Benjamin “Ben” Kampmann is software developer and lead since 2009, freelance and in full time positions. From the very start of his career he worked primarily in open source and adjacent technologies, mainly with smaller to mid-size start-ups. Since 2016 he has been working on various privacy-focused decentralization projects with Parity’s Substrate Blockchain Framework that Polkadot is built upon. He became interim VP of engineering before joining New Vector/Element (the makers of Matrix.org) in early 2022 as the lead engineer for the Matrix Rust SDK.
Since moving to Berlin, after his first few years in Barcelona, he has been active as an community and event organizer in the the field of code learning, privacy and open source and later in political campaigning and the ecological social-justice movement. Early on he was unhappy with the lack of decent organizing tooling for the self-organized, grass-roots, non-business and semi-professional sector. This found its peak when co-organizing the political election campaign of his partner in 2022 for which he started to put his thoughts into code and built a first mobile-first organizing tool (called Affinity).
Ben is now technical and product lead on EFFEKTIO, which implements these core ideas on the decentralized matrix protocol.
More details about Ben, his resume and project portfolio, as well as his blog – like an article about Why chat sucks and you shouldn’t use it – on his private website gnunicorn.org.
