Dr. Daniel Stauffacher, a former Ambassador of Switzerland, is the Founder and President of the ICT4Peace Foundation (www.ict4peace.org), which since 2003 explores, champions the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for peace-building, crisis management, and humanitarian aid, and supports diplomatic processes for a peaceful and open cyberspace (www.ict4peace.org).
He has a Master's degree from Columbia University, New York and a Ph.D. in media and copyright law from the University of Zürich. He joined the UN in 1982 and worked in New York, Laos and China. In 1990 he joined the Swiss Federal Office for Foreign Economic Affairs (Bawi) and in 1995 he was posted to the Swiss Mission to the European Union in Brussels.
From 1999 to end of 2005 he was an Ambassador of Switzerland and a Special Representative of the Swiss Federal Government, responsible, inter alia for the hosting and diplomatic preparation of the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) that was held in Geneva in 2003 and in Tunis 2005.
He was a member of UN SG Kofi Annan’s UN ICT Task Force, a Founder and President of the Geneva Security Forum, and a founding Trustee of Sir Tim Berners Lee’s World Wide Web Foundation and a member of the Boars of the Gulf Research Center (GRF).
Since 2007 he serves as an advisor to several Governments, to the UN Secretariat General, Funds and Programmes on improving Crisis Information Management Systems and processes, using ICTs and new media.
Since 2006 he and his colleagues form ICT4Peace have called for and participated in research and international negotiations on cyber security to maintain an open, free and secure cyberspace and published a number of widely acclaimed publications to support such international processes (see publications and events: http://ict4peace.org/?p=1076).
He was an Advisor to the Swiss Government on Cyber Security matters during the Swiss Presidency of OSCE, with special emphasis on Confidence Building Measures (CBM’s) for the Cyberspace).
