Switzerland

Boards of Directors

The World Wide Web Foundation is an international organization, with not-for-profit status at our headquarters in Switzerland, and in the United States (501(c)(3)). The Swiss Board is responsible for the strategic direction of global programs and global fundraising. The United States Board is responsible for direction of local operations and fundraising in the US.

World Wide Web Foundation – Switzerland board of directors

Rick Haythornthwaite, Chair
Dame Helen Alexander
Tim Berners-Lee
Marcia Blenko
Gordon Brown
Dr. Jeffrey Jaffe
Rosemary Leith
Professor Nigel Shadbolt
Dr. Daniel Stauffacher
Kevin Stephenson
Katherine Tweedie

Dame Helen Alexander

Dame Helen Alexander is deputy president of the CBI, where she was president until June 2011. She is chairman of the Port of London Authority (PLA), Incisive Media and deputy chairman of esure Group Holdings, a non-executive director and chair of the remuneration committee at Rolls-Royce Group plc, and senior adviser to Bain Capital. Helen is Chancellor of the University of Southampton.

She is also currently involved with other not-for-profit organisations in media, the internet, the arts and education, through the trustees at Thomson-Reuters, the World Wide Web Foundation, the Grand Palais in Paris, the Said Business School in Oxford and St Paul’s Girls’ School. She was Chief Executive of the Economist Group till 2008, having joined the company in 1985.

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee is the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation. A graduate of Oxford University, England, Tim is Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and a director of the Web Science Trust (WST). He is the 3COM Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with a joint appointment at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL) . He heads the Decentralized Information Group (DIG) at CSAIL. He is also a Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton, UK.

In 1989 he invented the World Wide Web, an Internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He wrote the first Web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread.

In 2001 he became a fellow of the Royal Society. He has been the recipient of several international awards including the Japan Prize, the Prince of Asturias Foundation Prize, the Millennium Technology Prize and Germany’s Die Quadriga award. In 2004 he was knighted by H.M. Queen Elizabeth and in 2007 he was awarded the Order of Merit. He is the author of “Weaving the Web”.

Marcia Blenko

Marcia Blenko is a partner at Bain & Company and is currently based in the Boston office. She joined the firm in 1988 and was elected to the partnership in 1995. Marcia has spent more than half of her consulting career in London, serving many of Bain’s global clients.

Marcia leads Bain’s Global Organization Practice. She has extensive experience in organization design, decision effectiveness, and leading organizational change across a range of sectors.

Marcia has authored a number of articles on organization, decision effectiveness, leadership and executive compensation which have appeared in The Harvard Business Review, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The European Business Journal, Harvard Management Update and the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda.

Prior to joining Bain & Company, Ms. Blenko worked for Goldman Sachs in both New York and London. She earned her MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business where she was an Arjay Miller Scholar. She received a Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics/Economics from Brown University and was elected Phi Beta Kappa.

Gordon Brown

Gordon Brown served as British Prime Minister and Leader of the Labour Party
from 2007 to 2010. He served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1997 to
2007, making him the longest-serving Chancellor in modern history.

Brown’s time as Chancellor was marked by major reform of Britain’s monetary and
fiscal policy and sustained investment in health, education and overseas
aid. As Prime Minister, Brown’s tenure coincided with the recent fiscal
crisis, and he was one of the first to initiate calls for global financial
action; his administration also simultaneously introduced a range of rescue
measures within the country.

Brown has a Ph.D. in History from the University of Edinburgh. He lives with his wife Sarah, a charity campaigner, and their two young sons in Scotland.

Rick Haythornthwaite, Chair

Rick Haythornthwaite is Chairman of MasterCard International, Chairman of Network Rail, President of PSI and a Senior Advisor to STAR Capital Partners. His previous roles include Chief Executive of Invensys from 2001 to 2005, Group Chief Executive of Blue Circle Industries and he spent 18 years with BP in various senior roles. His previous Non Executive roles included Board membership of ICI, Land Securities and Lafarge. In the voluntary sector, he is Chairman of the Southbank Centre.

Dr. Jeffrey Jaffe

Dr. Jeff Jaffe is Chief Executive Officer of the World Wide Web Consortium.

In this role he works with Director Tim Berners-Lee, staff, and membership, and the public to evolve and communicate the W3C’s organizational vision. He is responsible for all of W3C’s global operations, for maintaining the interests of all of W3C’s stakeholders, and for sustaining a culture of cooperation and transparency, so that W3C continues to be the leading forum for the technical development and stewardship of the Web.

Rosemary Leith

Rosemary is a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, joining Berkman’s Internet Robustness team, building awareness and facilitating global partnerships in an effort to support a more stable and reliable Web. She is also a Director of Herdict (Berkman Center) that uses crowdsourcing to present a real-time view of Internet accessibility around the world. Rosemary is a Founding Director of the Web Foundation.

Previously, she was the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council Chair of the Future of Internet Security and is currently Vice Chair. She serves on the Advisory Board of a number of Universities including Queen’s University School of Business (Canada), Wolfson College, Oxford University and University of the Arts, London ( UK). Rosemary is also active in a number of Arts organizations where she advises on Strategy and Fundraising.

Rosemary has a background over the past 25 years in Finance, Principal Investment, Start-up creation and Sale in Europe, UK , Canada and USA, She has a Bachelor of Commerce Degree (Hons) in Finance and Accounting from Queen’s University, Canada.

