Interledger Protocol (ILP): Interledger Summit Speakers

Briana Marbury

President & CEO

Interledger Foundation

Briana is passionate about promoting open payments and financial interoperability solutions for the world's population that need it most. As President & CEO of the Interledger Foundation, her goal is to expand the public’s awareness of the Interledger Protocol's immense potential to improve lives.

State of Interledger

We'll take a look back at the origins of the Interledger Protocol, where the ecosystem is today, and the illuminous future we're looking forward to.

Erin Brown

Performance Lead

USAID

Erin Brown is the Team Leader for the Management Performance Strengthening Team in the Management Bureau’s Office of Management Policy, Budget and Operational Performance. Before that she launched USAID’s new Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) agenda as the Agency’s Acting Chief DEIA Officer in the Office of the Administrator, including development of its 2021 DEIA Strategic Plan and an Equity Action Plan that highlights the Agency’s key actions to address equity across its programs and partnerships. A strategy and organizational transformation subject matter expert with 23 years of experience in the public and private sectors, Ms. Brown joined the United States Agency for International Development in 2012 as a Franklin Fellow after 13 years in the private sector where she led medium and large-scale strategic planning, business process improvement, and organizational change management initiatives for defense and civilian government agencies. Prior to joining USAID, Ms. Brown was a Senior Principal at the Hay Group, a global management consulting firm, where she led the Building Effective Organizations Practice in the Federal Sector.

The 5Ps of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is a hot topic across multiple industries and sectors, especially since the untimely death of George Floyd in 2020. While strategies, tools, and techniques to drive development of inclusive financial systems is the focus of the Interledger Summit, is that goal possible without a strong focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion by actors in the financial inclusion space across all aspects of their operations? In this talk, you will hear from Erin Brown, former Acting Chief Diversity Officer at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as she discusses the 5 Ps of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and how she used a focus on the 5 Ps of DEI to build USAID's Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) program. Through these 5Ps, you will gain awareness as to how our ability to achieve equity and financial inclusion may not be possible until that same focus and intention is used to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion within our own organizations (i.e., it starts at home). Erin will also cover a few foundational strategies to level up on our DEI efforts so that it both benefits our organizations internally and improved our ability to promote greater financial equity and inclusion outcomes.

Paula Hunter

Executive Director

Mojaloop Foundation

Paula Hunter is the Executive Director of the Mojaloop Foundation – a charitable nonprofit organization focused on extending the financial inclusion efforts of the Mojaloop open source software project. She leads the organization’s strategic planning and direction; grant, membership and strategic partnership development; and evangelism for the organization and its mission. Ms. Hunter is an open source and technology leader with nearly two decades of executive director-level experience managing industry advocacy groups, open source organizations, and standards associations.

Making Digital Payments Affordable and Simple for Everyone, Everywhere

While mobile money services exist in nearly 100 countries, 1.4 billion people still lack access to digital financial services, despite most owning a mobile phone, according to the World Bank's Global Findex. By providing a model for how to simplify and reduce the cost of designing interoperability between individual payment services, countries working with the banks, and mobile money and digital payment providers can develop connected instant payment systems that meet the digital financial services needs of emerging markets - especially the financially excluded. Built upon the Interledger Protocol, Mojaloop is an open source platform for helping hub operators with instant payments clearing. Mojaloop's API protocol does more than just move money: the software helps network participants to interact robustly with each other, helping to bring some financial inclusion principles to life. Mojaloop is reliant on its community of supporters, contributors, evangelists, developers, and others to make its work possible and help achieve the Foundation’s mission of providing universal financial inclusion to all. This session will go into detail about Mojaloop’s work with Interledger’s Rafiki API work and the need to upgrade to Interledger v4.

Julaire Hall

Programs Outreach Manager

Interledger Foundation

Julaire is a highly accomplished project and program management professional with 10+ years of extensive experience in planning, executing, and overseeing the successful delivery of programs in government and the global services sector. She’s previously worked for Jamaica’s investment and promotions agency and the private sector-led industry outsourcing association. As Programs Outreach Manager for the Interledger Foundation, Julaire will help build the programmatic aspects of the Foundation. Julaire enjoys traveling and spending time with her daughter. She’s a children’s book author and blogger.

Including GenZ in Digital Affairs: Bowie State University Share-Out

Banking the unbanked population through digitized financial inclusion may bring positive change in the lives of underprivileged populations and economies globally. What better way to prepare for such change than engaging future change makers, thought leaders and activists to be informed and equipped with the knowledge to enable a more equitable digital financial ecosystem? Bowie State University has received 25K in grant funding from the Interledger Foundation to execute an undergraduate course with students exploring open payments technologies, digital financial systems and issues in eCommerce. BSU will also create content for the community and other institutions to help increase equitable and inclusive participation. The eCommerce course will be offered through the Management Information Systems Department in the College of Business to students enrolled in Information Systems, Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Management, and Accounting Computer Science, Security, and Technology. Each student will be able to interact with mentors, practitioners, and open web payment advocates. The course model is a funnel from broad foundation concepts to the role of web payments to foster more efficient and equitable commerce.

