Global Voices

English

The world is talking, are you listening?

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

• Ethan Zuckerman 
• Rebecca MacKinnon (Chairperson)
• Akwe Amosu
• Rosental Alves
• Stephen King
• Jillian York (Volunteers representative)
• Marta Cooper (Volunteers representative)
• Claire Ulrich (Staff representative)
• Sue Gardner

Ethan Zuckerman

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 (Chairperson)

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.

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.

Stephen King

Stephen King is Senior Director, Investments with Omidyar Network. Based in London, he makes investments across all areas within the Media, Markets & Transparency initiative. Prior to Omidyar Network, Stephen served as the Chief Executive of the BBC World Service Trust, where he led a period of sustained growth that included building programs in more than 40 countries in the developing world. Stephen helped establish the Trust’s international reputation as one of the largest and most successful organizations using media and communications to improve the lives of the world’s poor and promote better governance and transparency worldwide. Prior to the BBC, Stephen was the Executive Director of the International Council on Social Welfare, an international organization working to promote social development. Stephen has also held positions with nonprofit organizations HelpAge International, Help the Aged, and Voluntary Service Overseas. Stephen is a board member of CARE International in the U.K. He holds an MA in Oriental and African Studies from the University of London.

Jillian C. York (Volunteers’ representative)

Jillian C. York is a blogger, writer, and freedom of expression activist. She has a BA in Sociology from Binghamton University, where she first became interested in the Middle East and North Africa. She then lived in Morocco for several years, where she studied Arabic, taught English, and wrote a guidebook to Moroccan culture. She started writing for Global Voices in 2007 after her Morocco-focused blog was quoted on the site, and has been an active GVer ever since. Jillian has worked at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society since 2008, on a number of projects, including the OpenNet Initiative, and Herdict. In 2009, she-cofounded Talk Morocco with fellow GVer Hisham, which won the Deutsche Welle Best of Blogs English award that same year. Jillian also writes for Al Jazeera English, Index on Censorship, and The Guardian, among other publications. She is thrilled to be a volunteer representative on the Board of Global Voices.

Marta Cooper (Volunteers’ representative)

Claire Ulrich (Staff representative)

Claire Ulrich is a French journalist, editor, translator,  and instructor for NGOs based in Paris, France. This long string of words is explained by her (she does not mind saying) “maturity.” Her professional experience has always revolved around journalism, spanning 25 years and every media now described as “traditional.” She has been a staff writer for French newsweeklies, reporter, producer and editor for French national television and radio news magazines. She turned to citizen media in 2004 when she began contributing to the veteran South Korean citizen news website Ohmynews, and has never looked back. She was the first volunteer translator of the then brand-new Global Voices in French site in March 2007, then she became editor, and is now in charge of a community of 100 or so wonderful francophone volunteers, writing or translating from Canada, China, Africa, Japan, and even France, Global Voices style.   She currently advocates for Internet literacy in Francophone Africa and preparedness against emergencies and natural disasters using new technologies, in the informal French network Crisis Camp Paris. Brought up in Madagascar and francophone Africa, Africa is definitely her focus. And no, Ulrich is not a German surname. It's Alsatian, from Strasbourg.

Sue Gardner

Sue Gardner is the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia – the world's largest and most popular encyclopedia, which is free to use and free of advertising. Wikipedia contains more than 23 million volunteer-authored articles in over 280 languages, and is visited by more than 483 million people every month, making it the number five most-popular website in the world.

Gardner, a seasoned journalist, was formerly head of CBC.ca, the website for theCanadian Broadcasting Corporation, one of Canada's most prominent and best-loved cultural institutions. Under her leadership, CBC.ca won many international awards for excellence, and grew to become Canada's most popular news site. Gardner started her career in 1990 as a producer with CBC's “As It Happens,” an internationally-recognized groundbreaking news and current events radio program. She has worked in radio, television, newspapers, magazines and online.