Hillary Clinton, Chief Justice Gesmundo to open Social Good Summit 2023

MANILA, Philippines – 67th U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Philippine Chief Justice Alexander Gesmundo, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, and key leaders in tech, business, and civil society, will headline Rappler’s Social Good Summit (SGS) on Saturday, September 16.

With the theme #TurningTechForGood: From problem to solution, this year’s SGS will be held on September 16 (Saturday), from 8:30 am to 4 pm, at the Samsung Hall, SM Aura Premier, Taguig, Metro Manila.

Clinton, live from New York, will be in a conversation with Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Rappler CEO Maria Ressa.

Chief Justice Gesmundo will deliver the keynote. United Nations resident coordinator in the Philippines Gustavo Gonzalez will deliver the opening remarks.

Headlining the first panel that will tackle tech in the global landscape is author, broadcaster, and entrepreneur Andrew Keen, author of the Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture, which he wrote in 2007 – long before social media turned into a toxic space.

Keen will be joining a panel discussion with Ressa; Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, a staunch advocate for tech accountability; and Dr. Adrienne Heinrich, head of the AI and Innovation Center of Excellence at Aboitiz Data Innovation and at Union Bank of the Philippines.

Tech and social issues

Setting the tone for the second panel on how tech is shaping the world’s biggest social issues is Richard Gingras, who, as global vice president of News at Google, guides Google in enabling a healthy ecosystem for news and journalism.

Gingras will be joining a panel discussion with Dr. Erika Fille Legara, academic program director of the Asian Institute of Management’s (AIM) master of science in data science and deputy managing director of AIM’s first corporate laboratory; Dr. Julie Posetti, global director of research at the International Center for Journalists, who has done groundbreaking work on digital threats to journalism; and Ruth Yu-Owen, co-founder of Connected Women, a social enterprise focused on creating opportunities for women in the online workforce and the future of work.

The third panel will tackle what institutions, communities, business, and government agencies can do to address the world’s tech-induced problems. We will hear it from the experts in their own field: retired Navy chief Alexander Pama, who headed the National Disaster Risk Reduction Management Council (NDRRMC); former energy secretary Rene Almendras, president and CEO of AC Logistics Holdings Corporation; Commodore Jay Tarriela, a key voice in Philippine security and spokesperson for the Philippine Coast Guard; and  and Ingrid Beroña, chief risk officer of GCash, the leading mobile wallet in the Philippines.

These are the key activities during the daylong Manila Social Good Summit 2023:

• “#TurningTechForGood: From problem to solution” panel discussions – This is the main event that will feature the speakers above along with an open forum after each panel.
  
• XChange – A space for learning, interaction and ideas. It is a marketplace that will highlight the advocacies and projects of partners and sponsors.

A regular ticket to the SGS costs P3,500 each, which comes with a free one-year Rappler+ membership. Seats are limited and discounts are available. For more details, visit this page: rplr.co/SGS2023

#TurningTechForGood: How you can be part of Manila Social Good Summit 2023

If you have any questions, email socialgood@rappler.com.

Here are the speakers and moderators of the SGS:

Hillary Rodham Clinton spent over five decades in public service as an advocate, attorney, First Lady, U.S. Senator, U.S. Secretary of State, and presidential candidate. 

As 67th U.S. Secretary of State, her “smart power” approach to foreign policy repositioned American diplomacy and development for the 21st century. Clinton played a central role in restoring America’s standing in the world, reasserting the United States as a Pacific power, imposing crippling sanctions on Iran and North Korea, responding to the Arab Awakening, and negotiating a ceasefire in the Middle East. 

Earlier, as First Lady and Senator for New York, she traveled to more than 80 countries as a champion of human rights, democracy, and opportunities for women and girls. She also worked to provide health care to millions of children, create jobs and opportunity, and support first responders who risked their lives at Ground Zero. 

In her historic 2016 campaign for President of the United States, Clinton won 66 million votes. 

She is the author of ten best-selling books, host of the podcast You and Me Both, founder of the global production studio HiddenLight Productions, Chancellor of Queen’s University Belfast, and a Professor of Practice at the School of International and Public Affairs and Presidential Fellow at Columbia World Projects at Columbia University. She is married to former U.S. President Bill Clinton, has one daughter Chelsea, and three grandchildren: Charlotte, Aidan, and Jasper.