Xiaoji Song

Artist and Interdisciplinary Researcher

Independent

Xiaoji Song (she/they) is an artist, (interdisciplinary) researcher, and creative practitioner based in Berlin. Growing up in China and trained in Europe, I work on socially relevant and community-specific experiences, often with the local networks, NGOs, and local cultural and political institutions, mediated by texts, images, games, and performances. My projects have appeared in local or international media or cultural platforms in China (PRC), the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and Bulgaria, to name a few: Worldwide FM, Sofia Art Week, Design Indaba, Goethe Institute Bulgaria, etc.) Working in the liminal spaces of political theory, practice, and art, Xiaoji Song’s research interests include techno-politics, networked social movement, border practices, and the performative aspect of political memory. I am now in a residency at Trust Berlin with two other artists/researchers working on modding practice in the gaming community as well as involved in a collective project on a fictional system of speculative emotional future supported by Light Art Space and Callie’s in Berlin. I am in the study group for the AI Anarchies Project at the German Academy of Art (ADK) and am also an alumna of the Open Set Lab research residency and the University of the Underground research program. Currently, I am finishing my master’s in global communication focusing on political communication of border technology at the University of Erfurt while working as a research assistant for the Humboldt University of Berlin.

Can web monetization protocols bring about a fairer digital future?

Our current, advertiser-supported Internet is broken. The business models underpinning data brokers, tracking, and programmatic advertising are predatory, and the tiny percentage of revenue that flows back to content creators often makes their work unsustainable. New technologies, like open payment networks that support micropayments and drip-style donations, are fostering more equitable alternatives for funding the work of individual creators and collectives. More democratic governance mechanisms and processes are able, or have the potential, to scale and support new forms of collective decision-making and digital participation. But how can early adopters ensure that these technologies are used for the public good, rather than supporting hyper-capitalist systems that have made the current digital landscape so inequitable? And what best practices can be learned from existing open source projects that operate in the public interest? This session includes panelists from industry, civil society, and academia who will discuss the challenges and opportunities that exist in an alternatively-funded online world. Moderator: Ayden Férdeline (Australia/Germany) Panelists: Xiaoji Song, interdisciplinary researcher and artist (China/Germany) Dr Stephanie Perrin, past winner of the Electronic Frontier Foundation ‘Pioneer Award’ (Canada) Raashi Saxena, social innovation practitioner (India) Ellen Magallanes, counsel, Wikimedia Foundation (USA)

Ayden Férdeline

Fellow

Internet Law and Policy Foundry

Ayden Férdeline is a public interest technologist who has worked directly with activists, academics, civil society organizations, lawmakers and industry to support responsible technological innovation with a focus on social impact. He is inspired by the potential of the decentralized web and is passionate about cultivating an empowered community of civic minded stakeholders who share a meaningful and actionable commodority to make Web3 work for more people than Web 2.0 did. He previously represented European civil society organizations on ICANN’s GNSO Council, the body which makes binding policy for generic top-level domain names like .COM and .ORG, and was a technology policy fellow with the Mozilla Foundation. He now hosts the Internet governance history podcast POWER PLAYS – generously supported by Grant for the Web – and independently researches how Internet governance processes can be made more inclusive, for organizations like the National Democratic Institute and the National Endowment for Democracy. Based in Berlin, he is an alumnus of the London School of Economics.

Can web monetization protocols bring about a fairer digital future?

Our current, advertiser-supported Internet is broken. The business models underpinning data brokers, tracking, and programmatic advertising are predatory, and the tiny percentage of revenue that flows back to content creators often makes their work unsustainable. New technologies, like open payment networks that support micropayments and drip-style donations, are fostering more equitable alternatives for funding the work of individual creators and collectives. More democratic governance mechanisms and processes are able, or have the potential, to scale and support new forms of collective decision-making and digital participation. But how can early adopters ensure that these technologies are used for the public good, rather than supporting hyper-capitalist systems that have made the current digital landscape so inequitable? And what best practices can be learned from existing open source projects that operate in the public interest? This session includes panelists from industry, civil society, and academia who will discuss the challenges and opportunities that exist in an alternatively-funded online world. Moderator: Ayden Férdeline (Australia/Germany) Panelists: Xiaoji Song, interdisciplinary researcher and artist (China/Germany) Dr Stephanie Perrin, past winner of the Electronic Frontier Foundation ‘Pioneer Award’ (Canada) Raashi Saxena, social innovation practitioner (India) Ellen Magallanes, counsel, Wikimedia Foundation (USA)