2026-07-11 –, Birch Salon
This is a panel of long-running movement builders from Free Software campaigning, platform cooperatives, rural deliberative governance, and cross-sector bridging work. These folks will share what worked, what broke, and what they'd do differently to help others in designing campaigns, cooperatives, and coalitions that are shaping change in society.
Speakers on the panel include:
Matthias Kirschner (Free Software Foundation Europe) presenting on "Public Money? Public Code!" (PMPC), a movement started in 2017, that has been one of the most successful campaigns for digital rights. Matthias will unpack the specific choices that let a single campaign framework grow into a movement of more than 200 civil society organizations and over 39,000 individuals worldwide.
Guil Maueler (Regens Unite) brings five years of gathering climate activists, cooperators, DAO builders, ReFi protocols, DeSci collectives, artists, and policy nerds into the same room.
Olivier Schulbaum (Platoniq Foundation, Democratic Tech Fund) will share about solidarity funding infrastructure Goteo.rg, drawing lessons from 15 years of supporting community-led initiatives through crowdfunding, matchfunding, and what we now frame as "crowdvocacy." Concrete cases he'll discuss include street vendors’ organising, La Nuestra, a testimonial digital archive against gender-based violence, and emerging models from renters and care workers such as Las Kellys.
Ray Xiang closes the loop with Nantang, a rural reconstruction community in China with more than 20 years of cooperative organizing, whose experiments with mutual aid, local deliberation, and — more recently — DAO governance and digital identity tools show both the promise and the fragility of building shared rules, records, and trust in a living, ordinary community.
This panel is a working conversation about the thin, hard-won connective tissue between movements that share goals but rarely share a table.
Elizabeth "Liz" Barry is the Executive Director of Metagov, a nonprofit research-to-infrastructure laboratory advancing collective self-governance in a digital age. By providing the scaffolding (tools, protocols, semantics, norms) necessary for emergent institutional design, Metagov aims to reduce the friction of upgrading or creating new organizations that are “alive” — i.e. that can adapt, incorporate feedback, and manage power. She co-founded the Computational Democracy Project with the creators of Polis. She witnessed Taiwan’s Sunflower Revolution in person, then introduced Audrey Tang to the international community in the 2016 piece "vTaiwan: Public Participation Methods on the Cyberpunk Frontier of Democracy." Her many initiatives have tuned human-environment-technology relationships by applying design to community organizing, science to environmental justice, and math to democracy. More at lizbarry.net.
Matthias Kirschner is President of FSFE. In 1999 he started using GNU/Linux and realised that software is deeply involved in all aspects of our lives. Matthias is convinced that this technology has to empower society not restrict it. While studying Political and Administrative Science he joined FSFE in 2004.
He helps other organisations, companies and governments to understand how they can benefit from Free Software -- which gives everybody the rights to use, understand, adapt, and share software -- and how those rights help to support freedom of speech, freedom of press or privacy.
In his spare time, together with his children and others he wrote the book "Ada & Zangemann - A Tale of Software, Skateboards, and Raspberry Ice Cream", which is available under Creative Commons in many languages and meanwhile also as a movie.
Platoniq Foundation (Creativity & Democracy) and Goteo.org Co-Founder. Member of Democratic Tech Fund (DTF) where he coordinates the forthcoming ARCHICARE Programme: Building infrastructures of memory, resistance and care. Designing strategies for co-constructing tomorrow's public policies and territories. Currently developing the citizen advocacy impact framework ‘Crowdvocacy’, a coordinated process between participation platforms where civic initiatives amplify their influence, obtaining resources, and stimulating leadership. Member of the Board of Trustees of the Civio Citizens' Foundation. Institutions hunger for WIDER participation. Citizens challenge them with #WILDERparticipation!
Guilherme Maueler co-founded Regens Unite and has spent 14+ years working at the intersection of brand, product, and community in Web3, fintech, and impact organisations.
I am a sociology researcher and community infrastructure practitioner from China. My work sits between agroecology, rural reconstruction, commons, and decentralized digital tools. I have been involved in chinese rural reconstruction and community infrastructure experiments, including digital identity,DAO governance, and local deliberation practices. My current interest is how technology can support living communities in seeing, discussing, and organizing themselves, rather than replacing their own capacity to deliberate and act.