Saskia Welch manages projects, communities, and communications at the Newsmast Foundation, Saskia supports Newsmast app development from the initial spark to the big launch. 🐘 @saskia@newsmast.social | 🦋 @saskiakezia.com | 💼 LinkedIn

Siddhartha Kurapati leads Communications and Digital Marketing at The Bristol Cable. Siddhartha ensures that The Cable’s independent journalism reaches newer audiences and stands out from the noise of mainstream news. 💼 LinkedIn

Together they will speak on building a local news app using Activity Pub for The Bristol Cable.

Aendra Rininsland is a creative technologist with a background in journalism who has been working at the intersection of media and technology for over a decade. Originally from Canada, she's lived in London since 2011 and is best known for the News Feed, Bluesky's most popular custom feed for journalistic content. She is also the founder of the Green Shoots initiative and a contributing member to the Northsky Social Cooperative, as well as the creator of the popular XBlock screenshot labelling service and an organiser for ATProto.london.

🦋 @aendra.com | 💼 LinkedIn

E.M. Lewis-Jong is the Founder and VP of Mozilla Data Collective—the community-led data platform for the ethical creation, curation, and control of AI training datasets. They are also the Director at Common Voice, the world’s largest open crowdsourced speech corpus, spanning 300+ languages and 750,000 open community contributors. EM has run AI community data programmes for the US National Science Foundation, NVIDIA, Gates Foundation, and GIZ. Before Mozilla, EM was a founding executive in CivTech: leading, launching and growing product from concept stage to venture-backed Series A. They are Sutton Trust Oxbridge Access Summer Schools Alumna, a Rising Star of Tech Awardee and a SheCodes Alumna. They sit on several multilingual AI advisory boards, including as NLP TAP Advisor for Google-backed Lacuna Fund, Industry Board Advisor for Speech Technologies at the University of Groningen and Data Advisor for the Caribbean Parliaments’ digitisation project. They studied at the University of Oxford, and are—in their spare time—a Doctoral researcher in AI Informatics, focussed on children, data and Intelligent Personal Assistants.

Jeremiah Lee is a program officer for the Interledger Foundation’s Grant for the Web. Prior to joining the foundation, he participated in its ambassadorship program by researching the creator economy and prototyping support for the Open Payments protocol and proposed Web Monetization standard in ActivityPub clients and servers. He grew up under the California sun, but now calls Stockholm home.

⁂ @Jeremiah@interledger.social | 💼 LinkedIn

​Laurens Hof is an independent analyst and consultant based in the Netherlands, specialising in decentralised social networking protocols. Through his newsletter Connected Places, he provides in-depth analysis of the ATProto and ActivityPub ecosystems, examining governance models, cultural dynamics and technical changes. He consults on strategy, funding, and ecosystem development for open social networking protocols.

Interledger open technology is a set of standards and protocols that facilitates payments across different ledgers and payment networks. It works by breaking down payment instructions into small packets, similar to how the internet routes data, and allowing them to travel through a network of "connectors" to reach the recipient. These connectors act as intermediaries, coordinating the transfer and exchange of currency between different ledgers. Once, where there were blockers and barriers for many, there is now an open-source protocol that liberates financial transactions for everyone.