Samer Hassan (PhD) is an activist and researcher, Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (Harvard University) and Associate Professor at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). Focused on decentralized collaboration, he was awarded a 1.5M€ ERC grant for the P2P Models project, to build blockchain-based democratic and economically sustainable organizations for the collaborative economy. 

Coming from a multidisciplinary background in Computer Science and Social Sciences, he has 50+ publications in those fields (H-index=20). He has carried out research in decentralized technology, P2P communities, distributed systems, social simulation and artificial intelligence, from positions in the University of Surrey (UK), the American University of Science & Technology (Lebanon), his alma mater Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain), and Harvard University, in which he is affiliated since 2015. In the EU-funded P2Pvalue project, he coordinated building decentralized free/open source web-tools for collaborative communities, such as SwellRT. 

As an activist, he's an accredited grassroots facilitator and has experience in multiple communities and grassroots initiatives, both offline (e.g. CSA Tabacalera, Medialab-Prado, OLPC) and online (e.g. Barrapunto, Ourproject.org, Wikipedia). 

He is also passionate about teaching, where he applies a participatory approach inspired by assembly facilitation. Nowadays he is especially keen on UCM's course on cyber-ethics and law that he co-created.

With Spanish and Lebanese origins, Samer does not believe in monolithic standpoints but in combining different approaches in order to push forward social change... meaning cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, mixing activism and academia, or theory and practice.

His research interests include the Collaborative Economy, Commons-based peer production, decentralized architectures, blockchain-based Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, online communities, grassroots social movements & cyberethics.

Follow Samer on Twitter: @samerP2P