Jessy Kate a researcher in outer space policy and governance at the Open Lunar Foundation, with a particular focus on policy and coordination questions for near term lunar activity. The space domain is what is called an Area Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ), and involves wrestling with many questions similar to those raised by commons management from the high seas to the Internet.

Jessy Kate is also actively involved in decentralised, self-governing communities and autonomous networks. These projects have led her to a broader interest in the foundational ingredients of international law, and new approaches to sovereignty, jurisdiction and institution design. Her background is in computer science. She worked on the founding team of the NASA Nebula cloud computing project (which became Open Stack), developed flight software for Astra's rockets 1.0 and 2.0, and worked with Open Government data at the Sunlight Foundation.

Jessy Kate is an affiliate researcher at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard and the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). She is an alumni of the Fellowship for Good at the Institute of the Future, and the Innovation Fellowship at the City and County of San Francisco. She achieved a BSc in Astrophysics from Queen’s University Canada and a MSc in Computer Science at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. She has several years of graduate study in distributed computing systems from the University of Maryland.