Samer Hassan face photo

I am an activist, researcher and teacher, Faculty Associate at Harvard University‘s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and Associate Professor (“Profesor Titular“) at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Spain. I have Spanish/Lebanese origins, and a messy background mixing Computer Science, Social Sciences and Artificial Intelligence.

My focus is on decentralized collaboration. Specifically, I am passionate about how to build free/open source privacy-aware decentralized systems (e.g. fediverse, blockchain) that may facilitate the sustainability of collaborative communities and social movements (from the Commons paradigm).

I was awarded EU’s largest individual research grant, an ERC Grant of 1.5M€, to study Blockchain-based Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) within the Collaborative Economy. Find more at http://p2pmodels.eu.

I’ve led teams that span-off the interoperable open peer review system of  Decentralized Science, which has attracted 300K€ in independent funding so far, or the backend-as-a-service for federated collaborative apps SwellRT, whose codebase was adopted by the Apache Foundation.

As an activist, I have been involved in a wide diversity of grassroots initiatives in Madrid (Spain) and in Beirut (Lebanon), together with multiple online communities, and I’m accredited as grassroots facilitator.

And as a teacher, I try to apply a participatory approach inspired by grassroots facilitation, especially in my favourite course on cyber-ethics.

If you’d like to know more details about me, you can check my public bio, my cv, or my publications. You may see my random thoughts and concerns in my Twitter account. And you may contact me directly using: hi@samer.hassan.name