Session: Closing Plenary: Love isn't all we need...

Speakers: Oisín Coghlan (Friends of the Earth), Edel McGinley (Hope & Courage Collective), Johnny Ryan (Irish Council for Civil Liberties) & Ruadhán Ó Críodáin (ShoutOut)

How we can rise to the moment and meet the challenges we face in our world today.

As we face unprecedented challenges in our world and in our work, we’ll hear from leading voices working across climate, digital rights, LGBTQ+ rights and combatting the far right about what we need to do now and how we can rise to meet the moment - as fundraisers, as a sector and as a community.

Johnny Ryan

Dr Johnny Ryan FRHistS is the Director of Enforce, and an Enforce Senior Fellow. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Open Markets Institute. Previously, Dr Ryan held senior roles in the online advertising, media, and technology industries.

He was Chief Policy Officer at Brave Software, and Chief Innovation Officer at The Irish Times Group. He is the author of two books, and his regulatory interventions and expert commentary appear in The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, Die Zeit, Wired, Le Monde, The Financial Times and other leading media. 

He is focused on surveillance, data rights, competition/anti-trust, and privacy. Open Markets called him "a renowned global privacy expert". Protocol named him "The thorn in Google's side". Tagesspiegel listed him as one of the digital people who shaped 2021. Die Zeit calls him "Google's biggest headache". He was awarded the EPIC International Champion of Privacy Award 2023. He currently has litigation and regulatory proceedings in several jurisdictions.

Dr Ryan works with law makers on digital legislation, and has testified at the US Senate and the EU institutions. 

His first book, based on his work as Senior Researcher at the Institute of International & European Affairs, was the most cited source in the European Commission’s impact assessment that decided against pursuing Web censorship across the EU.

He has a PhD from the University of Cambridge (thanks to a scholarship from the O’Reilly Foundation). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and member of the EPIC advisory board. 

He started his career in design, and returned to design thinking later as Executive Director of The Innovation Academy at University College Dublin. He was an associate on the emerging digital environment at the Judge Business School of the University of Cambridge.