Nicola Greco is a Ph.D. student in the Decentralized Information Group at MIT. He will write and advance research on ways to re-decentralize the web, focusing on technical, political, and social aspects of decentralized systems.
He started writing code when he was very young. He was 14 when he started the petition “Linux in Italian Schools”, converting schools to use Open Source Software; 16, when he started the BuddyPress’ developers community - an open source platform for federated social networks; 17, when he made one of the first unofficial Twitter buttons (two years before they came out); 18, he wrote software for Social Network analysis used by Telecom Italia that awarded him two research grants. The latter was key for his exposure; all of a sudden he was traveling around Europe, gave a TEDx and appeared Italian Wired Top 10 under 25.
He is now 22 and determined to work on re-decentralizing the Web - probably influenced by working at Mozilla and as a reaction to writing software for tracking people on social media.