---

Chief Justice Alexander Gesmundo was appointed to the Supreme Court as associate justice in 2017, and later as the 27th Chief Justice of the Philippines in 2021.

Prior to his appointment to the Supreme Court, he served as associate justice of the Sandiganbayan, later becoming Chairperson of its 7th Division. Chief Justice Gesmundo obtained his law degree from the Ateneo de Manila University in 1984 and passed the Bar in April 1985.

He entered government service in August 1985 as trial attorney in the Office of the Solicitor General. He was awarded as Most Outstanding Solicitor in 1998. He was on seconded appointment as Commissioner of the Presidential Commission on Good Government from July 17, 1998 to February 15, 2001. In August 2002, he was promoted to Assistant Solicitor General. He continued to serve in the Office of the Solicitor General until his appointment to the Sandiganbayan on October 15, 2005.

---

Gustavo González brings 30 years of international experience in humanitarian, peacebuilding and development affairs in countries in transition, across five different geographical regions (Central America, Africa, Middle-East, Europe and South Asia). 

He has led large scale operations in crisis and post-crisis settings and had direct participation in peace negotiations involving state and non-state actors. He has contributed to global best practices in the field of resource mobilization and partnership building. Presently, he is the United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in the Philippines.

Prior to joining the UN Resident Coordinator System, he worked at the Food and Agriculture Organization as Director of the Business Development and Resource Mobilization Division. He also held several senior positions at the United Nations Development Program, including Regional Development Coordinator for the Syria-related Crisis, covering operations in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Turkey; Senior Country Director in Yemen during the Arab Spring; Country Director in Burundi during the peacebuilding transition; and Head of the Post-Conflict Unit in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in support of the Global and Inclusive Agreement on the Transition.

González also worked on peacebuilding and reconstruction programs for the International Organization for Migration in Guinea-Bissau and the United Nations Office for Project Services in the Central African Republic. While with the United Nations Department of Humanitarian Affairs, he held positions in Angola, Liberia and Mozambique.

Prior to joining the United Nations, González worked for the Organization of American States in Nicaragua, within the framework of the Peace Accords for Central America.

He holds a master’s degree from the Said Business School at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, and a master’s degree in philosophy from the Universidad del Salvador in Argentina. He is fluent in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish.

---

Frances Haugen is an advocate for accountability and transparency in social media.

Haugen holds a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Olin College and a MBA from Harvard University. She is a specialist in algorithmic product management, having worked on ranking algorithms at Google, Pinterest, Yelp and Facebook. 

In 2019, she was recruited to Facebook to be the lead product manager on the Civic Misinformation team, which dealt with issues related to democracy and misinformation, and later also worked on counter-espionage. 

During her time at Facebook, Haugen became increasingly alarmed by the choices the company makes prioritizing their own profits over public safety. She made the courageous decision to blow the whistle on Facebook. The initial reporting was done by the Wall Street Journal in what became known as “The Facebook Files.” Haugen has testified in front of the U.S. Congress, UK and EU Parliaments, the French Senate and National Assembly, and has engaged with lawmakers internationally on how to best address the negative externalities of social media platforms. She has also filed a series of complaints with the U.S. Federal Government relating to Facebook (now named Meta).

---

Named as one of the “100 most connected men” by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world’s best known broadcasters and commentators. He produces and presents KEEN ON, the popular daily online podcast. He is the host of the long-running show, How To Fix Democracy, and directed and wrote the eponymous 2020 movie.

He is the author of four acclaimed books: Cult of the Amateur, Digital Vertigo, The Internet Is Not The Answer, and How To Fix The Future. Keen lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google’s Vice President of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

---

Dr. Adrienne Heinrich heads the AI and Innovation Center of Excellence at Aboitiz Data Innovation and at Union Bank of the Philippines.

Prior to this, Heinrich led AI and Machine Learning for personal health and connected care products at Royal Philips. She has a background in Information Technology (master’s degree at ETH Zurich) and has received her PhD at the Eindhoven University of Technology on video motion analysis for emerging application areas.

---

A journalist in Asia for more than 37 years, Maria Ressa co-founded Rappler, the top digital only news site that is leading the fight for press freedom in the Philippines. As Rappler’s CEO and president, Maria has endured constant political harassment and arrests by the Duterte government, forced to post bail ten times to stay free. Rappler’s battle for truth and democracy is the subject of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival documentary, A Thousand Cuts.

In October 2021, Maria was one of two journalists awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.”

