European Technology Forum
4 Sustainable Democracy

Former Deputy Head and Acting Head of the Representation of the European Commission in France, Gaëtane Ricard-Nihoul has held various positions as a European civil servant.

She has now joined the European Commission in Brussels where she contributes to the preparation of the Conference on the Future of Europe as a member of the Joint Secretariat. Before that, she worked at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where she was with the Secretary of State for European Affairs and Deputy General Secretary for Citizens' Consultations on Europe.

She was also Head of the Citizens' Conferences division at the Mission Grand Débat. She has also held the position of Secretary General of the Jacques Delors Institute and for the Belgian government, and Adviser for European affairs, particularly during the Belgian Presidency of the Council of the EU in 2001. She is the author of a book published in 2011 by Larcier, entitled “For a European Federation of Nation-States: the vision of Jacques Delors revisited.

João Ricardo Vasconcelos is a Senior Governance Specialist in the Governance Global Practice - Public Administration and Institutional Reforms unit of the World Bank, supporting the development of the GovTech Global work. His areas of expertise include: governance of digital government; green GovTech, CivicTech, interoperability and service delivery.

Before joining the World Bank, João was a Digital Government Policy Analyst at the OECD, being the lead coordinator of several cross-cutting activities in the Digital Government and Data unit. João also worked in the Portuguese public sector for several years heading various digital innovation and international cooperation initiatives.

Alan joined the Open Government Partnership in August 2018. He was previously the Australian OGP Point of Contact, and an executive and lawyer with the Australian Government, having worked across the Departments of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Attorney-General, and Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Alan also has a strong civil society background focused on social inclusion and civic participation. He serves on the Board of Directors of Oxfam Australia, one of Australia’s largest international development organisations. After attending the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, he was also commissioned to help grow the Forum’s Global Shapers Community, which supports young changemakers across the world.

Previously, Alan served as Chair of Australia’s peak body for young people, as Special Envoy for Young People to the Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme, and on the Australian National Commission for UNESCO. Alan is based in Singapore.

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Nele Leosk serves as the Ambassador-at-Large for Digital Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Estonia, being responsible for the development and coordination of Estonia’s digital diplomacy.

Over the past twenty years, she has advised political and public sector leaders in digital governance and digital economy in more than forty countries. She has experienced the life of private sector, international organisations such as the UNDP, UNU-eGOV, OECD as well as academia.

Nele holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute (EUI), Italy.

She is a former Fulbright-Schuman grantee at the National Centre for Digital Government at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and at the Governance Lab at New York University, USA.

Krzysztof Izdebski. Expert at the Stefan Batory Foundation and the Open Spending EU Coalition. Member of the Osiatyński Archive, and Consul Democracy Foundation Advisory Boards. Marshall Memorial, Marcin Król and Recharging Advocacy Rights in Europe Fellow.

He is a lawyer who graduated from Warsaw University and specializes in access to public information and re-use of public sector information. He has wide expertise in relations between public administration and citizens.

He is the author of publications on freedom of information, technology, public administration, corruption, and public participation including "Transparency and Open Data Principles: Why They Are Important and How They Increase Public Participation and Tackle Corruption" and recently published "alGOVrithms. The State of Play. Report on Algorithms Usage in Government-Citizens Relations in Czechia, Kosovo, Hungary, Poland, and North Macedonia ».

He is also specialized in legal aspects of the prevention of corruption. In 2012-2018 he was a Local Research Correspondent for Poland in the European Commission Anti-Corruption project (Anti-Corruption report) that aimed to improve anti-corruption policies in the Member States. He is also an Apolitical.co contributor. 37th on the Dziennik Gazeta Prawna daily list of 50 most influential Polish lawyers in 2020.  

Vera Soares is Government Adviser at the Ministry for Digitalisation of Luxembourg.She is member of the Cabinet and coordinates the development of eGovernment and several initiatives such as: GovTech Lab Luxembourg, the implementation of the national interoperability framework (NIF), the interministerial Committee for digitalisation.

