Rebecca MacKinnon is a writer, researcher, and advocate regarded as one of the leading voices on digital rights and internet freedom. She is currently a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and recently served as Vice President for Global Advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation. Her book Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom won the Goldsmith Book Prize and remains a defining text in debates about corporate and governmental control of online speech. A former CNN bureau chief in Beijing and Tokyo, she co-founded Global Voices, an international citizen media network, and also founded Ranking Digital Rights, an organization evaluates the world's most powerful internet and telecommunications companies on their respect for users' privacy and free expression. She has taught at the University of Hong Kong and the University of Pennsylvania and held fellowships at the University of California’s National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, the Open Society Foundations, Princeton, and New America.
Sean Gailmard is the Herman Royer Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley, where he also serves as Chair of the University Committee on Academic Freedom for the UC systemwide Academic Senate. His research explores how political institutions operate, change, and affect governance quality, with a particular focus on the U.S. executive branch, checks and balances, bureaucratic capacity, and the evolution of American institutions. He is the author of several books including Agents of Empire and Learning While Governing, the latter of which won best book awards from the American Political Science Association. His roles as chair of the UC system's academic freedom committee and Faculty Director of Berkeley Liberty Initiative place him at the center of ongoing debates about the institutional conditions under which free inquiry and expression can be protected within universities.
Eduardo García brings more than three decades of experience at the intersection of economics and journalism, making him an authoritative voice on Mexico's business, finance, and political economy. He served as Mexico bureau chief for Bloomberg News, where he led coverage of one of Latin America's most consequential economies for an international audience. A pioneer in digital media, he founded Sentido Común, an online financial newspaper providing the economic, financial, and business information essential for decision-making that has since evolved into Axis Negocios. His mission to help explain complex political and economic dynamics has expanded as questions of press freedom, access, and the conditions under which journalism can be practiced become increasingly fraught across Latin America. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism.
