Facilitators
Biographies, Alphabetical by last name
The Tactical Technology Collective and Mi2, in partnership with Open Society Institute, was delighted and honored to present a strong and diverse team of facilitators to direct the learning at Summer Source. The following are biographies provided by the facilitators.
Micah Anderson
Micah is a free software, media activist system administrator working to create grassroots democratic technology alternatives to the existing corporate structures. In order to meet the computer needs of those working for radical social change he has worked to create The Red Cursor Collective (http://riseup.net) which provides email, mailing lists and website hosting for activists. While organizing the WTO protests in Seattle, Micah helped create the Independent Media Center (http://www.indymedia.org) and has played a significant role in architecting and supporting the extensive technical infrastructure needed to support it over the years.
Micah has participated in a project to ship containers of computers to indymedia centers and social movements in the global south to build popular communications capacity.
Recently he has begun work on developing a distribution of the Debian operating system which will provide a stable, free desktop environment that will fulfill the needs that non-profits would need, called Debian-NP (http://np.debian.net) Micah is interested in finding ways to use technology to democratize communication.
Jacob Appelbaum
Jacob Appelbaum is a security consultant from the San Francisco bay area. He is an advocate of strong crypto and common computing sense. As a supporter of anonymous free speech (on the Internet and off) he has developed a love for covert and overt channels of communication. With the amount of time spent working with computers, he has a healthy disdain for the machines of modern living.
Henri Bergius
Henri Bergius is a co-founder of the Midgard project and partner in Nemein Oy, a Finnish Midgard solution provider. Henri is also board member in OSCOM, the international consortium for Open Source Content Management Systems.
Henri has given presentations on Midgard and Open Source in several events internationally, including Global Linux 2000 in Korea, Linux Expo Madrid 2001 in Spain and the OSCOM conferences.
Candida Coronato
Candida Coronato has long-term experience with interdisciplinary projects since 1995. She started working freelance as technical interpreter and translator for different projects in Berlin including lots of management work for them (mainly civil construction and congresses). Later on she used part of that experience in Germany and Italy for the development of web based technical language media and consultancy for EU projects ('Leonardo da Vinci' program).
A strong interest for Free Software/Open Source and ICT4development took her to a number of intensive IT trainings, focused on Linux and project management. Since fall 2001 she is active for 'Digital Bridges e.V.' (http://www.dbev.de), a German non-profit which is realizing IT education projects with Free Software (Linux) in developing countries. Actually she is working as president, PR contact and fundraiser for this NGO.
September 2002 she moved to the Netherlands. From there she is also doing research about the spreading and potentials of FS/OS in developing countries under various aspects (such as education, resources, projects) and about the networking between NGO's.
Robert Guerra
Robert Guerra is a leading privacy advocate based in Toronto, Canada. After working for several years in the medical research field, he now works with Human Rights NGOs to help them improve their information privacy and security practices. He is presently the managing director of Privaterra, which has recently assisted groups in South and Central America improve data privacy and security with the support of the Open Society Institute. He is active within the international electronic privacy community, sitting on the board of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) and the program committee of the preminent conference, "Computers, Freedom, Privacy". He has also been actively involved in all key meeetings of the preparatory process of the UN World Summit on the Information Society, including as a panelist at the Pan European and Latin American Regional Meeting, and an NGO member of the Canadian delegation to the second preparatory meeting.
Mako Hill
Benjamin Mako Hill is a long-time free software advocate and practitioner. He has been a developer in the Debian project -- arguably the largest free software project -- for nearly three years in both technical and non-technical roles. Currently, he acts as the projects' accountant and hardware manager. Additionally he maintains a number of free software projects and has written several documents on non-technical aspects of free and open source software including the widely distributed Free Software Project Management HOWTO and a number of more academic papers.
He has extensive experience with a large number of non-profit organizations including Software in the Public Interest where he currently serves as a member of the board of directors. He has recently help spearhead Debian-Nonprofit, a new custom version of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution geared toward use in non-profit organizations. While printing in members of the non-profit and non-Debian community, the development is fully within the Debian framework.
He is currently writing code both professionally and as a volunteer. He is also producing academic and non-academic literature, speaking at conferences, and consulting for a new company and non-profit organizations, Partecs and Sammondano, to help design and implement software to facilitate democratic decision-making in more meaningful ways.
