Samer Hassan (he/they) is a Spanish/Lebanese activist and researcher, currently Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center, and Associate Professor at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain).
Their research revolves around online governance, decentralized collaboration and social computing, combining Computer Science and Social Sciences. They were awarded the prestigious ERC grant, a €1.5M individual research grant from the European Research Council, Europe's premier funder of frontier research, for the project P2P Models. They now lead a multidisciplinary team aiming to facilitate a commons-oriented Collaborative Economy. Within this approach, they build free/open source prototypes relying on decentralized tech (e.g. fediverse, blockchain/web3), employ qualitative and quantitative methods to co-design experiments with co-ops and communities (e.g. Amara, Smart.coop), apply data science to study existing phenomena (e.g. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, DAOs), and explore innovative forms of cooperative governance. Samer has authored over 70 peer-reviewed publications (H-index: 27), and led the team building the framework for federated apps SwellRT , adopted by the Apache Software Foundation. Beyond academia, they have been a grassroots organizer in a diverse array of initiatives both online and offline. They enjoy applying grassroots facilitation methods to teaching their courses, especially their current favorite Ethics of Artificial Intelligence.
