Markus Beckedahl is the founder of netzpolitik.org, one of the largest public interest media in Germany. He built up the news website and was editor-in-chief from 2003 to 2022. He is co-founder of the re:publica conference, Europe's leading conference on digitisation and society. 

Markus Beckedahl was an expert in the German Bundestag's Enquete Commission on "Internet and Digital Society" from 2010 to 2013 and has been a member of the Media Council of the Berlin-Brandenburg State Media Authority since 2010. In 2015, he was investigated for treason and considered a state-certified traitor to the German country under initial suspicion for a few months. The Federal Public Prosecutor General then in office had to retire afterwards. 

Markus has received numerous prizes and awards for his work with netzpolitik.org, including the Grimme Online Award in the category "Special", the Günther Wallraff Prize for the critical examination of journalism, and in 2015 also the "Team of the Year" prize for journalists awarded by the medium magazine.

Ministerialrätin Sabine Dannelke is Ministerial Advisor in the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport. She is Head of the DP-10 Division ("Principles of National Digital Policy, Digital Strategy, Digital Summit, Digital Budget") within the Digital and Data Policy (DP) Department. In addition, she currently heads the sub-department DP-1 (National, European and International Digital Policy) on a temporary basis.

Urs Eppenberger has a degree in electronics from ETH Zurich. He has worked for the SWITCH foundation since he graduated, helping to build the Swiss Internet. Today, Urs Eppenberger is in charge of SWITCH’s registry for the top-level domains .ch and .li. He is responsible for the stable operation of the related services, focusing on safeguarding the DNS as a critical infrastructure and protecting users in collaboration with the Federal Administration and the Internet industry.

Adriana Groh is currently setting up a project on data sovereignty and participation at the newly established The New Institute in Hamburg. Before, she was director of the Prototype Fund, an innovation fund of the Open Knowledge Foundation and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. She also headed a study on digital sovereignty and open digital base technology carried out for the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action and co-initiated a range of technical projects, such as a messenger app for the German Federal Elections in 2017 and 2021 and the #WirVsVirus online hackathon 2020. Adriana studied Public Policy and Democratic Innovations in Frankfurt and Maastricht.

Thomas Keller is CTO and member of the Executive Board of DENIC eG, the managing organisation of Germany’s ccTLD .de. He is responsible for Product Management, Technology/Security, Marketing as well as Policy & Public Relations. Thomas has been in the Internet industry since 1997. He has been actively involved in the ICANN/ccTLD environment for more than two decades and contributed to a range of working groups in various positions. He also is co-founder and Board member of ID4me.

Peter Koch has been “doing” Internet in Germany for 30 years. In his role as advisor to the DENIC Executive Board, he interlinks the areas of policy, standardisation, regulation and cybersecurity. Peter Koch represents DENIC at important national and international bodies and organisations like ICANN, IGF, IETF, RIPE and CENTR, translating technology into policy and vice versa. The current focus of his activities is on Internet governance and the security, stability, and resilience of the Internet identifier system.

Peter Koch sits on the Board of ISOC.DE e.V., the German Chapter of the Internet Society.

Sascha Lobo, born in 1975, studied social and business communication in Berlin. He works as an author, Internet entrepreneur and speaker on all aspects of digitisation and the impact of technology and networking on business and society. In 2005, he founded the community blog “Riesenmaschine” with Kathrin Passig, Holm Friebe and others. In 2006, the blog won the Grimme Online Award and in 2007 the Erik Reger Literature Prize.

Since 2007, Sascha Lobo has explained the Internet and its effect on business, politics and society in mass media. In 2009, he made the documentary film "Der Loboist" for the television channel ARTE, in which he investigated the action mechanisms of lobbying.

Since 2011, he has written the weekly column "Die Mensch-Maschine" in the German online magazine SPIEGEL online, in which he looks at current events from a digital perspective. Since summer 2017, the column has been supplemented by his weekly podcast "Debattencast," where he deals with the comments on his columns.

In 2017, he shot the film "manipuliert" for the German television channel ZDF, which deals with the effects social media have on politics and society. Together with Christoph Kappes, Sascha Lobo runs the “Fortschrittsfabrik”, a platform for digital transformation projects. Examples of the projects that have emerged from it are the e-book platform Sobooks or the "Twitterbarometer" used for the 2013 German Bundestag elections.

Since 2008, Sascha Lobo has regularly delivered keynotes on digitisation as a professional speaker. His annual "State of the Union Address" at the digital conference re:publica has a wider, public audience. 