Prior to joining and supporting, to set up the Ministry for Digitalisation Vera Soares was in charge of the international cooperation at the Ministry of Higher Education and Research.

She has started her career as civil servant in 2010 at the Ministry of the Economy where she was in charge of Communication and Press relations. In 2014 she joined the Department of Foreign Trade and Investments where she coordinated the commercial relations between Luxembourg and the United States and Israel markets.

She holds a degree from the University of Coimbra – Faculty of Economics in Portugal in international politics and foreign affairs with a specialization in geopolitics and geostrategy.

Senka Krivić is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Sarajevo and BURCH University. She received bachelor's and master's degrees in Control and Electronics at the University of Sarajevo and PhD degree in Computer Science at the University of Innsbruck.

Her research covers topics at the intersection of robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, planning, and explainable and ethical AI with the main focus on enabling a robust and safe operation of autonomous systems in real-world environments and in interaction with humans. She has several publications in international peer-reviewed journals and conferences, such as Autonomous Robots, JAIR, IJCAI, IROS, CASE, ESANN, etc.

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Former journalist then entrepreneur in media groups, Julie worked and lived for 7 years in the Middle East. She then joined Google where she led the Media Buying team in emerging countries.

In 2015, Julie founded Fluicity, a start-up recognized as being of public utility which offers a digital platform for citizen participation. This innovation has been recognized by numerous awards (MIT award, Digital Innovation BPI) and is deployed in more than 100 cities in Europe.

Julie co-founded ACTE (an association that brings together civic tech member states to represent the sector in Europe).

Raphaël Kies is senior researcher at the University of Luxembourg. He holds his PhD from the European University Institute. He is interested in deliberative democracy, electoral studies, democratic innovations, political system in Luxembourg and media studies.

He is the founder of the Luxembourgish Platform of Participatory Democracy (PLDP.lu). He has contributed to implement and review several democratic innovations in Luxembourg. Among them, the European Citizens Consultation (in 2007 and 2009), the voting advice applications Smartwielen.lu (since 2009). 

More recently he is actively involved in the Luxembourg Open Government strategy  with ETICC, the participative budget with the City of Dudelange, the Biergerkommitee Lëtzebuerg 2050 and the Klima-Biergerrot with the national government.

Graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique in France, Axel Dauchez started out in marketing at Procter & Gamble and quickly focused on media and digital where he led fast-growing companies for nearly 20 years. In 2010, he became CEO of Deezer and enabled the company to become a world leader in streaming in 4 years. In 2014, he became President of Publicis France where he notably led the first edition of Viva Technology.

He founded Make.org in 2016, the first independent European platform for mobilizing civil society (citizens, associations, companies, institutions, local authorities, media, etc.) in actions of general interest and in the transformation of the society.

Darko Brkan is the Executive Director of CA „Why not“, one of the most prominent Bosnian NGOs that is a regional leader in fact-checking, disinformation debunking, civic tech, political process monitoring and civic participation. He is an advisory board member of the Open Government Partnership for BiH, president of the board of the regional network Action SEE, as well as board member of several regional and inter-regional networks like SEE Check network or TransparenCEE network. He holds degrees from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Faculty of Economics Sarajevo.

His professional interests are digital and social media, fighting disinformation, fact-checking, elections and political processes, civic activism and international relations. He was a German Marshall Memorial Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the US, Draper-Hills fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law at Stanford University and a Reagan-Fascell fellow at the Forum for International Democratic Studies.

He is also an Alumni of the Stanford Leadership Academy for Development, Council of Europe Academy of Political Excellence and Fletcher Summer Institute for Advanced Studies of Non-Violent Conflict. He is a regular contributor to many local and international media and a speaker at a number of prominent events and conferences.

Esther is international project manager at the Consul Democracy Foundation, where Esther leads the operations and activities of the foundation. These include promoting the digital citizen participation software CONSUL with governments and local administrations, supporting its community of users and developers, and working together with partners on (digital) democratic innovation.

