Global Voices Online

Our founders, volunteers and staff are represented on our Board along with some of the most influential innovators in global online media.

• Ethan Zuckerman (Chairman)
• Rebecca MacKinnon
• Akwe Amosu
• Joi Ito
• Rosental Alves
• Deborah Ann Dilley (Volunteers representative)
• Amira Al Hussaini (Staff representative)

Ethan Zuckerman (Chairman)

Ethan Zuckerman is a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. His research in the field of information and communication technology for development includes work on telecommunications policy, free and open source software, and citizen media. With Rebecca MacKinnon, he is the co-founder of Global Voices (www.globalvoicesonine.org), an award-winning international community of webloggers and citizen journalists. Prior to his work with Berkman and Global Voices, Ethan founded Geekcorps (geekcorps.org), a volunteer organization which sent technology experts to work with ICT companies in the developing world. He is the former CTO of Tripod.com, a pioneering web hosting company based in Western Massachusetts, where he lives and works. He serves as advisor to several nonprofit projects that focus on technology and social change, and serves on the board of Open Society Institute's US Program. His personal blog, “My Heart's in Accra” is located at http://ethanzuckerman.com/blog.

Rebecca MacKinnon

Rebecca MacKinnon is a veteran journalist, China hand, and online media pioneer. In January 2007 she joined the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Center, where she teaches online journalism and conducts research on the Chinese Internet, free expression and corporate responsibility. She also serves as Public Lead for Creative Commons Hong Kong. Before coming to Hong Kong MacKinnon was a Research Fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where she co-founded Global Voices with Ethan Zuckerman. Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, MacKinnon worked for CNN in Northeast Asia for over a decade, serving as CNN’s Beijing Bureau Chief and Correspondent from 1998-2001 and as CNN’s Tokyo Bureau Chief and Correspondent from 2001-03. She has also covered major news events in North and South Korea, Pakistan, and the Philippines. MacKinnon writes and speaks frequently on the future of journalism in the Internet age, the Internet and censorship in China, and issues of free expression and corporate responsibility. Her blog is RConversation.com

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.

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.

Rosental Alves

Professor Rosental Calmon Alves holds the Knight Chair in Journalism and the UNESCO Chair in Communication at the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the founding director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. Created in 2002, thanks to a $2 million grant from the James L. and John S. Knight Foundation, the center reaches thousands of journalists throughout the hemisphere with training and organizational capacity building projects. Professor Alves began his academic career in the United States in March 1996, after 27 years as a professional journalist, including seven years as a journalism professor in Brazil. He moved to Austin from Rio de Janeiro, where he was the managing editor and member of the board of directors of Jornal do Brasil. He was chosen in 1995 from approximately 200 candidates to be the first holder of the Knight Chair in International Journalism, created by a $1.5 million endowment from the Knight Foundation. Alves created the first Brazilian online news service, in 1991, which served the network of Rio de Janeiro’s Stock Market. In early 1995, he managed the launching of the first online edition of a newspaper in Brazil, Jornal do Brasil Online. In Austin, he created the first class on online journalism at UT in the 1997-98 academic year. A member of the boards of several national and international organizations related to journalism, Alves has been a frequent speaker in academic and industry conferences, has worked as a new media consultant, and has conducted numerous workshops in several countries to train journalists and journalism professors on the use of new media. Since 1999, he hosts the annual International Symposium on Online Journalism at UT Austin – a unique conference, gathering professionals and scholars from around the world.

Deborah Ann Dilley (Volunteers' representative)

Deborah Ann Dilley is the Outreach Assistant at the Middle East Center on the University of Utah campus, coordinating community education projects on all aspects of arts, history, culture, and politics of the Middle East. She graduated in 2004 from the University of Utah with a BA in Ancient Middle East History and Turkish Language and is currently working on her Masters in Applied Linguistics. Her interest in advocacy (and later blogging) began in 1999 when she participated in an archaeological dig in Southeast Turkey, a heavily Kurdish area. Shortly thereafter she started working with the American Kurdish Information Network (AKIN) publicizing the plight of the Kurdish people in the Middle East. She began blogging on her personal blog, Turkish Delight, in 2002, as a means of communicating with family and friends while abroad. From there she became affiliated with the Kurdish group blog, the Kurdistan Bloggers Union. Deborah began writing for Global Voices in September 2005 covering the Kurdish blogosphere and later in October 2005 began covering the Turkish blogosphere as well. She takes great pride in her community and international advocacy work and is pleased to have been elected as the GV Author representative on the Global Voices board.

Amira Al Hussaini (Staff representative)

Amira Al Hussaini is a Bahraini journalist, translator, editor, blogger and wannabe artist - in no particular order. Her experience in journalism spans 17 years, during which she climbed the ladder - starting as a trainee journalist and working her way up to becoming news editor - in an environment not as accommodating to outspoken and free-thinking women as we would wish. Amira has a number of firsts under her cap - she is among the first female Arab news editors and among the first Arab women to win the Dag Hammarskjold Scholarship, which offered her a three-month fellowship to cover the United Nations in New York in 1996. She has since been a frequent visitor to the UN's headquarters in New York, where she continued to cover the General Assembly and Security Council, whenever her travels brought her to the US. Amira's interests cover women and human rights, politics, freedom of expression and democracy and all forms of artistic expression. Having dabbled with everything ranging from oil painting to embroidery to spinning and glazing ceramics, she is moved by the intensity of colour and contours of form. In 2004, Amira ventured into blogging and embraced online media with the same intensity she fell for mainstream media at a young age. Today she is Global Voices Online's Middle East and North Africa and Arabic Language Editor and Voices without Votes editor.