For her courage and work on disinformation and “fake news,” Maria was named one of Time Magazine’s 2018 Person of the Year, was among its 100 Most Influential People of 2019, and has also been named one of Time’s Most Influential Women of the Century. She was also part of the BBC’s 100 most inspiring and influential women of 2019 and Prospect magazine’s world’s top 50 thinkers. In 2020, she received the Journalist of the Year award, and in 2021, UNESCO awarded her the Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize.

Maria wrote Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of al-Qaeda’s Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia and From Bin Laden to Facebook: 10 Days of Abduction, 10 Years of Terrorism, and How to Stand up to a Dictator.

---

Veteran journalist John Nery is a columnist and editorial consultant at Rappler. He hosts the weekly program “In the Public Square,” serves as a lecturer on media and politics at the Ateneo de Manila University, and co-convenes the Consortium on Democracy and Disinformation. He is a member of the board of trustees of the Asian Center for Journalism in Manila and a member of the board of directors of the World Justice Project in Washington, DC.

He served as a senior editor at the Philippine Daily Inquirer, editor in chief of Inquirer.net, and a member of the executive board of the Asia News Network. Among other recognitions, he has received a Catholic Mass Media Award for investigative journalism, a National Book Award in the journalism category, an Award for Excellence from the Society of Publishers in Asia for opinion writing, a visiting research fellowship at the Institute on Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, and a Freedom Flame award from the Friedrich Naumann Foundation. He was the first Sandra Burton Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

His Revolutionary Spirit: Jose Rizal in Southeast Asia was published by ISEAS in Singapore and by the Ateneo de Manila University Press in the Philippines in 2011. Radical: Readings in Rizal and History was published by San Anselmo Press In August 2023. A book of reflections on journalism, media, and the press is forthcoming from the Ateneo de Naga University Press.

---

Richard Gingras is global vice president, News at Google. In that role, Gingras focuses on how Google surfaces news on Google’s consumer services and how Google can enable a diverse press on the open Web. He also guides Google’s effort to enable a healthy, open ecosystem for quality journalism. This includes the Google News Initiative, Google’s global investment in efforts to elevate quality journalism, explore new models for sustainability, and provide technology to stimulate cost-efficiency in newsrooms.

Gingras has walked the bleeding edge from satellite networks to search engines, from Apple to Excite to Google. He readily concedes he’s made more mistakes than you.

He serves on the boards of the Center for News, Technology and Innovation, the First Amendment Coalition, the International Center for Journalists, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, the PRX public media podcast network, and the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation (advocacy for hostages including journalists held in other countries).

---

Prof. Erika Fille Legara is associate professor at the Asian Institute of Management and the deputy managing director of AIM’s first corporate laboratory. She was awarded the National Academy of Science and Technology Outstanding Young Scientist in 2020.

Legara specializes in data-driven analytics and modeling, computational social science, network science, and agent-based modelling. She obtained her PhD in Physics from the University of the Philippines in 2011, and was a scientist at innovation think tank A*STAR, Singapore. 

In 2018, Legara was one of the recipients of The Outstanding Young Men and Women award in education innovation.

---

Julie Posetti is the global director of research at the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ). Prior to joining ICFJ, she was a senior research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, where she led the Journalism Innovation Project. She has a PhD in journalism studies focused on digital age threats to investigative journalism.

Posetti is the author of Protecting Journalism Sources in the Digital Age (UNESCO: 2017) and co-author of Journalism, Fake News and Disinformation (UNESCO: 2018), and Balancing Act: Countering Disinformation While Respecting Freedom of Expression (UNESCO: 2020). 

She began her career as a broadcast journalist in Australia, working across news, current affairs and documentaries at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) as a reporter, presenter and editor. As a young journalist, she won a slew of professional awards recognizing her investigative reporting on child abuse in state care, Indigenous rights and violence against women.

Her work has been published by The Atlantic, CNN, the BBC, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, the ABC (Australia), Nieman Lab, The Mail and Guardian (South Africa), Columbia Journalism Review, and major Australian newspapers The Age, the Australian Financial Review and The Sydney Morning Herald.

---

Ruth Yu-Owen was recognized by Bloomberg as one of the top women leaders in the country’s energy sector. She is also one of LinkedIn’s 100 Most Influential Women. 