Esther has managed projects in Brussels and Berlin, as Director EU Affairs at civic tech start-up Civocracy and as Chair at deliberative democracy project PRIhME. Her work revolves around democracy, by giving people the support and tools to become publicly involved in decision making processes on every level.

Ariane König is a research scientist at the University of Luxembourg, where she has developed new approaches to scientific inquiry in support of sustainability transformations and an innovative study programme to equip changes agents for sustainability and social innovation. 

She is a member of the European Statistical Advisory Committee and the national observatory on climate politics, where she actively leads discussions on the potential of citizen science as data source for democratizing EU environmental statistics and accounts. Before coming to Luxembourg König was employed at the Universities of Harvard and Oxford, where she conducted research and taught in post-graduate and executive training courses on technology governance.

Prior to this, she worked for a leading multinational life science corporation. She was a scientific consultant for the OECD, the European Commission, and EU research consortia. Ariane König was conferred her Bachelor, Master and Ph.D. Degree in Biochemistry from the University of Cambridge, Emmanuel College.

Nick is Head of Legal at Avaaz which means ‘voice’ and is a global civic movement with over 70 million members worldwide. Its members campaign for a thriving future for all of humanity and life on Earth, aiming for transformational impact on the big issues of the age - combating climate change, preserving biodiversity, protecting democracy and challenging disinformation and, now, ending the tragic war in Ukraine.

Avaaz has played key roles in inspiring the Paris Agreement, calling for the protection of 50% of the planet, demanding accountability for tech giants and challenging the far-right’s bid to corrupt the EU elections and the Avaaz legal team is deeply involved in all that work, supporting strategic litigation on climate and money laundering, demanding accountability for crimes against humanity and proposing legislation to regulate Big Tech while helping the wider Avaaz team navigate the complexities of election, data protection, intellectual property and defamation law.

Arthur is an athletic and optimistic entrepreneur, who started his journey in 2012 by creating several online communities as well as digital applications. Strong from his experience in digital marketing, he developed several tools such as "Whosup" (resold company) or "Six" (dating app) with the aim to use technology to create real added-value in the physical world.

After an experience in influence marketing and further to the sale of his society BrainBox to a group of dating, he manages to lead the European network for an American social network named Thriller, which gathers 100 million of users. 

Since 2019, he co-founds Time For The Planet with the ambition to deploy 100 innovations fighting on a global scale against climate change by involving citizens from all over the world to invest in the project by becoming a shareholder and actor of the change. In July 2021, he was selected to follow the Linkedin #Changemakers program, which helps and supports entrepreneurs in their project and willingness to drive the change worldwide.

A leading participation expert with experience working on projects in countries such as the US, the UK, France, Tunisia, Colombia, India, Zambia, or the Czech Republic, Tom builds on his rich field experience and transfers it to conceptual work and design of tailor-made participation processes combining international best practices and the local specifications. Tom’s key expert areas include participation process design, stakeholder engagement, youth participation strategies, civic tech consulting, data analysis, strategic planning for communities of various sizes, and capacity building.

In the past he co-founded and ran D21, a social enterprise that provided software and consulting services on public engagement processes. He led a team that for the past four years implemented a digital voting solution for the NYCC Participatory Budgeting (PB) process.

Tom is passionate about sharing his extensive know-how and mentoring upcoming participation experts. Tom’s background is in communications and media, and he brings this expertise to the participation processes.

Executive Director at 1991 Open Data Incubator, Co-founder & CMO at SPREAD & Ambassador @wtech.club. Strong with an experience of more than 8 years in building tech communities and startups, Jane is a startup mentor and adviser. JaneLecturer and trainer at KSE and IIB (MBA programs). Teenagers mentor at Ukrainian business schools (Computer Academy “Step” and “Creators”). Actively involved in the tech ecosystem development in Kyiv and Ukraine. Social investor at Urban Space 500. Jane is in the TOP-20 of women tech entrepreneurs in Ukraine and in the TOP-50 of influential women in FinTech industry.