Jaromil
Free software programmer and streaming media pioneer, media artist and activist, performer and emigrant.
Wired to the matrix since 1991 (point of NeuromanteBBS on Cybernet 65:1500/3.13), co-founded in 1994 the non-profit organization Metro Olografix for the diffusion of telematics, then founded in 2000 the free software lab dyne.org; sub-root for the autistici.org / inventati.org community since 2001, also active within the italy indymedia collective.
As a programmer he is author and mantainer of three free softwares (GNU GPL): MuSE, FreeJ and HasciiCam, pionieristic in offering new possibilities for online radios and in dealing with audio streaming and realtime video manipulation in a unique way; also author of the GNU/Linux distribution dyne:bolic: a bootable CD offering an easy to use operating system (without the need for an hard disk installation) and a toolkit useful for media hacktivism and online radio streaming.
Co-author of TUBOCATODICO, developed the software for Sophisticated Soiree (ZKM/intermedium02 award) performing it on tour the 2001/2002; programmer and performer with the theatre company Giardini Pensili since several years having contributed to the realization of pieces like Animalie, Metamorfosi, Affreschi, Il Cartografo. Recently co-curated the I LOVE YOU exposition about software viruses in the Museum of Applied Arts in Frankfurt. His most recent online piece is FARAH: the documentation of a travel thru the occupied territories of Palestine, in search for joy.
Collaborations include: Ars Electronica Center / Futurelab, PUBLIC VOICE Lab, Giardini Pensili, digitalcraft.org, 01001.org, August Black, epidemiC, Florian Cramer, 92v2.0, LOA hacklab, Lobo, Freaknet Medialab, CandidaTV, the Mitocondri, the HackMeeting community.
Tomas Krag
Tomas Krag spends his days working with http://wire.less.dk, a company that he founded with his friend and colleague Sebastian Büttrich in early 2002. wire.less.dk specialises in community wireless networking solutions, and has a special focus on low-cost wireless networks for the developing world.
Before founding wire.less.dk Tomas held 2 volunteer positions for US NGO GeekCorps. First he spent 3 months in early April helping an Accra, Ghana based Internet Service Provider set up a wireless network, and some Linux-based servers, and training his local counterparts to build out and maintain the systems. In late 2002 he went on another trip. This time to Yerevan, Armenia where he worked with GeekCorps to evaluate possible volunteer projects, and to train local GeekCorps/IESC staff on how to handle geek volunteers.
Before that, Tomas spent a few years at university studying Computer Science and Business, followed by 5 years in various jobs, ranging from Open Source web developer and Technical Project Manager, to heading up a small research department in a large web agency, and trying to learn everything he could about mobile Internet, interactive TV and other stranger web channels, before the bubble burst.
A big fan of traveling Tomas has played pick-up basketball games in at least 6 countries on 3 continents. He does what he does because it's loads of fun.
Kwindla Hultman Kramer
I'm the CTO of AllAfrica Global Media, which is a producer and distributor of news and information from and about Africa. We work with more than 100 publishers, post an average of 800 new stories each day to http://allafrica.com and to commercial syndicated feeds, and have around 600,000 pieces (dating back to 1994) in our searchable archives. We also do some technology projects for outside friends and clients. We host the web and email servers of the Free and Open Source Software Foundation for Africa: http://fossfa.org. And an AllAfrica team spent nine months rebuilding the Democratic National Committee's technology infrastructure in 2001 and 2002: http://www.democrats.org. We've done work with the Nigerian government, and have projects just getting started in Namibia and Angola.
My first bits of HTML and perl were written in late 1994. I studied North African History and Arabic for most of my time at university, but I backed my way into becoming a programmer, and eventually into graduate school in a discipline resembling Computer Science. I spend most of my time writing perl code, having come full circle after meandering around lisp, java, C, several flavors of assembly language and a fair amount of hardware hacking.
