Panelists
Moderator: Amanda Brock, CEO, OpenUK
Speakers:
1. Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia
2. Laura Gilbert, Senior Director of AI, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change
3. Anastasia Stasenko, Co-founder and CEO, Pleias
4. Mishi Choudhary, Founder, SFLC.in
18 Feb 2026, 10:30 – 11:25
Room number 15, Bharat Mandapam
About
Amanda Brock, CEO, OpenUK
OpenUK CEO and Executive Producer State of Open Con, Amanda’s 25 years’ legal experience includes being instrumental in shaping open source’s legal frameworks and internet law in 2000’s. Sought-after international keynote speaker, tech press contributor and editor “Open Source: Law, Policy and Practice” (2022).
Recognition: Raconteur 50 CEOs (2025); Computer Weekly 50 Most Influential Women (2023-2025); Computing IT Leaders 100 (2023 – 2025); Lifetime Achievement WIPL (2022); Women Who Will (2023); INvolve Heroes (2022, 2023); Novi Awards (2024).
Advisory: Public Boards UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure; KDE. Commercial Boards: Mimoto; Scarf; FerretDB and Space Aye. Fellow, Open Forum Academy; Distinguished Fellow, Rust Foundation; European Representative, OIN; Ambassador, Open Charge Alliance; Board Member Mojaloop Foundation; and Expert Network, Digital Innovation Board of ITU.
Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia
Jimmy Wales is a globally recognized futurist and visionary tech entrepreneur, celebrated for founding Wikipedia—the world’s fourth‑most‑popular website and a cornerstone of the free-access knowledge movement. Since launching in 2001, Wikipedia has become a global utility, used billions of times monthly, and a leading bulwark in the fight against misinformation.
Driven by a passion for innovation and trust‑based community building, Wales is also the author of the forthcoming book The Seven Rules of Trust (co‑written with Dan Gardner), which distills the principles that made Wikipedia possible into a practical guide for building lasting institutions and relationships in an era of declining credibility.
Among the world’s most sought‑after keynote speakers, Wales offers audiences deep insight into topics ranging from AI and misinformation to digital governance and societal resilience.
Audiences praise his optimistic vision, eloquent delivery, and ability to translate complex ideas into memorable, inspiring narratives, exemplified by praise such as: “We were all inspired… by his presence here.” (McCann/Thiess)
A recipient of honors such as TIME’s 100 Most Influential People and recognition by the World Economic Forum as one of the top 250 leaders shaping our global future, Wales is also active in global tech discourse. In recent interviews he’s cautioned about AI
overreach—calling current systems like ChatGPT “terrible at writing Wikipedia” due to hallucinations, while calling for tools to flag errors and preserve human editorial standards.
He advocates for media literacy, transparency, and policies that support open collaboration over heavy-handed regulation.
Wales lives in London and continues to engage with global audiences and institutions, drawing on his unique blend of entrepreneurial insight, community-driven values, and unwavering belief in trust as the foundation for enduring progress.
Photo credit: Perry Seymour-Marsh
Laura Gilbert, Senior Director of AI, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change
Dr Laura Gilbert is Senior Director of AI at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, where she leads the AI Innovation Lab, working with governments worldwide to harness AI for more effective public services and better outcomes for citizens. She is also a Visiting Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics School of Public Policy.
From September 2020 to January 2025, Laura worked in 10 Downing Street as the founding director of 10DS, the government’s data science team, and the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (i.AI). Her teams delivered rapid, high-impact modelling and analysis to support policy decisions, while pioneering AI solutions for public services. She was awarded a CBE for Services to Technology and Analysis in the New Year’s Honours 2024.
Laura holds a doctorate in Particle Physics from the University of Oxford and undergraduate degrees from the University of Cambridge. She is a Fellow of both the Institute of Physics and the Institute of Analytics, and is fluent in seven programming languages.
Before government, Laura spent a decade as CTO of Rescon, a medical technologies company she helped build from startup to acquisition. Her work spanned wearable technology, systems architecture, and data security—she is named on four patents, including as lead inventor on two. Earlier in her career, she worked in quantitative finance and defence intelligence. Outside work, Laura has represented Great Britain seven times in Savate kickboxing.
Anastasia Stasenko, Co-founder and CEO, Pleias
Anastasia Stasenko is the co-founder and CEO of Pleias, a Franco-German startup developing full open-source small reasoning models trained exclusively on permissively licensed data. A senior associate lecturer in data analysis and digital strategy at Sorbonne-Nouvelle University, she coordinated the creation of Common Corpus, the largest fully open dataset for training LLMs, with over two trillion tokens. Under her leadership, Pleias built Albert, France’s first sovereign AI co-pilot for civil servants, and developed fully offline LLM assistants for frontline health workers and teachers in West Africa. She is an advocate for ethical, transparent and decentralised AI development.
Mishi Choudhary, Founder, SFLC.in
Ms. Mishi Choudhary, Founder of SFLC.in. She is a technology lawyer and an online civil liberties activist who practices law in New York and New Delhi. Currently, she leads the legal department and IP monetization business at Washington DC based cybersecurity company, Virtru. Mishi Choudhary found SFLC.in in 2010. Under her leadership, SFLC.in became the premier non-profit organization representing the rights of Internet users and free software developers in India. In 2025, SFLC.in won the EFF pioneer award. She works at the forefront of digital rights on internet freedom, privacy, innovation, and free and open source software.