Our 2022 speakers

Andy Dudfield

Andy is the Head of Automated Fact Checking at Full Fact where his work is focused on using technology to support fact checkers around the world. Andy was previously the Chief Publishing Officer of the Office for National Statistics and prior to that spent a decade working in product and technology roles at the BBC.

George Oates

George Oates is a designer working at the intersection of software, cultural heritage, and philosophy. She is the founder of the Flickr Foundation, a 501c3 charity dedicated to the challenge of preventing Flickr from being deleted.

George has worked online since 1996 and enjoyed a great variety of interesting roles like being part of the small team that created Flickr, project lead of Open Library at Internet Archive, and director of design at Stamen Design. George specialises in designing systems used by millions of people holding billions of things but also likes designing very specific interfaces for tiny audiences.

James Higgott

James is a product manager at NHS Digital. During the pandemic he led teams building and iterating digital services such as Get an isolation note, Book a coronavirus vaccination and the NHS website’s information and advice about COVID-19.

Liz Slade

Liz Slade is the Chief Officer of the UK Unitarian church, a freely inquiring spiritual community that draws on wisdom from all sources. With a background in healthcare improvement, she sees the role that congregations can play as civic and cultural infrastructure for community wellbeing.

Paulina Kolata

Paulina Kolata (she/her/hers) holds a PhD in Japanese Studies from The University of Manchester and is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for East and Southeast Asian Studies at Lund University, Sweden.

Her work explores ethnographically the socio-economic and demographic complexities of religion in contemporary Japan, focusing on Buddhism, depopulation, and people’s everyday lived experiences and their relation to particular pasts and imagined futures.

She is currently finishing a monograph that investigates the post-growth survival of Buddhist temple communities in regional Japan.

Phoebe Tickell

Phoebe is a renegade scientist, systems thinker and social entrepreneur, passionate about creating opportunities for transformation of people - and through that, transformation of society and the planet.

She is the founder and director of Moral Imaginations, a collective imagining to increase radical kinship with the human and more-than-human worlds, present, past and future.