Setting up a national Internet Governance Forum is a challenge in all countries; it can be especially difficult in countries with little experience in Internet governance processes. 
Emmanuel Elolo Agbenonwossi has more than 5 years of work experience in various fields of online journalism and web content management. After several years of practice in Togo working for the government official website www.republicoftogo.com, the Moroccan websites www.northafricapost.com and www.medafricatimes.com, and several other media in West Africa, Emmanuel has won many awards, including the prestigious Young African Leaders Initiative of the U.S. government.
Komi Elitcha has more than 7 years of work experience as an IT Engineer based in Lomé.
Serge-Parfait Goma is from the Republic of Congo, he holds a master’s degree in Tele-Information and is currently completing another master’s degree in E-Service International, he is working as an IT-manager at Campus Numérique in Brazzaville, and as a substitute teacher at Marien Ngouabi University.
Darcia Dieuveille Kandz is a national ICT champion from the Republic of the Congo, a project assistant on new technologies for the NGO Azur Développement. She is also involved in communication as an administrator for the Facebook page of “Innovator Ladies English Club” and for the “Association Congolaise Accompagné (ACA)”. For her, the Internet is shaping the world and communication has shaped the world, so they are to be used together in a good way.
Frederico Links is a Namibian journalist and the editor of Namibia’s award-winning current affairs monthly magazine Insight Namibia since mid-2011. He is also a freelance researcher with a long association with Namibia’s leading think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). In both, his journalism and research work, Frederico Links is primarily concerned with democracy and governance issues, particularly corruption and maladministration, both within the public and private spheres. He is also an ardent access-to-information advocate and a founding member of the Access to Information Namibia (ACTION) Coalition of civil society and media organisations and social activists. Mr Links is also a founding member of the #MyConstitutionMyDecision social movement that opposed undemocratically introduced changes to the Namibian constitution in 2014.
Gabriel Ramokotjo is an Internet Activist, who currently serves as President of Internet Society Gauteng Chapter and Secretary of Soweto Wireless User Group (NPO). He is a fellow at the Nepad African School on Internet Governance and at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Name and Numbers (ICANN). Previously he was with the ZA Central Registry providing Technical Support to the .ZA ccTLD domain name and is currently pursuing his studies at the University of Witwatersrand in Telecommunications Policy, Regulation and Management.
Gabriella is a law graduate working at the Open Democracy Advice Centre as the head of research, and is a Founding Co-Director of Code for South Africa. She has a BA LLB from the University of Cape Town, graduating with distinction in Sociology. She formerly clerked with Justice Yacoob of the Constitutional Court and worked with University of Witwatersrand. She has a particular focus on access to information and freedom of expression issues. She is also the current Chair of the African Platform on Access to Information.
Natasha Tibinyane is a Namibian feminist human rights defender, with a focus on freedom of expression, and the empowerment of women. A journalist by profession, she currently serves as the National Director of the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) Namibia Chapter. My work involves advocating and lobbying for a conductive environment for freedom of expression, as well as building the capacity of media practitioners, civil society actors and the youth.
Htaike Htaike Aung is co-founder and executive director of Myanmar ICT for Development Organization (MIDO), one of the very few ICT-focused non-governmental organizations in Myanmar/Burma. MIDO focuses on ICTs for development, Internet freedom and Internet policy advocacy works in Myanmar. Since the introduction of the Internet to the public in Myanmar, she has been involved in Myanmar’s Internet propagation events. She is also a digital security & privacy trainer/consultant for human rights defenders in Myanmar. Some of the notable initiatives that MIDO is involved in are Panzagar (anti-hate speech campaign), Kyeet election monitoring application, Myanmar Internet Freedom Forum, Peace Tech Exchange and Lighthouses (community information centres) etc. She is an award holder of Jemseti TaTa fellowship – ICT Champions, and also an alumnus of Deboer Fellowship.
Nalaka Gunawardene is a science writer and multimedia journalist in Sri Lanka.
Maheeshwara Kirindigoda is from Sri Lanka and considers himself a “Millennial” despite being born in year the 1980. He had the good fortune to receive his primary and secondary education at the Dharmaraja College Kandy. Further education he received at the National Institute of Business Management and System Designing. He is presently following a degree course in Mass Communication at the Open University of Sri Lanka.
