin Net. As a journalist, he served as Silicon Valley correspondent for the London Sunday Times and the Irish Times, and defended reporters globally from online harassment and cyber-attacks at the Committee to Protect Journalists.

David Dao is the Co-Founder of GainForest.Earth, a decentralized science non-profit leveraging emerging technologies to address the climate and biodiversity crisis. His work earned him the XPRIZE Rainforest Prize, and he is a leading contributor to research on data valuation in machine learning. David completed his postdoctoral research in environmental and computer science at ETH Zurich and conducted research at MIT, UC Berkeley, and Stanford. He holds a doctorate in computer science from ETH Zurich.

Diego Saez Gil is a climate tech entrepreneur, the founder of Pachama, a company developing Geospatial AI models to measure, monitor and ultimately finance nature restoration projects that can have a meaningful impact on climate. Prior to Pachama Diego started two other tech startups that were acquired by industry leaders. Diego is an advisor for several purpose driven startups and funds.

​Evan leads Atlas Computing, a nonprofit mapping and prototyping ways to scale human review and provable safety of advanced AI. He previously built and led a venture studio designing and deploying new coordination systems for humanity, as well as the building the research grants and metascience team at Protocol Labs (the company that initially created IPFS and Filecoin). He completed a PhD in Applied Physics at Caltech, developing hardware for a secure quantum internet, and a BS in Materials Engineering from Stanford.

I've been blending art and technology with my unique career journey since trading web design for glass blowing lessons in 2006. When I began accepting bitcoin payments for my artwork in 2014, I discovered decentralized finance, eventually leading me back into tech as a software developer for NEAR protocol in 2020 after a brief hiatus. Today, I leverage my diverse background to build developer communities, advocating for open source solutions and digital sovereignty while working toward a more equitable web where users control their own data and digital identities.

Juan Benet, founder of Protocol Labs, is the inventor of IPFS and Filecoin, driving innovation in decentralized web technologies and building more robust foundations for our digital future.

,

Maria João Sousa is a PiTech Startup Postdoc at Cornell Tech and Executive Director at Climate Change AI (CCAI), which is a global non-profit that empowers a global community of innovators, practitioners, and decision-makers to accelerate impactful research and deployment at the intersection of climate change and AI. Since joining CCAI as a core team member in 2020, she has collaborated on and spearheaded several of CCAI’s flagship initiatives e.g., the summer schools, scientific workshops and innovation grants programs. She received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Universidade de Lisboa in 2023, where her doctoral thesis focused on cooperative aerial robotics and artificial intelligence for wildfire detection and monitoring systems, a project for which she had been nominated for the UN Environment Young Champions of the Earth 2018 Prize.

Agoric Founder & Chief Scientist
Foresight Senior Fellow, co-author Gaming the Future

Matthew Monahan is the founder of Ma Earth (maearth.com), an emerging initiative to bring more funding into community-led nature protection and restoration. He is also a co-steward at Biome Trust (biometrust.earth), a philanthropic foundation devoted to ecological health and education, and Mangaroa Farms (mangaroa.org), a regenerative farm and forest project in Aotearoa New Zealand. Matthew is passionate about advancing the tools of money in service to life.

TBD

Paul Brody is the Global Blockchain Leader at EY (Ernst & Young) since 2015, overseeing the firm’s blockchain strategy and solutions, including the OpsChain tokenization platform and Blockchain Analyzer analytics tools.

As a prominent advocate for public blockchains and privacy technology, Paul has led EY to develop the Nightfall privacy-enabled Ethereum Layer 2 network and the Starlight zero-knowledge compiler, both contributed to the public domain and the Ethereum community.

Before joining EY, Paul held various roles at IBM, including Electronics Industry Vice President. He began his career at McKinsey & Co. in Los Angeles and holds a degree in Economics and a certificate in African Studies from Princeton University.

TBD

I am an ecologist, designer, activist, artist, herbalist, and technologist working at the forefront of climate change and ecological crisis. I design and build places, products, and systems of human coordination that restore ecosystem function.

