Budapest Forum

Year: 2021

  • Aleksandra Dulkiewicz

    Aleksandra Maria Dulkiewicz is a Polish lawyer and politician serving as the city mayor of Gdańsk since 2019.

    She acted in the Association of Young Conservatives and the Conservative People’s Party. In 1995 she participated in the mayor campaign of Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz. Since 2000, she has worked in the Gdansk AREOPAG organisation. In 2006 she was assistant of the mayor of Gdansk Paweł Adamowicz. She was working in the European Solidarity Centre in the 2009–2014 period and in the Gdansk Economic Development Agency in the 2014–2017 period. She also participated in the preparation of UEFA Euro 2012 in Gdańsk.

    In 2010 and 2014 she was elected as a city councillor in Gdańsk, being a candidate of the Civic Platform party, in 2014 she became the leader of the Civic Platform club in the municipal council. From 20 March 2017 to 14 January 2019, she was deputy city mayor of Gdańsk responsible for the economic policy. During the local elections in 2018, she was the campaign manager of Adamowicz (she suspended her membership in Civic Platform then, which later expired).[2] In this election, she received re-election in the city council, being a candidate of the Committee Everything for Gdańsk.

  • Ágnes Urbán

    Ágnes Urbán

    Ágnes Urbán is co-founder and director of Mertek Media Monitor media watchdog organization. She has been a member of the jury of the Soma Award, the most prestigious journalism prize in Hungary since 2015. She was involved in different European research programs in recent years and she is the Executive Board member of the LAKMUSZ-HDMO (Hungarian Digital Media Observatory). Her academic career is linked to the Corvinus University of Budapest, she is Associate professor and chair of the Department of Infocommunication. Her main research interests are transformation of the media market in Hungary, the analysis of the market distortion effects of state advertising spending, the analysis of market issues in media policy, and changes in media consumption habits. Urbán is the author of 100+ Hungarian and English-language international publications in the fields of media and infocommunication.

  • Agis Tsouros

    Agis Tsouros

  • Gábor Kerpel-Fronius

    Gábor Kerpel-Fronius

    Gábor Kerpel-Fronius is the Deputy Mayor of Budapest.

    He was born in Budapest in 1966. After graduating from high school in Budapest, Kerpel-Fronius studied History and French at the Janus Pannonius University in Pécs. He later founded his own IT firm where he worked as system analyst and project manager.

    He joined the centrist-progressive Momentum Movement (which is the biggest opposition party in Budapest) in 2017 after the highly successul “NOlimpia” campaign, which forced the government to withdraw it’s previously submitted application for the 2024 Olympic Games due to corruption concerns. He was the party’s candidate for the mayoral elections of Budapest in 2019. The General Assembly of Budapest elected him as Deputy Mayor responsible for smartcity and participatory government that year.

  • Jason Worlledge

    Jason Worlledge

  • János Kocsány

    János Kocsány

    After graduating as an architect, János Kocsány studied economics, estate management and has also earned an MBA degree. In 1981 he began to work in various fields of the construction industry, mostly on building sites. He found computer support of construction site logistics as the most engaging task. Following his immersive architect career, in 1994 he began to work as an investment specialist in real estate, managing entire real estate development projects. In 1996 he joined Graphisoft R&D Rt. as the leader of Graphisoft Park’s many development projects, as well as of its leasing and operational tasks. Starting its IPO (initial public offering) as a standalone real estate developer company, listed on the stock market, he also serves as the CEO of Graphisoft Park SE.

  • Jamie Bartlett

    Jamie Bartlett is the author of three books: The People Vs Tech (2018) about data and democracies (Winner of the 2019 Transmission Prize), Radicals (2017) about political outsiders and the best-selling The Dark Net (2014) about internet subcultures. His books have been translated into 15 languages. He founded the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think-tank Demos, where he specialised in online social movements and using machine learning to study the impact of technology on society. He is a regular commentator on national and international media outlets, and a regular writer on technology for The Spectator.

    Jamie’s TED talk ‘How the mysterious dark net is going mainstream’ has been watched almost 5 million times. His main topics are cyber security and privacy online, new political movements, social media research and analysis, and internet cultures.

    In 2017 Jamie presented the two-part BBC TWO documentary series ‘The Secrets of Silicon Valley’ about how technology was changing politics and society, including Cambridge Analytica’s role in the 2016 US election. In 2019 he wrote and presented the hit BBC podcast series ‘The Missing Cryptoqueen’ which exposed the biggest ever cryptocurrency.

  • Ivan Vukovic

    Ivan Vukovic

    Ivan Vukovic was born on September 17, 1984 in Podgorica.
    He completed his undergraduate and specialist studies in 2007 at the University of Montenegro – Faculty of Political Science.
    Vukovic was one of the student representatives in the Movement for Independence of Montenegro.
    After the specialist studies (2006-2007), he enrolled in postgraduate studies at the Leiden University, Netherlands. In 2008, Vukovic defended his master thesis.
    Upon returning to Montenegro (2008-2014), Vukovic became a teaching assistant at the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Montenegro.
    Vukovic defended his PhD thesis in June 2014, at the Central European University in Budapest.
    In the period from 2014-2015, he acquired the title of Lecturer at the Faculty of Political Science, where he was elected Assistant Professor and Vice-Dean for International Relations.
    He spent the academic year 2016 – 2017 at the George Washington University, as the first Fulbright Postdoctoral scholarship holder from Montenegro. During his stay in America, he was teaching at the aforementioned university.
    In January 2021, he was elected as the Vice president of the Democratic Party of Socialists. In March of the same year, he became the President of the Assembly of the Union of Municipalities of Montenegro.
    In April 2021, Vukovic was nominated as a member of the European Council of Foreign Relations (ECFR).

    He is fluent in English and has a good grasp of French.

  • Ivan Vejvoda

    Ivan Vejvoda is Acting Rector and Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, Austria.

    From 2010 – 2017 he was Senior Vice President at the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMFUS) in Washington D.C.

    From 2003-2010 he was the Executive Director of the Balkan Trust for Democracy, a project of GMFUS supporting democratic initiatives and civil society.

    Vejvoda came to GMF in 2003 from distinguished service in the Serbian government as senior advisor on foreign policy to PM Zoran Djindjić.

    He was executive director of the Belgrade-based Fund for an Open Society from 1998 to 2002. During the mid-1990s, Mr. Vejvoda held various academic posts in the United Kingdom (University of Sussex) the US (Macalester and Smith Colleges).

    Ivan Vejvoda was involved in the democratic opposition movement in Yugoslavia through the 1980s and 1990s

    A political scientist and political theorist he has published extensively on: democracy, totalitarianism, the French Revolution, comparative European politics, Balkans.

    He was awarded the French National Order of Merit in the rank of Officer (2006) and the Italian Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity rank of commander (2007)

  • Howard Dean