Matthias Spielkamp

German journalist and digital-rights researcher; co-founder, equal-partner shareholder, and Executive Director of AlgorithmWatch, the Berlin-headquartered non-profit research-advocacy organisation working on the social, legal, and ethical implications of automated decision-making systems. Spielkamp convened the gGmbH in 2016–2017 with data journalist Lorenz Matzat (his equal-partner co-shareholder), computer scientist Katharina Anna Zweig, and ethicist Lorena Jaume-Palasí, and is also Founder and President of AlgorithmWatch CH, the legally independent Swiss sister organisation launched in Zurich in November 2020.

Born in 1970 in Paderborn, Spielkamp came to algorithmic-accountability work through journalism rather than computer science: he holds a Master's in Journalism from the University of Colorado at Boulder and studied philosophy, economics and political science at universities in Frankfurt, Hannover and Freie Universität Berlin, and worked as a reporter for Spiegel TV Magazin and as a freelance contributor to Die Zeit, brand eins and Berliner Zeitung. Before AlgorithmWatch he co-founded iRights.info (2004; Grimme Online Award 2006), Germany's longest-running public-facing digital-rights information service, and the mobile-privacy information project mobilsicher.de (2015); he has also directed the IGF Academy, the Global-South capacity-building programme for the United Nations Internet Governance Forum, and held fellowships from the ZEIT Stiftung, Stiftung Mercator and the American Council on Germany.

Beyond AlgorithmWatch he sits on the governing boards of Reporter ohne Grenzen (Reporters Without Borders Germany) and the consumer-testing foundation Stiftung Warentest, on the advisory councils of the Freudenberg Stiftung and the Whistleblower Network, and on the Expert Committee on Communication/Information of the German Commission for UNESCO. From 2020 to 2022 he sat on the multi-stakeholder Global Partnership on AI, and for the 2024–2026 term he was appointed to the advisory council of Germany's Digital Services Coordinator. He testifies regularly before the Council of Europe, the European Parliament, and German Bundestag committees, and edits AlgorithmWatch's flagship Automating Society reports — the closest thing in the European digital-rights field to a recurring multi-country ADM-mapping standard.