I am the founder of ArtEcology is a multidisciplinary collective of climate designers working to restore ecology. Explore our work with nature preserves, climate impact platforms, biodiversity credits, governance, ecological conscious and animism narratives at artecology.studio.

My current work includes park curation and biodiversity credit architecture for Antilles Reserve in Barbados, climate finance design for BioFi Project bioregional financing pilots, and I am the COO of a crypto startup, LayerLabs.

I was a co-founder of Regen Network, a blockchain platform to regenerate landscapes. As a city park designer I led the redesign of 1,000 acres of public lands in Pittsburgh, including the USA’s largest urban farm, Hilltop Urban Farm. I am a co-designer of the Food Studies certificate program at Indiana University Bloomington, co-author of the Pittsburgh Climate Action Plan and Greater Pittsburgh Food Action Plan, co-founder of the North American Permaculture Convergence, and co-conspirator of the Occupy Wall Street Sustainability Working Group. I have raised over $47 million in funding for ecosystem restoration projects.

My institutional training includes finance and marketing degrees from University of Delaware and sustainable design training from the Fashion Institute of New York. My extitutional training includes Center for Bioregional Living (permaculture), Northeast School of Botanical Medicine (herbalism), and ecology, permaculture, and herbalism training from Darrel Frey, Peter Bane, Andrew Faust, 7Song, Juliet Blankespoor, and Luke Learningdeer, as well as hundreds of grassroots herbalists and permaculture designers.

I believe that interdependency consciousness can shift the trajectory of the climate and ecological crisis.

🧢 Founder, FIL-B
📍 Filecoin DX and community on @filbuilders @filecoin

Dr. Seth Frey is a computational social scientist who studies commons governance institutions and other complex social systems. He specializes in using online communities as model systems for emergent institutional and organizational phenomena. His expertise is in computational approaches to self-governance and the cognitive science of strategic behavior.

He is an associate professor in Communication at the University of California Davis, an affiliate of the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, and a Research Director at Metagov. He was a behavioral economist at Disney Research in Walt Disney Imagineering, and a complex systems scholar at NECSI. Seth earned his Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Informatics (complex systems) at Indiana University in 2013, and a B.A. in Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley.

Seth’s research has appeared in PNAS, Nature Scientific Reports, and Proceedings of the Royal Society. It has been covered in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, and TEDx. It has been funded by the NSF, NASA, and the Ford Foundation.

Founder & Visionary Leader in Decentralized Science and Data Privacy

Shady El Damaty, a Philadelphia native with Egyptian and Moroccan roots, embodies the spirit of a first-generation immigrant in the United States. His remarkable journey from academia to pioneering decentralized science and data privacy solutions is nothing short of inspiring. Currently, as co-founder of Holonym Foundation, El Damaty is changing the future of online safety by developing a decentralized identity protocol based on zero-knowledge proofs.

Shady's academic excellence began at the University of Rochester, where he earned a B.Sc. in Neuroscience. He then pursued an M.Sc. in Biomedical Science with a focus on Neuroengineering at Drexel University. His academic journey culminated in a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Georgetown University, where his dissertation explored the maturation of cognitive skills and neural systems.

Shady's professional career is marked by significant achievements. As a Principal Investigator funded by the Department of Justice, he led a novel research initiative  for the National Institute of Justice, securing $164,000 in research funding. His innovative spirit shone through during his Mistletoe Hardware Startup Accelerator Fellowship, where he was awarded a grant to support his work as he honed his entrepreneurial skills.

In 2021, Shady founded Opscientia, the first decentralized science (DeSci) DAO, raising $300,000 to support software development and launching the first decentralized fellowship program. Under his leadership, Opscientia grew to 700 contributors, of which 40% academics and researchers, and indexed 500TB of open-source data on the Filecoin network.