Polina Malaja is the Policy Director at the Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries (CENTR), leading its policy work and liaising with governments, institutions and other organisations in the internet ecosystem. She holds an LL.M in International Human Rights Law and Intellectual Property Rights Law and is deeply interested in interactions between technology and fundamental rights and freedoms in the digital age. Before joining CENTR, Polina was responsible for the free and open source software advocacy work at the Free Software Foundation Europe, together with leading the FSFE legal team and coordinating the biggest network of legal experts in Free Software: the Legal Network

Göran Marby was appointed CEO & President on 23 May 2016. He brings over 20 years experience as a senior executive in the Internet and technology sector, as well as his leadership as Director General at the independent regulatory body Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS), where he worked closely with international organizations and standards bodies.

Prior to this, he served as CEO and founder of Appgate, a Swedish security software company (now Cryptzone in the U.S), where he grew the organization to a global company with customers in 35 countries and operations in the U.S. Before his seven years at Appgate, he was CEO for the advanced networks company Cygate Group (now owned by TeliaSonera) where he spearheaded operations in five countries with revenues in the range of 120 million euros. And as Country Manager for Cisco in Sweden, Marby led sales of all products and services. Marby holds a Bachelor of Science in Finance from the University of Gothenburg, School of Business, Economics and Law, and is married with three kids. He is fluent in English and Swedish and is a Swedish national.

Christian Müller has been a member of the management of Cronon since 2011, initially as CEO of Cronon AG and after its conversion into a GmbH as executive director. Cronon GmbH is a subsidiary of STRATO AG, whose service portfolio includes the domain service provision for STRATO AG. Christian Müller joined STRATO in 2000 and has been a member of the Cronon AG Board ever since. In his role as Board member, he has been responsible for varying technology resorts within the STRATO group, most recently as CIO of Strato AG until 2014. 

Before he joined STRATO, Christian managed H/S/D/ Consult's ISP department as co-owner of the Berlin system house. His focal tasks were network planning and ISP. The ISP department of H/S/D/ Consult was established in 1994. Thus, Christian Müller can look back on 25 years of experience in the domain business. He also held various positions at DENIC eG.

Since 2007, he has been a member of the Technical Advisory Council of DENIC eG, and sits on the Supervisory Board of DENIC eG.

Andreas Musielak is COO and member of the Executive Board of DENIC eG, the managing organisation of Germany’s ccTLD .de. He is responsible for Finance, Legal and Human Resources as well as Member and End Customer Services and is Co-Managing Director of the subsidiary DENIC Services GmbH & Co. KG. He is actively involved in international meetings of the domain industry within the sphere of ICANN as well as of the Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries, CENTR, and is Chair of the standing Strategic and Operational Planning Standing Committee (SOPC) of ICANN's Country Code Names Supporting Organisation (ccNSO). He also is a member of the Information Economy Committee of the Frankfurt Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Katharina Nocun is a publicist as well as an economist and political scientist. The primary focus of her work is on the tension between digitisation and democracy. She is a regular guest on numerous TV and talk show formats. Her podcast "Denkangebot" was nominated for the prestigious Grimme Online Award in 2020. Her first book "Die Daten, die ich rief" (The Data that I Summoned, 2018) is about the data states and corporations collect from us. Her second book "Fake Facts. Wie Verschwörungstheorien unser Denken bestimmen“ (Fake Facts. How Conspiracy Theories Shape our Thinking, 2020), co-authored by Pia Lamberty, became a bestseller. In May 2021, Nocun and Lamberty published their second co-authored book "True Facts - was gegen Verschwörungserzählungen wirklich hilft" (True Facts - What Really Helps against Conspiracy Narratives).

Thomas Rickert is managing partner of the law firm Rickert Rechtsanwaltsgesellschaft mbH based in Bonn (https://rickert.law/en/). The law firm with currently 10 lawyers is specialised in digital economy. Thomas Rickert advises national and international clients in domain law, trademark law, data protection law, copyright law and IT law.

Thomas Rickert also is Director of the eco Names & Numbers Forum of the Association of the Internet Industry, eco e.V, which represents the interests of the association's members from the domain industry at national and international level and provides information with regular events and publications as well as the opportunity to exchange ideas. From 2011 to 2015 and also today, Thomas Rickert was and is a member of the GNSO Council at ICANN.

Dimitri Robl studied Languages and Cultures of South Asia and Tibet at the University of Vienna and after an excursion into comparative Indo-Germanic linguistics became enthralled with IT security through the Chaos Computer Club Vienna. He spent three years with CERT.at, Austrias national computer emergency response team, as junior IT security analyst, where he acquired a broad knowledge in many areas of IT security. Since January 2022 he has been working with the Austrian Federal Ministry of Justice as an IT expert in the field digital forensics.

Robert Schischka has been CTO of Austria’s official domain registry nic.at since September2003. nic.at administers all domain names with the endings .at. co.at. and or.at. Robert Schischka also is CTO of nic.at’s sister companies tldbox GmbH and ipcom GmbH. Additionally, he has been director of the national Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT.at GmbH), a subsidiary of nic.at, since 2008. His professional focus as managing director is on IT strategy, IT architecture and infrastructure and IT security. 

