Global Voices Online

• Akwe Amosu
• Ricardo Carreón
• Dan Gillmor
• Joi Ito
• Daoud Kuttab
• Isaac Mao
• Dina Mehta
• John Palfrey
• David Weinberger

Akwe Amosu

Akwe Amosu works as a Senior Policy Analyst for Africa at the Open Society Institute in Washington, DC, advocating more effective responses to Africa's challenges and more attention for Africa's civil society viewpoints in the US and wider policy community. For over 20 years she worked as a journalist and radio producer in African and Africa-targeted media. She joined allAfrica.com as its founder executive editor in 2000 and the site was twice nominated (2002 and 2003) in the Webby Awards' Best News Site category. While there, she co-founded BlogAfrica. She worked previously as a host, editor and producer for the BBC World Service during the '90s, and before that at the Financial Times in London and West Africa magazine. In 2003-5, she was head of communication at the UN's Economic Commission for Africa in Ethiopia. She is on the boards of the International Women's Media Foundation (IWMF), of TrustAfrica and of the AllAfrica Foundation. She believes passionately in the value and importance to Africa of the new media tools and communities that help put power in the hands of non-governmental actors and leaders.

Ricardo Carreón

Ricardo Carreón is the GM of Intel Latin America. Ricardo leads a team of more than 200 people with offices in 10 countries and presence in more than 30. Ricardo joined Intel in August 1999 and he has several management positions and since November of 2003 he is the GM for Latin America. Prior to joining Intel, Ricardo held management positions at Maxcom Comunicaciones (Marketing Director), Novell de México (several positions including Mexico Country Manager) and Digital Equpiment Corporation. Ricardo has been heavily involved on the development of strategies to promote Digital Inclusion on emerging markets. He developed a strategy to accelerate Mexico’s transition into a knowledge based economy with the “Mexico Competitivo” strategy. He has received awards by Tec de Monterrey, Unete and the Office of the President of Mexico for his engagement on social activities and education.

Ricardo holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. He has three children and currently lives in São Paulo, Brazil. His hobbies are music, movies and has a heavy interest in writing (including blogging). He is a member of Mensa International and the World Economic Forum.

See Ricardo's Blog.

Dan Gillmor

Dan Gillmor is founder and director of the Center for Citizen Media, a project to enhance and expand grassroots media and its reach. The center is an affiliate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University Law School and the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

Gillmor is author of “We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People” (O'Reilly Media, 2004), a book that explains the rise of citizens' media and why it matters.

From 1994 until early 2005 Gillmor was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont. During 2005 he co-founded Bayosphere, a San Francisco Bay Area website, which is now part of Backfence.com's collection of hyper-local community network.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Vermont, Gillmor received a Herbert Davenport fellowship in 1982 for economics and business reporting at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. During the 1986-87 academic year he was a journalism fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he studied history, political theory and economics. He has won or shared in several regional and national journalism awards. Before becoming a journalist he played music professionally for seven years.

See Dan's Website.

Joi Ito

Joichi Ito is General Manager of International Operations for Technorati which indexes and monitors blogs and the Chairman of Six Apart Japan the weblog software company. He is on the board of Creative Commons a non-profit organization which proposes a middle way to rights management, rather than the extremes of the pure public domain or the reservation of all rights. He is a board member of Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Open Source Initiative (OSI). He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. In 1997 Time Magazine ranked him as a member of the CyberElite. In 2000 he was ranked among the “50 Stars of Asia” by Business Week and commended by the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications for supporting the advancement of IT. In 2001 the World Economic Forum chose him as one of the 100 “Global Leaders of Tomorrow” for 2002. He has served and continues to serve on numerous Japanese central as well as local government committees and boards, advising the government on IT, privacy and computer security related issues. He is currently researching “The Sharing Economy” as a Doctor of Business Administration candidate at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy at Hitotsubashi University in Japan. He is a fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Communications.

See Joi's Website.

Daoud Kuttab

Daoud Kuttab is a Palestinian journalist and media activist. Born in Jerusalem in 1955, Kuttab studied in the United States and has been working in journalism ever since 1980. He has worked in the Arabic print press (Al Fajr, Al Quds and Assinara) before moving to the audio visual field. He established and presided over the Jerusalem Film Institute in the 90s. In 1995 he helped establish the Arabic Media Internet Network (AMIN) a censorship free Arab web site. He established and has headed since 1996 the Institute of Modern Media at Al Quds University. In 1997 he partially moved to Amman (because of family tragedy and remarriage) and in 2000 established the Arab world's first internet radio station AmmanNet. Mr. Kuttab is active in media freedom efforts in the Middle East. He is a regular columnist for the Jordan Times, The Jerusalem Post and the Daily Star in Lebanon. He has co produced a number of award winning documentaries and children's television programs. His op ed columns have appeared in the NY Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angles Times, The Daily Telegraph and Shimbum Daily in Tokyo. He has received a number of international awards among them the CPJ Freedom of Expression Award, the IPI World Press Freedom Hero, PEN Club USA Writing Freedom Award and the Leipzig Courage in Freedom Award.

