re:publica 25
26th-28th May 2025
STATION Berlin

Rebecca MacKinnon is Vice President, Global Advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that hosts Wikipedia and other volunteer-run free knowledge projects. She leads efforts to promote and defend a legal and regulatory landscape in which people around the world can freely and safely share knowledge. Previously she was Founding Director of Ranking Digital Rights, a research program that sets global standards for internet companies to respect users’ rights. Author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom (2012), she is co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices, was a founding board member of the Global Network Initiative, served on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists, and is now a Trustee of Wikimedia Europe. Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, she was CNN’s Beijing Bureau Chief from 1998-2001 and Tokyo Bureau Chief from 2001-2004. She gas taught at the University of Hong Kong and the University of Pennsylvania, and held fellowships at Harvard, Princeton, the Open Society Foundations, and the University of California. She holds an AB magna cum laude in Government from Harvard and was a Fulbright scholar in Taiwan.