Robert Schischka studied business economics at the University of Economics in Vienna, specialising in commercial information technology and controlling. He gained his profound experience as a security expert during his occupation in a subsidiary company of the Austrian National Bank and as a consultant with the internationally active IT-consulting company CSC.

Rainer Sträter is Head of Cloud Development and Digital Ecosystems at IONOS. In this role, he leads the international IaaS department. In 2015, he was responsible for the successful launch of IONOS‘ Next Generation Cloud Platform in Europe and the US. Since 2019, he has been sitting on several committees and working groups within Gaia-X.  

Rainer Sträter has over 20 years of experience in the hosting industry, focusing on the development of IT infrastructure solutions. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Dortmund and the Grand École ISEN in Lille. He then started his career in VoIP-Stacks software development and represented his company in standardisation bodies like ETSI.org. Before joining IONOS in 2012, Rainer Sträter held positions at Web.de, Telefonica O2 and Deutsche Bahn and was responsible for various projects.

Dr. Tatiana Tropina is Assistant Professor in cybersecurity governance at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University and an Associate Fellow of The Hague Program on International Cyber Security. A lawyer by education, for the last 15 years she has been engaged in academic research, policy and advocacy in the field of cybercrime, cybersecurity, ICT regulation and Internet governance, including several years of volunteer involvement in policy-making and Internet governance processes at ICANN, Freedom Online Coalition Advisory Network, and European Dialogue on Internet Governance.

Manuela Urban is COO of the Sovereign Cloud Stack project of OSB Alliance. She has more than 25 years of experience from leadership positions in research institutes, where open, global collaboration to accomplish large-scale tasks as well as sharing resources, in particular digital infrastructures and data, have always been common practice.

Claudia van Veen, born in Hannover, studied medicine for 7 semesters before she decided to follow her passion for the stage. She learned all about musicals from scratch at Hamburg Stage School. After some years in the profession she received her first request to present a news format. By now, Claudia can look back on more than 15 years of presenting experience. But actually she rather is a person who likes to look ahead: with a positive attitude, flexible thinking and well informed. 

Her main fields of interest are IT, digitisation, cyber security, medicine and psychology. Which she loves to present not only in German but also in fluent English or Dutch.

Emma Wehrwein is Project Manager Digital Business Models at eco – Association for the Internet Industry. Since 2020 she is heading the Project Management Office for the German Gaia-X Federation Services initiative.

Richard Wein has been Commercial Manager of Austria's official domain registry nic.at since 2000. nic.at administers all domain names with the endings .at. co.at. and or.at. The state-certified Business Economist can look back on several years of experience in the fields of controlling and commercial management in different industrial enterprises. At nic.at, he is responsible for Finance, Administration and Marketing & Sales. In this role, he regularly attends international meetings of the domain sector (ICANN, CENTR, etc.). Richard Wein also is Managing Director of nic.at's sister companies tldbox GmbH, ipcom GmbH with the product RcodeZero DNS and of CERT.at GmbH. tldbox GmbH offers backend registry services and consulting for new gTLDs. RcodeZero DNS is an Anycast Service provided by nic.at and targeted at corporations, Internet service providers and Top Level Domains.

Andreas Weiss is responsible for the eco business unit “Digital Business Models” and member of the Executive Board of eco – Association of the Internet Industry. He started with eco in 1998, initially with the Competence Group E-Commerce & Logistics and then moving to E-Business. Since 2010 he is Director of EuroCloud Germany and since 2019 Board Member of Trusted Cloud Competence Network. In these roles, he is responsible for the cloud activities of the eco association. Moreover, he is engaged in various projects for the use of artificial intelligence, data privacy and GDPR conformity as well as security and compliance of digital services. Since 2019 he is involved in specifying GAIA-X and coordinates the development of the GAIA-X Federation Services.

Peter Welchering has worked as a journalist for German radio, television and print (including Deutschlandradio, ZDF, various ARD channels, FAZ) since 1983. He is a certified trainer in journalism (KfJ) and teaches at various journalism schools in Germany and other countries. Welchering studied philosophy and believes that the skills he acquired there definitely help him in his journalistic work. What he once planned as a dissertation in 1980 never led to a doctorate, but was at least published in form of a book in 2011 (so actually quite late). E-mail surveillance in city halls, missing tax money, profile databases of the security authorities to expose whistleblowers and major and minor data thefts are other topics he has engaged in for more than 30 years. Welchering was a volunteer trainer at Heise publishing house (e.g. computer magazine c't) for three years and editor-in-chief and editorial director at the publisher Konradin Verlag (computer magazine “Computer Zeitung” and online portals) for eight years.