Opscientia's success led to its selection for the Spanish accelerator program by Invest in Spain in June 2021. By 2022, Shady had formed the identity team to tackle data archival attribution and verification challenges, resulting in the incorporation of the Holonym Foundation as a spin-out from Opscientia Labs Inc. With Holonym, Shady and his team raised $315,000 in a pre-seed round and, by 2024, achieved $1 million in revenue and closed a $5.5 million seed round.

Holonym Foundation was conceived out of a need to solve scientific data-sharing problems encountered at Opscientia, but has grown to solve general problems related to identity and agency in digital systems. Shady's passion for empowering individuals through technology led him to focus on privacy tooling and decentralized systems. His vision is to create a future where digital interactions are built on asymmetric cryptography, ensuring secure and private interactions for users worldwide. At Holonym Foundation, Shady instills values of service, rigor, innovation, and purpose-driven work. His team embodies curiosity, tenacity, and self-driven motivation. Together, they foster a culture of innovation through open dialogue, co-ownership, and collaborative problem-solving.

Shady's journey has not been without challenges. The bear market of 2022 tested the resilience of Holonym, but through grit and strategic decisions, the team navigated financial constraints and emerged stronger. Shady's ability to focus on immediate tasks and maintain unwavering belief in his mission has been crucial to overcoming these obstacles.

Holonym Foundation aims to launch several groundbreaking projects, including Silk, a universal web account and digital wallet,  Mishti Network Actively Validated Service (AVS) on Eigenlayer, and Zeronym’s Proof-of-Clean Hands for on-chain AML/KYC. Long-term, Shady envisions providing private proof of personhood for every individual on the planet, securing government contracts, and expanding Silk into a decentralized personal bank account for all.

Shady El Damaty is dedicated to making a lasting impact by bringing asymmetric cryptography to civic systems and financial services, ensuring privacy and security in digital interactions, and reducing the risk of digital despotism. His journey serves as a testament to the power of innovation, resilience, and the relentless pursuit of a vision that empowers individuals and transforms the world.

xxx

Dr. Stuart Cowan is the Executive Director of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, which is dedicated to the realization of Fuller’s vision of a world that works for 100% of humanity in the shortest time possible through spontaneous cooperation. In this role, he launched the BFI Design Lab to support commons-based initiatives to strategically address critical planetary challenges including climate, biodiversity, water cycles, and financial systems. Stuart brings 25 years of experience in regenerative design, finance, and systems and is a planetary strategist, ecological designer, systems scientist, and regenerative economist. He was the founding convener of the Regenerative Communities Network from 2018-20, supporting 15 bioregions on their journeys of regeneration. He served as Chief Scientist at the Smart Cities Council, Transaction Manager for the sustainable investment fund Portland Family of Funds, and Conservation Economy Research Director at the non-profit Ecotrust. He is the co-author with Sim Van der Ryn of Ecological Design (Island Press, 2007), and received his doctorate in Applied Mathematics from U.C. Berkeley with a focus on Complex Systems and Ecological Economics. He has taught and facilitated internationally for academic institutions, cities, companies, indigenous groups, government agencies, and NGOs. He also serves on the Board of Regenerosity, Global Solutions Alliance, and University for International Cooperation.

.

WENDY HANAMURA
Lead Organizer, DWeb

Wendy Hanamura helps to steward the DWeb community (GetDWeb.net) that now encompasses global nodes of technologists, policymakers, artists and activists all working to build a better web. Hanamura produced the Decentralized Web Summits in 2016 & 2018, and DWeb Camp in 2019-2024. For almost a decade, Hanamura served as Director of Partnerships at the Internet Archive where she is now a Fellow, using her skills in communication and content strategy, strategic planning, fundraising, and partnership building, all in service of the Internet Archive’s mission: universal access to knowledge. Hanamura was also an Emmy Award-winning television producer & correspondent (CBS, NHK, PBS, KCET/Link) and serves on the boards or advisory panels of the Filecoin Foundation, Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, Earth Species Project, Harvard Asian American Alumni Alliance, and Whose Knowledge?