People

As Deputy Director, Meetali assists in setting and achieving Reset’s strategic direction. Her mission is two-fold — to ensure organizational effectiveness and to strengthen programmatic work in campaigning, litigation, and policy development and advocacy. She brings two decades of experience to Reset as a lawyer, academic and campaigner, both in the United States and in South Africa. Meetali began her legal career post 9/11 representing individuals charged with terrorism. She later focused on holding corporations accountable for human rights abuses, and facilitated the development of the African Coalition on Corporate Accountability. She’s lectured extensively in the theory and practice of international human rights law and advocacy. Most recently, she served as Legal and Campaign Director at Avaaz, where she worked to safeguard human rights and to protect democracies and vulnerable communities from hate speech and disinformation.

As Advocacy Director, Alaphia is in charge of developing our advocacy and campaigning strategy, including partner engagement. Her mission is to build a diverse and global network of civil society groups and stakeholders working to tackle digital threats to democracy. She brings a decade of campaigning experience to Reset, first at Amnesty International and then as a senior campaigner at Avaaz, where she focused on issues of media reform, human rights, and the impact of digital hate speech on minorities. One of Alaphia’s successes includes protecting Sky Television in the UK from a takeover by media mogul Rupert Murdoch. She previously worked as a news anchor and journalist at New Delhi Television, where she expanded the network’s coverage of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to some of the most remote parts of South Asia.

As Executive Director, Ben is responsible for Reset’s strategic direction. In this capacity he oversees the coordination of our policy, technology, and civic engagement work, while providing expert counsel on policy development and advocacy. His mission is to create a global network of organisations working to achieve Reset’s aims by coordinating and integrating financial, knowledge, and relational resources across the globe. Ben’s role at Reset is an evolution of his previous position as Luminate’s Director of Policy & Advocacy (he continues to be policy and advocacy advisor at Luminate). Ben previously co-led the Stiftung Neue Verantwortung (SNV) in Berlin, helping develop the organisation into a leading tech policy voice in German politics. He was also a Senior Adviser to New America in Washington DC, helping design the Public Interest Technology Initiative. Ben led the technology policy advisory group for the 2016 Clinton US presidential campaign.

As UK Director, Poppy leads our UK policy and political strategy. Combining her expertise in policy and technology, Poppy’s mission is to maximise Reset’s impact in the UK and help drive its influential policy agenda. In addition to previously running multiple technology advisory businesses and supporting some of the world’s leading technology companies and start-ups, Poppy also worked in Downing Street for two years where she was an advisor on public appointments and tech policy. Poppy is a World Economic Forum “Global Shaper” and in 2018 was recognised in Brummell Magazine’s “Ones to Watch” list celebrating London’s high-potential talent.

As Operations Manager, Vivian is responsible for developing and implementing Reset’s internal operational strategy. Combining expertise in internal control and compliance management, Vivian oversees the processing of Reset’s investments and shores Reset’s financial and risk positions. Her mission is to utilize institutional learning and demand sensing to refine a velocity-focused funding operations model. Vivian studies civil society at SOAS and has been gaining experience in operations management since 2016.

As Senior Advisor, Felix leads our German policy and political strategy and advises on Reset the overall policy direction. Based in Berlin, Felix currently focuses on building civil society coalitions in the face of growing digital threats to democracy. Also, he helps policymakers develop systemic approaches to regulating Big Tech and reining into surveillance capitalism. Previously, Felix was with the European External Action Service, Europe’s diplomatic arm, where he helped shape the EU’s strategic response to disinformation and malign digital interference. He also spent a number of years with the European Commission after starting his career as a researcher and journalist.

As Policy Advisor, Dylan conducts research and strategic planning to support our programmatic work on law and policy around the world. He works to expand Reset’s network of relationships by evaluating projects and scoping funding opportunities in support of cutting-edge research, technology development, civic engagement, and policy advocacy. Dylan’s role at Reset builds on his previous work as a researcher for Luminate and Omidyar Network where his remit focused on developing understandings about digital threats to democracy and studying elections, disinformation, and data privacy legislation. In this capacity, he also worked on due diligence for grants and investments.

