Location: Bush House Lecture Theatre 3

Date: 6th November 18:30 - 21:00

Networking proudly hosted by Consensys and Governx

The Event:

The King’s College Blockchain Society is proud to bring you this exciting event. In this fireside conversation, we will be discussing with experts from different sectors of society about the implications of new technologies within government. We shall be exploring some of the fundamental principles of governance, looking at future power relations that may emerge from the embracing of this technology.

Proceeding this, we shall be having a networking event with refreshments, with opportunities to ask questions and link up.

Key Speakers

Alexander Kirk

Chairing the event will be Alexander Kirk, who is currently a third-year geography with computer science student. Alexander has worked within UK Parliament, working for Karl Turner MP & Nic Dakin MP. Involved in think-tanks Alexander, is currently looking at how democracies and bureaucracies can be developed with technology to improve their functions for society as a whole. Currently working on an academic publication "The rise of digital ledger technologies and the fall of the nation-state", this conversation will help inform this debate.

Mark O Neill

Mark is the founder of Artraige, an organisation that solves problems for businesses and governments.

Prior to that, Mark worked for the UK government in a number of digital and technology posts including multiple Chief Digital Officer roles and as Chief Information Officer for major programmes like London 2012.

Mark has a long history of working on innovation and transformation and set up with world’s first govtech incubator and skunkworks as well as being on the founding members of the Government Digital Service.

Griffin Owens

Griffin is a Business Development Manager at ConsenSys in Brooklyn, NY; he is focused on GovernX, an early-stage spoke dedicated towards advancing decentralized governance systems. Prior to ConsenSys, Griffin worked for PepsiCo’s Marketing group, where he crafted loyalty strategy on global brands and was exposed to the intersection of the legacy CPG industry and emerging technologies. Recognizing that the latter challenged the status quo of nearly everything, Griffin’s experience convinced him that the corporations of tomorrow would look nothing like the structures of today.

Griffin graduated from The Wharton School of The University of Pennsylvania, dual-concentrating in Management and Information Systems. While at Penn, Griffin was an early student, advocate, and investor in blockchain technology, promoting education towards the digital asset class that is still undefined and often misunderstood. Originally hailing from Los Angeles, Griffin was glued to Satoshi’s story and the implications of what a decentralized society embodies as if it were a Hollywood thriller where everyone had a stake in the ending. He hasn’t looked back since.

GovernX

GovernX is an early-stage business within ConsenSys building tools to enable decentralized governance in voting processes. Collectives of the future are embracing structures like Token-Curated Registries, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, and inclusive token economies. Each of these structures requires a broad network come to consensus in order to keep things flowing, and GovernX is building distributed mechanisms to help introduce transparency behind new forms of representation.

Dr. Luke Riley

Member of the 'Voting Over Ledger Technology' Project: aiming to explore applications of distributed ledger technologies (including blockchains) in domains involving voting and collective decision making. Our first two use cases are voting within organisations (e.g. internal political party elections) and shareholder voting systems (including the transfer of shareholder rights).

Alex Jupiter

A technical entrepreneur and product designer currently pursuing his own projects and working for world-class clients at the product design studio Make Us Proud. Recent successes include designing the future of cloud computing for Samsung and strategising the future of democracy with Democracy Earth.

In short, Alex strives to deliver world-changing products. Whether this is from a design, technical or managerial perspective: Wanting to make a difference in people's lives.

Democracy Earth

Founded the first digital political party in the Americas, the Partido de la Red (Peers Party) that ran for its first election in the city of Buenos Aires in 2013. In 2014 having shared their experience in TED Talks reaching over 1.2 million viewers. During 2015 and 2016, Silicon Valley's Y Combinator and Fast Forward funded their efforts to start the Democracy Earth Foundation, a non-profit organisation committed to the mission of borderless governance.

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