My (much neglected) home page can be found at:http://allafrica.com/staff/kwindla/
And here is a more formal summary of my professional activities: Kwindla H. Kramer is chief technical officer of AllAfrica.com. Before helping to found AllAfrica, he spent three years as a research associate at the MIT Media Laboratory, where he was a Motorola Fellow. While there, he developed new methods of distributing network functionality and control. He has served as a technology consultant for such companies as Motorola, LEGO, Mattel, Kraft and Intel, and has been building Web-based systems since 1994. Proficient in a number of programming languages, he has extensive experience managing Unix systems, Web servers, and production networks. He developed the programming language for the Lego MindStorms robotic toy lines and wrote the first embedded virtual machine for the Java programming language. He is the author of the open source XML::Comma web operating system. After living and traveling in Africa, he graduated Cum Laude from Harvard University with a degree in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and speaks French and Arabic. He has a Masters degree in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT.
Marc Levine
Marc Levine has been interested in the development of public policy and its impact on underserved populations since his days in college. Levine served as both student body president of his alma mater and chairman of the California State Student Association while at California State University, Northridge advocating for educational policies that most benefited California's student population.
After graduating, Levine was employed with a leading public affairs agency working to influence policy in the energy and environmental sectors. He continued to pursue his academic interests at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, and earned a Master of Arts degree in National Security Affairs while establishing the school's Office of Alumni Relations. Levine then promoted international trade between US states and countries located in the Eastern Mediterranean -- working to link companies from the US and the region -- both hi-tech companies and food growers, alike.
When Levine heard about Benetech and the opportunity to lead the Martus project, he found it irresistible. "To create software that will help NGOs around the world document and secure information about human rights violations, and to use that information to seek justice, is among the most compelling reasons I can think of to use technology."
Working with Benetech's expert computer engineering team, Levine has managed the development of the software since inception. Levine has tested the software in the United States, Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Cambodia and Russia. Already, the software is being used by a domestic violence agency tracking abuse in Arizona, and by the Human Rights Commission in Sri Lanka to monitor the ceasefire that ended the island's decades-long civil war.
eddy nix
eddy nix has been involved in independent media production for over 15 years. having filmed in over 15 countries, eddy has been exploring issues of corporate globalization, ecological agriculture, and free speech issues.
eddy has worked with the Independent Media Center (IMC) movement since 1999 when the IMC was formed . He has co-produced the IMC videos 'Praha 2000', which chronicles the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and the soon to be released 'Trading Freedom' which explores the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
Currently eddy works with a Romanian Hemp company called Ecolution, which uses natural processing techniques to create a full line of hemp clothing, cordage, and accessories. in 1997, he helped to found an alternative High School in Wisconsin, and spent 4 years teaching english, history and drama. Eddy has directed over 10 theater productions and acted in many plays, films and television shows.
eddy also serves on the Board of Directors of the Dhanakosha Foundation, which provides grants to individuals and organizations which support the cultural and artistic traditions of Tibet. He is a father of a lovely 2 year old daughter, and currently lives in Santa Cruz California.
Niels Peen
Niels is network and systems administrator at Greenpeace International, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
“We run a global VPN called Greenlink-3 which provides connectivity and services to Greenpeace offices, ships and mobile users around the world. Currently over 60 locations are connected and we expect to pass the 100 somewhere in the next two years. On this network we provide services like email, news, discussion lists, file transfer, typical web-based applications, world-wide dial-in and more using primarily Open Source software.
With the rest of the Greenlink-3 team I'm responsible for maintaining and developing the network and it's services as well as responding to user and system reported technical problems. This involves a wide variety of activities ranging from creating a discussion list to writing scripts or debugging an OSPF problem. "
Bako Mihaly
Hi All! I am Misi (BAKO Mihaly) from Romania. I am part of the Hungarian minority living in Transylvania. I am 36 year old, male.
I am active in the NGO field since 1993. I have participated to a lot of NGO trainings, meetings and conferences on various issues like NGO management, leadership, conflict resolution, problem solving, strategic planning, financial management.
I am network administrator. I am doing also NGO management, in my position of Executive Director of the StrawberryNet Foundation. I am managing Strawberrynet, an NGO network serving mainly environmental NGOs. I am taking care of the hosting issues, management of the content management system - APC Action Apps, installing new applications within this framework, dealing with web pages, mailing lists, DNS, etc.
I have some experience in PHP, MySQL, Perl, web design. However I have worked mainly as implementer lately, because of my NGO management duties which are eating up my time :-(. So I am sticking my hands into the code when something is not working, doing mainly debugging and writing simple scripts, including bash scripts under Linux. I have done recently a CISCO Networking Academy CCNA course, so I am pretty good in networking basics and concepts. I have also extensive experience in basic network administration, taking into account that I am administering Internet services and POPs (point of presence) since 1994.
