Symposium on Information Controls

Esra’a Al Shafei is the founding director of Majal, a network of online platforms that amplify under-reported and marginalized voices in West Asia and North Africa. She is also the co-founder of the Numun Fund, which resources and sustains women-led groups who engage with technology in their activism in the Global Majority. Most recently, she’s the founder of Surveillance Watch, an interactive map and database that exposes the hidden connections within the opaque surveillance industry. Esra’a currently serves on the Board of Trustees at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit which hosts Wikipedia. She is also on the Board of the Tor Project, developers of one of the world’s strongest tools for privacy and freedom online, and Mastodon, a free and open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services.

Savena Surana (she/her) is a creative producer, strategist, and artist dedicated to telling impactful stories. As the co-founder of Identity 2.0, a creative studio envisioning better digital futures, she transforms research into engaging narratives about our relationship with technology. She has worked with organizations like the Mastercard Foundation, the Westminster Forum of Democracy, and Careful Trouble, and serves as the program manager for Grand Plan, a micro-grants charity. Savena’s interdisciplinary efforts span exhibitions, printed zines, workshops, and digital experiences, collaborating with groups such as Stop Killer Robots and Feminist Internet and sharing her expertise globally, including at the University of Oxford and the World Web Foundation.

Michaela is the Programme Officer for Censorship at ARTICLE 19 where she works to ensure that people can exercise their rights to speak and know using Internet infrastructure that is purposefully designed and deployed to enable the free flow of information. In this role, Michaela works to improve the censorship resilience of telecommunication networks and the domain name system (DNS) through engaging in the development of anti-censorship standards and protocols at technical standards-setting forums, building and participating in civil society coalitions and information-sharing networks, and carrying out strategic communications and research outputs for the Censorship Programme.

Prior to joining A19, she served as the Advocacy & Engagement Officer at Global Partners Digital, leading civil society engagement efforts in global multilateral and multistakeholder forums and processes at the intersection of internet governance and human rights. She previously worked at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center and in the New York City Mayor’s office. She holds an MSc in Global Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in History from Northwestern University.