As Chief Technologist, Dan oversees our technology-centred efforts. He leads Reset’s technology funding and implementation work, provides strategic counsel, and connects a network of experts to support Reset and our partners across the full portfolio of our work. His mission is to build Reset’s capacity as a trusted source and sharer of knowledge at the intersection of technology and democracy. Dan previously served as Principal Director and Chief Technologist of the Open Technology Fund (OTF), which he co-founded in 2012 and remains involved with as a strategic advisor to the team …

As program and project manager, Yael works closely with the Chief Technologist to help with organization, task management, and timelines to keep the Reset team informed and efficient. She comes to Reset with a background in museums, informal education, public history, and grassroots organizing in New York City and Washington, DC. Her work in the public history and museum sector has focused on institutional critique, labor within the sector, and using material culture to craft narratives about difficult histories.

As Strategic Consultant, Brandi supports Reset’s strategic programs and research. Brandi Geurkink is a campaigner who wrestles with some of society’s thorniest problems — and then maps a pathway to systemic solutions. With a background in digital rights, civic rights and economic justice movements, Brandi has honed her skills in grassroots mobilization, investigative research, and coalition building. Her background is varied, but her approach to social change is singular: interrogating power imbalances in society and shifting power to those who are impacted most.

Currently, Brandi is a Senior Policy Fellow at Mozilla, the global nonprofit behind Firefox. At Mozilla, Brandi comes up with new ways to hold the internet’s biggest platforms accountable for algorithms, online advertising, privacy, and other issues. Brandi is the creator of YouTubeRegrets, the largest-ever crowdsourced investigation into YouTube’s recommendation engine and its impact on society. YouTube Regrets has been featured in hundreds of news stories, cited in the EU’s Digital Services Act, and won a coveted Shorty Impact Award.

Brandi’s research and commentary has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, NBC News, NPR (U.S.), BBC, the Times of India (India), Rappler (Philippines) and dozens of other publications. Brandi is based in Berlin, Germany.

As Resident Fellow, Fiona Krakenbürger supports and consults Reset in its programmatic work and research, while working on new funding approaches to Open Source Infrastructure. Fiona co-authored a feasibility study in 2021 for the German government that serves as a basis for the design of a new federal funding program, the Sovereign Tech Fund. During her fellowship, Fiona will focus on the validation and implementation of a suitable funding model that effectively supports Open Source Infrastructure, further refining the results of the study and setting the guardrails for the new Funding Program.

Her experience builds on her previous roles as a senior manager and technologist in various funding programs at the intersection of technology, human rights, privacy and civic tech, among them the US based Open Technology Fund and the German Prototype Fund.

As Resident Fellow, Rebecca Weiss supports and consults Reset in its programmatic work and research. Rebecca is an award-winning computational social scientist and data science leader. She has worked in academia and industry, applying innovative methods to large-scale data sets to better understand online environments and their behavioral consequences.

As Head of Research and Innovation at Mozilla, she created and incubated the Rally project, a privacy-preserving data platform leveraged by institutions including Princeton, Stanford, and The Markup to conduct research in the public interest. Before that, she founded the Firefox Data Science team and advanced Lean Data Practices as Mozilla’s Director of Data Science.

Weiss has held fellowships at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation (a joint effort between Stanford School of Engineering and Columbia School of Journalism). She has advised the U.S. Congress on artificial intelligence policy and her research has been published in leading computer science and social science conferences and journals, such as WWW, ICWSM, KDD, PET, and ICA. She holds a PhD from Stanford, a SM in Technology Policy from MIT, and a BA in Cognitive Systems from the University of British Columbia.

As Resident Fellow, Louis Barclay supports and consults Reset in its programmatic work and technology strategy. Louis is a technologist with a background in creating open source tools to help people control their usage of the internet, including Nudge.

In 2021, Louis was banned for life by Facebook for his tool Unfollow Everything, which helped people use Facebook less. The ban received coverage in the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Business Insider and dozens of other publications, and led to support from figures including Frances Haugen and Jimmy Wales.

Louis’s current focus is on creating infrastructure to establish evidence of effective interventions against online harms. During his fellowship, he will be helping Reset’s partners to translate concepts into the appropriate product and technology framework.

Louis has built multiple commercial software products and was previously a co-founder of Stacker.