Geraldine de Bastion is a bilingual (en/de) political scientist with an intercultural background and experience working with activists, governments, startups and NGOs across the word. Her work focuses on digital transformation and international cooperation, innovation, and human rights. She will be rocking the Nextcloud Conference this year with a talk about usecases in healthcare for Open Hardware!
She founded the consultancy firm Konnektiv in 2013. Konnektiv advises various organizations including the City of Berlin and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development on digital transformation.
In 2018 she authored and moderated the Arte documentary “Digital Africa” which captures many of the innovators active in the GIG network.
Since 2012, she has been part of the curatorial team for the re:publica, Europe’s largest conference on the topic of the Internet and society, and regularly organizes and curates events in the field of politics and digitization.
In 2018 she organized the first re:publica in Accra, Ghana with over 2000 participants and over 260 speakers from across Africa.
Geraldine is also the founder of the Global Innovation Gathering (GIG), a network of grassroots innovators, social entrepreneurs, founders, and managers of makerspaces, hackerspaces, and innovation hubs, shaping digital communities for social and sustainable innovation around the world.
We will make the schedule and the following info available soon.
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When she had just started university, Geraldine founded her first NGO and started organizing peer to peer digital media trainings for youths. The internet was young and innocent when she co-built a platform for young people to network and publish school or youth magazines, way before blogs or other platforms were “shaped”.
“ Everything was super exploratory and experimental at the time. We soon began thinking about how to translate activism to the online space. With the first efforts to regulate the digital forms of activism and civil disobedience came the interest in internet regulation and digital rights and I have been active in the field ever since.”
“Resources crucial to the development of humanity should be open and accessible for all, including access to internet and the resources it provides as well as how ownership and use of data is managed in societies.”
Geraldine believes that fighting for a better internet means fighting for access, openness and transparency. It is supporting decentralized, independent structures, grassroots innovation and the idea of a globally connected society that is not steered or owned by monopolistic corporates but collective and diverse.
Check Geraldine’s talk at the Nextcloud Conference and grab your ticket here.
See you in Berlin!
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