Professor Nigel Shadbolt

Nigel Shadbolt is Professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deputy Head (Research) of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. He is a Founding Director of the Web Science Trust. Working with Tim Berners-Lee he is currently Information Advisor to the UK Government.

In its 50th Anniversary year 2006 – 07, Nigel was President of the British Computer Society. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Academy of Engineering and the British Computer Society.

Between 2000-7, he was the Director of the £7.5m EPSRC Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration in Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT). AKT was particularly influential in establishing the viability and value of web-based semantic technologies. He has recently been awarded a further £2.3m by the EPSRC to build on this work.

He has been involved in a wide range of entrepreneurial activities. In 2006 he was one of three founding Directors and Chief Technology Officer of Garlik Ltd, a company specialising in consumer products and services to put people and their families in control of their own digital information.

From 2001 to 2004 he was Editor in Chief of IEEE Intelligent Systems and in 2005 he was appointed Emeritus Editor in Chief. He is also a Fellow of the European AI Association (ECCAI).

He is the co-author of “The Spy in the Coffee Machine”.

Nigel Shadbolt, a professor of artificial intelligence and deputy head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. A past President of the British Computer Society Shadbolt is a leading researcher in Web Science and a founding director of the Web Science Trust. Working with Tim Berners-Lee he is currently Information Advisor to the UK Government.

Dr. Daniel Stauffacher

Daniel Stauffacher, former Ambassador of Switzerland, has a Ph.D. in law from the University of Zürich and a Master’s degree in International Economic Affairs from Columbia University, New York. After working for the Swiss private sector, he joined UNFPA and UNDP in 1982 and worked in New York, Laos and China. He joined the Swiss Federal Office for Foreign Economic Affairs in 1990, where he was responsible for Economic and Financial Co-operation with major Asian and Central and Eastern European countries. In 1995, he was posted to the Swiss Mission to the European Union in Brussels as Counsellor for Economic and Financial Affairs. In 1999, he became Ambassador of Switzerland to the United Nations in Geneva and the Swiss Federal Government’s Special Representative for the hosting and preparation of the United Nations World Summit for Social Development (Geneva, 2000). Ambassador Stauffacher was subsequently the Swiss Government’s Special Representative for the hosting and preparation of the World Summit on the Information Society that was held in Geneva in 2003 and in Tunis 2005.

Dr. Stauffacher is the Founder and Chairman of ICT4Peace Foundation, President of theGeneva Security Forum and the co-founder and Executive Coordinator of the Geneva Network. He serves on the Board of several Foundations and a Special Advisor to the UN Undersecretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs for the UN Global Alliance for ICT and Development.

Dr. Daniel Stauffacher is President of Dr. Daniel Stauffacher + Partner a consulting firm based in Switzerland that helps build partnerships for innovation among governments, international organisations, civil society and private-sector entities (daniel@stauffacherconsulting.ch).

Kevin Stephenson

Kevin Stephenson is a Managing Director at Cambridge Associates and joined the firm in 1997. He works with foundations and colleges on general investment issues such as asset allocation strategy, manager selection, and investment program evaluation. Kevin is the author of several published articles on investing and finance and has spoken at numerous industry conferences. In 2008, he was nominated for Consultant of the Year by Institutional Investor.

He is the Director of Mission-Related Investing at Cambridge Associates, a group he formed in 2008 to assist clients interested in investing a portion of their assets in strategies connected to their mission.

He was a professor of economics for five years at Middlebury College, a visiting professor at Cornell University and an adjunct professor at Marymount University. He has taught courses at the undergraduate and MBA levels on topics including investments, corporate finance, and economics.

He has an MA and PhD in economics from Cornell University. He has earned the Chartered Financial Analyst designation.

Katherine Tweedie

Katherine’s most recent position was Director and Head of Africa for the World Economic Forum based in Geneva, Switzerland. She was responsible for all African-related affairs within the Forum and managing strategic relationships with Africa’s key government, business and civil society leaders. She had overall responsibility for the Africa Agenda at Davos and for the annual World Economic Forum Summit on Africa. During her tenure she helped to facilitate a number of multistakeholder initiatives between global and African leaders in the areas of food security/agri-investment, water and sustainability and education.

Katherine commenced her career in 1999 in Investment Banking for one of Canada’s foremost financial institutions, BMO Financial Group where she specialized in mergers and acquisitions in the financial services sector. In 2001 she joined CIBC Capital Partners to conduct venture capital and private equity investments across North America. In 2005 Katherine returned to South Africa as a Principal for HSG, a private investment company of the Fleming Family, partnered by Standard Chartered Bank and Bank of Scotland. Katherine was responsible for the pan-African private equity mandate for HSG which focused on the mining, resources, telecommunications and services industries.

In addition to the Web Foundation, Katherine sits on the board of two others foundations focused on African development. These include the Phoenix Africa Development Corp, dedicated to the reconstruction and development of post conflict countries with a primary focus on agriculture, and the Kibera Celtics Foundation which supports teenage girls in Nairobi, Kenya who have been affected by violence.

Katherine is currently a 2012 Mason Fellow and Mid-Career Masters in Public Administration candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She holds a BA in Economics from the University of Victoria, Canada and participated in a three year Executive Leadership program at INSEAD. In addition to her professional life, Katherine is an avid athlete, photographer and “off the beaten path” traveler.