Ayden Férdeline

Ayden Férdeline

Landecker Democracy Fellow, Humanity in Action

Ayden Férdeline

Ayden Férdeline is a public interest technologist who has worked directly with governments, industry, and civil society organizations to support responsible technological innovation with a focus on social impact. He is currently a Landecker Democracy Fellow with Humanity in Action, in collaboration with the Alfred Landecker Foundation, where he works to bring traditionally-excluded voices from the labor organizing space into Internet governance arenas. He serves on the Steering Committee of the joint Ford Foundation-Mozilla Foundation Public Interest Technologists Network, where he cultivates an empowered community of civic minded stakeholders who share a meaningful and actionable camaraderie to keep the Internet working for everyone. In addition, he is a Fellow with the Internet Law and Policy Foundry in Washington D.C. He previously represented European civil society organizations on ICANN’s GNSO Council, the body which makes binding policy for generic top-level domain names like .COM and .ORG, and was a technology policy fellow with the Mozilla Foundation. He also hosted the Internet governance history podcast POWER PLAYS, which shined a spotlight on many pioneers from within the Internet governance community, and has worked for an array of philanthropic organizations, including the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute, and the New Venture Fund. He is an alumnus of the London School of Economics.

Harvesting Hope from Hiccups: Overcoming Standardization Hurdles

Standardization is an art, not a science. After Meta launched Threads, which promised to interoperate with the fediverse and Mastodon, some in the Interledger community became enchanted by the promise that further down the line this could positively impact the adoption of the Interledger Protocol and the W3C web monetization standard. Cynics, however, have noted that the reality of standards adopt…