She co-founded Connected Women, a social enterprise with over 100,000 members focused on creating opportunities for women in the online workforce and the future of work. She is also the president of Upgrade Energy Philippines, which offers renewable energy and energy efficiency technology to various industries, and a chairperson of the energy committee of the Management Association of the Philippines and the European Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines.

She is the first honoree of USAID’s Asia’s Southeast Asian Women Energy Champions, as well as an awardee of the Women of the Future International Award in the mentor category. She is also a vice chair-Board of Trustee at Ateneo de Zamboanga. She was born in Zamboanga City to a Tausug Mother and Chinese father.

---

Natashya is a multimedia journalist and newsroom manager whose work has centered on Asia-Pacific. In her most recent role as Asia-Pacific (APAC) Editor in Chief at Vice News, she led the APAC team to win several awards for their reporting on human rights in the region.

Natashya started her journalism career with Rappler, first as a multimedia reporter, before becoming Southeast Asia Correspondent and Indonesia Bureau Chief. She is particularly knowledgeable on Southeast Asia, and has lived and worked in Manila, Jakarta, Singapore and Sydney in the last decade. Her work is largely focused on covering women’s rights, politics, democracies and disinformation.

---

Alexander Patiño Pama is a retired vice admiral of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and former Navy chief.

He is the co-chair of the Board of Directors of ARISE Philippines, a private sector alliance for disaster risk reduction in support of the UN’s advocacy for the attainment of the Goals of the Sendai Framework for Action. Pama is also consultant to the National Resilience Council, a public-private partnership that supports government, communities, the academe and private sector in advancing the attainment of disaster resilience. He is also consultant for disaster resilience of SM Prime Holdings Incorporated.

In 2013, he was named founding executive director of the Secretariat of the National Coast Watch Council at the Office of the President of the Philippines, where he was instrumental in the initial organizing and building up of the Council and the National Coast Watch Center, the agency mandated to oversee the Philippine maritime security and domain awareness. From 2014 to 2016, he served as executive director of NDRMMC, and administrator of the Office of Civil Defense.

With the Philippines as the host economy for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in 2015, he was instrumental in the authorship, introduction, and adoption of the 2015 APEC Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.

---

Almendras has vast experience in the private and public sector. He is the president and CEO of AC Logistics Holdings Corporation, concurrently serving as senior managing director of Ayala Corporation and group head of public affairs.

He spent 13 years with the Citibank group where he started as a management trainee and landed his first CEO position as president of City Savings Bank of the Aboitiz Group at the age of 37.

As a public servant, Almendras served in various high-level positions, namely, secretary of energy, Cabinet secretary and secretary of foreign affairs.

In June 2016, he was awarded the Order of Lakandula, Rank of Gold Cross Bayani, a presidential award and the highest honor given to a civilian by the Republic of the Philippines. The award was the late President Benigno Aquino III’s recognition of his exemplary service during his administration.

---

Commodore Jay Tarriela is the spokesperson for the Philippine Coast Guard. He joined the Philippine Coast Guard in 2005 as a commissioned officer with the rank of CG Ensign.

He was part of the inaugural class of the GRIPS Maritime Safety and Security Program in 2015, and later the GRIPS Global Governance Program. After completing his PhD, he reported back to the Philippine Coast Guard, where he now holds three positions: the Deputy Chief of Coast Guard Staff for Human Resource Management, Adviser of the Commandant of Maritime Security, and the Philippine Coast Guard Spokesperson on the West Philippine Sea.

Tarriela also occasionally writes for Rappler and other publications.

---

Ingrid Rose Ann Beroña is the chief risk officer of GCash, and plays a key role in ensuring the safety and security of the e-wallet platform.

Armed with 10 years of experience in risk management, she leads the enterprise risk management, business assurance, as well as the business protection and continuity management functions of the leading fintech company.

Under her leadership, GCash has strived for excellence in governing enterprise risk management, protecting against fraud, and enabling innovations that are crucial to achieving the company’s vision of “finance for all.”

She took up the Enterprise-wide Risk Management course at the Asian Institute of Management, and is a certified risk manager.

---

Pia Ranada is Rappler’s investigative reporter focused on community-driven stories. She is best known for her coverage of the Rodrigo Duterte presidency. She has covered Philippine politics, security, foreign affairs, disasters, climate change, and environment. She was a John S. Knight International Journalism Fellow at Stanford University from 2022 to 2023. In 2022, she was named one of The Outstanding Women in the Nation’s Service for her reportage. – Rappler.com