President of the CBI, the voice of business in the UK. Senior adviser, Bain Capital. Non-executive director of Centrica and Rolls Royce plc; senior Trustee of the Tate Gallery; Chair of the Business Advisory Forum of the Said Business School, Oxford. Governor of St Paul’s Girls’ School.

Chief Executive of The Economist Group 1997 – 2008. She was awarded a CBE for services to publishing in 2004. She has an MBA from INSEAD and is an Honorary Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford.

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 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.

Alberto Ibargüen is president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

He is the former publisher of The Miami Herald and of El Nuevo Herald. During his tenure, The Miami Herald won three Pulitzer Prizes and El Nuevo Herald won Spain’s Ortega y Gasset Prize for excellence in journalism.

He studied at Wesleyan University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Between college and law school, he served in the Peace Corps in Venezuela’s Amazon Territory and in Colombia. He practiced law in Hartford, Connecticut until he joined The Hartford Courant, then Newsday in New York before moving to Miami.

Ibargüen is chairman of the board of the Newseum in Washington, D.C., a museum dedicated to free speech and free press. He is a member of the board of PepsiCo, AMR Corp. (American Airlines), ProPublica and of the Council on Foreign Relations. Over the years, he has served on the boards of arts, education and civic organizations, including Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Wesleyan University, Smith College, the Trustees’ Council of the National Gallery of Art and as national board chair of PBS.

For his work to protect journalists in Latin America, Ibargüen received a Maria Moors Cabot citation from Columbia University and George Washington University awarded him an honorary Doctor of Letters.

Rosemary Leith is a Director of Hilvern Management Limited a private investment company with investments in the UK, Europe and the USA. Prior to this she was CoFounder and Director of Flametree Life Solutions a strategic consulting firm that advised FTSE 100 clients on how to implement flexible work strategies. Flametree was founded in 1999 and in 2002 she sold the business to PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

For fifteen years prior to this Rosemary worked in the investment business, eight years as a Principal at Talisman Management Limited, a principal investment and management company focusing new and traditional media companies.

Based in London for the last 20 years, Rosemary has a background in investment, financial analysis and accounting in the UK, USA, France, Switzerland and Canada, where she began her career at Coopers and Lybrand. Rosemary holds a Bachelor of Commerce Degree (with Honors) from Queens University in Canada.

In addition to being a Founding Director and Chair of the Governance Committee of the Web Foundation, Rosemary’s non-profit board memberships include: Trustee of the Almeida Theatre, Vice Chair of Almeida’s Development Board and member of the Strategy Committee;  Member of the Tate Foundation Advisory Board; Member of the Queen’s University School of Business Global Advisory Council; Trustee of the Web Science Trust (UK). Rosemary advises a number of non-profit organisations in fundraising and strategy.

Mauro is the Director of Finance of the MIT Media Lab.  He is a Founding Director, Treasurer and Chair of the Audit Committee of the Web Foundation.

Prior to joining the MIT Media Lab he was the Business Manager of the World Wide Web Consortium. Before that he worked for the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso in Chile; first as a Project Manager, and eventually as the Director of Finance for the University. He was also a lecturer at the Business School for many years, teaching Economics and Finance to undergrads, and Negotiation at the MBA program. In Boston he has been a lecturer at Suffolk University, and a guest speaker at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mauro is a Fulbright Scholar and the co-author of Financial Mathematics: A Decision Making Approach, an introductory finance textbook published by the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso, and a Master’s degree in Business Administration from Suffolk University.

He has lived (and worked) in Chile, China, and France, and he is currently living in the United States.

He is a Founding Director, Treasurer and Chair of the Audit Committee of the Web Foundation

Iqbal Z. Quadir is the founder and director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which promotes bottom-up entrepreneurship in developing countries.In the 1990s, Quadir founded GrameenPhone, which provides effective telephone access throughout Bangladesh.

Quadir is an accomplished entrepreneur who writes about the critical roles of entrepreneurship and innovations in improving the economic and political conditions in low-income countries. Quadir is often credited as having been the earliest observer of the potential for mobile phones to transform low-income countries. His work has been recognized by leaders and organizations worldwide as a new and successful approach to sustainable poverty alleviation.

For four years, Quadir taught at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, focusing on the impact of technologies in the politics and economics of developing countries. In 2005, he moved to MIT. His particular research interest is in the democratizing effects of technologies in developing countries with some of his initial thoughts published in the Summer/Fall 2002 issue of The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs.

In 2006, Quadir co-founded the journal Innovations, published by MIT Press, which highlights private efforts in public service. Quadir spent most of the 1990s founding and building GrameenPhone Ltd., which has now become Bangladesh’s largest telephone company, with net income of $250 million in 2006. His childhood exposure to the conditions in rural Bangladesh combined with his later venture capital experience in New York led Quadir to recognize that the ensuing digital revolution could facilitate the introduction of telephony to 100 million people living in rural Bangladesh. In 1994, he formally launched this effort by convincing angel investors to establish a New York based company, Gonofone Development Corp (meaning “phones for the masses”) to help him organize what subsequently became known as GrameenPhone.

Quadir’s vision of a large-scale, commercial project that could serve all urban areas and 68,000 villages in Bangladesh led him to organize a global consortium including Telenor AS, the primary telephone company in Norway and an affiliate of micro-credit pioneer Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. He attracted these investors by complementing his vision with a practical distribution scheme whereby small entrepreneurs, backed by loans from Grameen Bank, could retail telephone services to their surrounding communities. With the support of these investors, GrameenPhone, established in late 1996, started building a new cellular network and providing services to the public soon thereafter. To date, it has built the largest cellular network in the country with investments of nearly $2 billion and a subscriber base of nearly 20 million. Its rural program is already available in more than 60,000 villages, providing telephone access to more than 100 million people, while helping to create 250,000 micro-entrepreneurs in these villages.

Quadir appeared on CBC, CNN and PBS and was profiled in feature articles in The Economist, Boston Globe, Financial Times and The New York Times, and in several books. The World Economic Forum, based in Geneva, Switzerland, selected him as a “Global Leader for Tomorrow.” In 2006, Quadir was awarded the prestigious Science, Education and Economic Development (SEED) award in Bangladesh. In spring 2007, Wharton Alumni Magazine selected Quadir for its list of 125 Influential People and Ideas on the occasion of the 125-year celebration of the Wharton School. His work is referred to in 20 books and is prominently featured in the 2007 book, You Can Hear Me Now, by Nicholas Sullivan (Jossey-Bass).

Earlier in his career, Quadir served as a vice president of Atrium Capital Corp., an associate of Security Pacific Merchant Bank, both in New York, and a consultant to the World Bank in Washington DC. He received an MBA and an MA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and a BS with honors from Swarthmore College.

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.

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 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.