Michiel Leenaars, Dir. of Strategy, NLNet
Michiel Leenaars (1972, Netherlands) is Director of Strategy at NLnet. He is responsible for defining and initating short term and long term policies and managing strategic activities within the NLnet foundation, and acts as its spokesperson to the press and society. He currently also leads NGIZero, a family of research programmes including NGI0 Entrust and NGI0 Core, part of the Next Generation Internet initiative. He joined the management team of NLnet in 2007. He has a background in Physics at Technische Universiteit Eindhoven and Theory and history of literature/Visual and verbal communication at Tilburg University.
He is active in a number of national and international organisations, such as The Commons Conservancy (chair), OpenDoc Society (vice-chair), SCION Foundation (Board of Advisors), SIDN Fund (Board of Advisors), and Petities.nl foundation (treasurer). He is co-founder and board member of Technology Commons Trust. In 2022 he was awarded the NLUUG Lifetime Achievement Award.
Session
Technology is everywhere, and is reshaping how we live, work, (get) entertain(ed), learn and create. But not all technology is equal, nor beneficial. As societies we have the choice to let ourselves be dragged around by the maelstrom of venture capital and its continuous flood of (wannabe) big tech and unicorns that like to move fast and break things or to use the potential of digital commons to empower everyone.
NLnet Foundation is one of the most active grantmakers in the field of the open internet and of technology commons. NLnet is a public benefit organisation that was instrumental in taking the internet out of the United States and bringing it to Europe in the eighties, making it one of the oldest grant making philanthropies in the space of digital commons in the world altogether. Together with a growing coalition of partners, and supported by donations from individuals, foundations, public sector organisations, companies and institutions like the European Commission, it has been a strong advocate for building a free and open technology stack from top to bottom. NLnet has been an active proponent of the European Next Generation Internet initiative, in particular through the various NGI Zero programmes.
In this talk, Michiel Leenaars (director of strategy at NLnet) will take a quick recap of history and give a high level overview of the digital commons landscape from the point of view of a small and flat country partially below sea level. He will also give an update on the hundreds of recent and ongoing efforts funded by NLnet creating advanced FOSS building blocks — from open hardware e-ink screens and mobile networks to social media tools, from video conferencing tools to compartementalised operating systems and secure digital payment methods.