Ireen Sultana is a strong vocal activist in the Bangla blogosphere. As a columnist she writes in 
Chencho is from Bhutan. He has a Bachelor Degree in Economics from Delhi University and Diploma in Project Appraisal and Management from Maastricht School of Management from Netherlands. Chencho has been working in the department of IT&Telecom of the Bhutanese government for the last 15 years and is currently the head of Promotion Division under the department. As a head of Promotion Division, his main responsibility is to plan and formulate programs and projects to promote and build ICT capacity in the country. Chencho is working on connecting the remote parts of Bhutan through the establishment of CC (Community centers) to provide equal opportunity to the rural communities. For this the Bhutanese government has established 200 CCs connected to high speed internet.
Mya Thwin is a passionate Entrepreneur & IT Professional who resides in Myanmar. Currently, he serves as the Managing Director for FMK Group, a Myanmar-based investment and ICT Consulting firm that offers various IT solutions. Mya is also the founder of the Myanmar E-Learning Institute.
Mohammad Kawsar Uddin has been in the ICT industry since 1999 and is well known in Bangladesh as an ICT journalist. Currently, he is General Secretary of the Internet Society Bangladesh Dhaka Chapter.
Samten Yeshi worked as a bilingual reporter with Bhutan’s national daily newspaper Kuensel prior to joining Shejun Agency for Bhutan’s Cultural Documentation and Research as a programme manager. He worked as a bilingual reporter for about seven years, covering a wide range of topics, mostly reporting on political, business and cultural beats, writing both for the English as well as the Dzongkha Kuensel issue. While with Kuensel, he served as bureau correspondent in Southern and Central parts of Bhutan. He also represented Bhutan in the SAARC media delegation to China in June 2009 and he was the first journalist from Bhutan to receive the Chevening scholarship for South Asia Journalism Program (SAJP) in 2013. While in London on his Chevening scholarship, he interned with BBC online for a week and another week with BBC’s world radio. He initiated and developed a website for Dzongkha Kuensel, which was a contribution for Bhutan’s oldest newspaper. Until then Kuensel did not have a website in Dzongkha. While working with Shejun since August 2013 towards preserving and promoting Bhutanese tradition and culture, he also continues to be a freelance journalist, active as social media enthusiast blogging at 
Matthias Spielkamp is co-founder and publisher of the online magazine iRights.info – about legal issues in the digital world, which in 2006 received the Grimme Online Award, Germany’s most prestigious award for online journalism. In 2011, Matthias co-founded the independent Berlin think tank iRights.Lab, where he develops solutions for dealing with the challenges of digitisation – for stakeholders from the public sector, civil society, politics, and business. He continues this work in his own consultancy iRights.international.
More recently, he co-founded the research and advocacy organisation AlgorithmWatch, aiming to increase accountability in algorithmic decision making and so-called artificial intelligence (AI).
As a consultant and trainer Matthias has worked with journalists and activists in Germany, South-Eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East for institutions like Deutsche Welle Akademie, the International Institute for Journalism of GIZ and others for more than 15 years.
Matthias testified before three committees of the German Bundestag on future developments of journalism, online journalism and copyright regulation. He is co chair for the academia and civil society groups in the German Internet Governance Forum (IGF-D).
From September 2015 to February 2016, Matthias was a Fellow of Stiftung Mercator and visiting researcher at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG).
He serves on the governing board of the German section of Reporters Without Borders and the advisory council of the Whistleblower Network and is a member of the American Council on Germany as a former John J. McCloy Fellow.
Matthias has co-authored three books on journalism and copyright regulation and holds master’s degrees in Journalism from the University of Colorado at Boulder and Philosophy from the Free University of Berlin. Twitter: @spielkamp
Anriette Esterhuysen is the executive director of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), an international network of organizations working with Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) to support social justice and development.
Helani Galpaya is CEO of LIRNEasia, a pro-poor, pro-market think tank working across the emerging Asia Pacific on ICT policy and regulatory issues. She assumed the CEO role in Jan 2013. Prior to that she was LIRNEasia’s Chief Operating Officer.
Laleema is a researcher at LIRNEasia. Her research interests are internet governance, urban development and public policy. Prior to joining LIRNEasia she worked at the