Wael Ghonim, was one of the main leaders of the protests that toppled the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Ghonim graduated in Computer Engineering from Cairo University and then graduated with an MBA in Marketing and Finance from the American University in the Egyptian capital. In 2008, he was hired by Google and soon received a promotion to Marketing Executive for the Middle East and North Africa.

To take the position, Ghonim moved with his family to Dubai. After the police killed young Khaled Said in Alexandria in 2010, Ghonim created the page “We Are All Khaled Said” on Facebook, which garnered thousands of followers. In January of that year, inspired by the revolution in Tunisia, the Google executive, under the pseudonym of El Shaheed (“The Martyr”), created an event in which he invited the page’s 350,000 fans to protest in Tahrir Square. Within days, there were more than the 50,000 confirmations of attendance. Ghonim then headed to Egypt to participate in the January 25 protests. Some days later, the young man was arrested and spent 12 days missing. Upon leaving prison, he gave an emotional testimony on Egyptian television and was received by the public as a hero of the revolution that had gripped the country.

In the end, more than 12 million people took to the streets and removed Dictator Mubarak from power. Due to his cyberactivism espousing nonviolence and civil disobedience, Ghonim was elected one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people on the planet.

Wael will participate in this conference via satellite.

Jamila Raqib is Executive Director of the AEI (Albert Einstein Institution), an agency founded by Gene Sharp, the leading name when it comes to strategies of non-violence in the world today. She studied Business and International Relations at Simmons College in Boston. She started working at the AEI nine years ago to coordinate the translation of institute texts into various languages. She was responsible for overseeing the painstaking work of translating Sharp’s primary work, From “Dictatorship to Democracy”, into more than 25 languages.

Born in Afghanistan, she immigrated to the United States with her family because of the violence during the Soviet occupation. She grew up admiring the guerrilla movement of the Mujahideen, but committed herself to the dissemination of ideals of nonviolence and civil disobedience once she began studying the subject. Raqib believes this position is a powerful weapon to deal with dictatorships and foreign oppression, “an alternative to both passivity and violence.”

The AEI is a non-profit organization operated from Sharp’s house in suburban Boston. Jamila Raqib assists him with text writing, takes care of correspondence and contact with governments and organizations around the world, and acts as spokesperson for the institution. She is also a commentator on non-violent demonstrations around the world for vehicles such as BBC, The New York Times, National Public Radio and Voice of America, among others. In more recent times, hers was one of the most-heard voices during the Egyptian revolution.