See Daoud's Website.

Isaac Mao

Isaac Mao is a blogger, software architect, entrepreneur, investor - and researcher in learning technology and social technology. He divides his time between research, social works, business and technology. He is now running/advising some non-profit programs and several for-profit businesses in China.

As one of the earliest bloggers in the Chinese community, Isaac is not only co-founder of CNBlog.org which is the earliest evangelizing site in China on grassroots publishing, but also the co-organizer of Chinese Blogger Conference (2005 in Shanghai, 2006 in Hangzhou). The CNBlog team then transformed into Social Brain Foundation(SBF) later on to promote free culture in China covering Free Access, Free Speech and Free Thinking areas. The current projects SBF is supporting includes Ideas Factory, Open Education and Creative Commons China, etc.

Isaac is also a global bridge in blogosphere. He is regular speaker/keynote to Wikimania, Chinese Internet Conference and other global internet cultural events. As a trained software engineer, he has a long history leads developing both business and consumer software. He worked as a Chief Architect in Intel HomeCD project and Tangram BackSchool suite. He applied many HCI methodogies into software design process and improved the usability of software so much. He turns to Social Computing research and organized the first Social Software Forum in China.

Isaac Mao earned BS degree in Computer Science and got MBA training program at Shanghai Jiaotong University. Isaac is also a pedagogy consultant to some local institutions. He acts as advisors for some local hi-tech firms on their business strategy. Isaac Mao was listed as the people of “2006-2016, Map of the Decade”, by Institute for the Future. He is also as director of Shanghai Youth Development Foundation.

See Isaac's Website.

Dina Mehta

Dina is a qualitative researcher and ethnographer based in Mumbai, India for the last 18 years. After 10 years at IMRB International, she set off on her own and established Explore Research & Consultancy in 1998, which has a portfolio of global clients including MTV, JWT, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, ESPN, HP and Pitney Bowes Inc. As part of her research consultancy, she's involved in ethnographic studies including participant observation, studying the impact of technology in rural markets, and following trend setting youth in urban settings.

Dina is particularly curious about and loves playing with and using social technologies that bring about new ways of communication, collaboration and development. Her explorations into the social media and social tools space led her to actively contribute to grassroots online disaster relief efforts since the tsunamis devastated parts of Asia in December 2004.

Her personal blog is Conversations with Dina, she has contributed to building several communities on the internet, such as Worldchanging, TsunamiHelp, KatrinaHelp, WorldWideHelp, MumbaiHelp and SkypeJournal.

She's participated and presented at many conferences worldwide.

John Palfrey

As Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, John’s work focuses on Internet law, intellectual property, and the potential of new technologies to strengthen democracies locally and around the world.

John came to the Berkman Center from the law firm Ropes & Gray, where he worked on intellectual property, Internet law, and private equity transactions. John is a co-founder of several technology companies. He also served as a Special Assistant at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton administration. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Charles River Watershed Association, which does terrific work to clean up our local river, as well as the non-profit that runs Chris Lydon’s and Mary McGrath’s radio program, Open Source. While attending Harvard Law School, John worked at the Berkman Center, was a Teaching Fellow in Internet Law, and served as an editor of the Harvard Environmental Law Review.

Outside of his Berkman Center work, he is a founder of RSS Investors, a private equity firm focused on new syndication technologies, and is Chairman of the Board of TopTenSources, a new media company. He is active in Massachusetts politics.

John graduated from Harvard College, the University of Cambridge, and Harvard Law School. He was a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholar to the University of Cambridge and the U.S. EPA Gold Medal (highest national award). John is admitted to the New York and Massachusetts bars.

See John's Website

David Weinberger

David Weinberger, Ph.D. is co-author of the bestseller, The Cluetrain Manifesto and the author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined; he writes the well-known blog “Joho.” He is currently a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society. His work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, USA Today, Wired, Salon, The Guardian, Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 and many others. He is a commentator on National Public Radio and is a columnist for KMWorld and Il Sole 24 ore (the leading financial daily newspaper in Italy). He is on the advisory boards of Technorati, ITConversations, SocialText, BlogBridge, the Information Architecture association, Fon, and the Christopher Reeve Foundation. As a marketing consultant he has has worked with companies from startups to Fortune 500s. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto. His book “Everything Is Miscellaneous” about the social effect of the new digital ways of organizing knowledge will be published by Times Books in spring, 2007.

See David's Website