I am using Linux since 1994. I had a short SCO UNIX administration period of 8 months before. When I saw UNIX first time, it was a feeling of getting lost in a dense fog on some unknown terrain. I realised at that time that I have to forget considering myself a computer programmer and start all over again. After an intensive Linux camp financed by the Romanian branch of OSI (Soros Foundation) in autumn 1994 I committed myself near Linux. I used mostly Slackware, and recently Debian and UHU Linux (that is a new and very neat Hungarian distribution of which I am proud of). I tried out RedHat as well, but I did not like it.
I worked also as computer programmer (Pascal, Z80 Assembler, Basic), in computer hardware service (2 years) and electronic technician before 1993.
Otherwise I like visual experiences (used to make photos before I made myself so busy :-)), arts and whatewer is meaningful and nice. I see nature, life in general and human intelligence the most valuable things and I am concerned about the environment and social justice.
I am looking forward to see you all in Vis!
Vladimir Petkov
Vladimir Petkov works in InterSpace Media Art Center – based in Sofia, Bulgaria as manager of eRider project called “Open Source Software Solutions for Bulgarian NGOs”. He has graduated University for National and World Economics – major Public Administration, and now graduates the Sofia University – major Virtual Culture. He is the engine of Cult.bg – server for art an culture, *bpm – zone for cyber culture and many other independent web projects. His favorite Linux distribution is SlackWare and uses GNOME as windows manager.
Patrice Riemens
I am a geographer by training but I have over the past fifteen years been mostly active in 'net.activism' - as a natural follow-up of activism (cultural, political) in general. I got more especially involved in the 'hackers movement' as co-organiser of the Galactic Hacker Party/ICATA in Amsterdam 1989, and later as active participant in the Dutch hackers fest HEU (1993), HIP (1997) and HAL (2001). I was also involved in XS4ALL and the Digital City of Amsterdam (DDS) in their pioneer time.
Having never been into any serious kind of career (I hold an unsalaried research fellowship in development studies at the University of Amsterdam since 1987) I have always functioned as a kind of 'Resource Person' to various initiatives (and left those that became real institutions ;-), like Nettime, the Waag/ Society for Old and New Media, Sarai, Tech-2, etc. etc. I have also always tried to use my, err, academic expertise in development issues by blending it with my knowledge of technological culture, e.g. by participating in the (alternative activities) of the upcoming WSIS.
Being francophone has also led me to become a translator to the philosopher Paul Virilio, and member of the edit board of the magazine 'Multitudes', besides trying to follow and spread the word around the very interesting but internationally under-exposed French cyber-culture. Same applies btw to the Italian scene, to which I am somewhat familiar. Both offer for instance extremely interesting (immo) approaches to the current hotly debated issues regarding 'Intellectual Property', FLOSS, and the economics and politics of the net in general.
In coming to Vis, I hope to meet a lot of remarkable personalities and learn about their experiences and activities, and to be able to share with them my own experiences and knowledge. And may be I can do some cooking as well - or serve Turkish Tea.
You can check me out (bit random info) on Google and view my pals and me on the documentary film "Hippies from Hell", downloadable at: http://hippies.waag.org
Dirk Slater
Dirk Slater has been Circuit Rider for the Welfare Law Center's Low Income Networking and Communications (LINC) Project since May, 1998. As Circuit Rider, Dirk helps low-income organizing groups increase their capacity to conduct advocacy, public education, and membership and leadership development by utilizing technology. A major part of his work involves developing technology strategies with groups that are driven by the goals of their missions and campaigns. Dirk has written numerous articles about technology use in grassroots groups and his work with LINC has been featured in prominent articles appearing in the Dallas Morning News, and the Chronicle of Philanthropy. He also serves on the Board of Media Jumpstart, a non-profit technology assistance provider collective based in New York City. In April, 2000 he became the first recipient of an award (which is now known as the "Dirk") for outstanding achievement in circuit riding, given at the Circuit Riders' Roundup, an annual gathering progressive nonprofit technology assistance providers. Besides working in the economic justice area he has also worked on environmental justice, voter and queer issues. Dirk spends the little time he has at home on the island of Manhattan, with his partner, Paul Getsos.
Kevin Smith
Kevin Smith is an experienced software development artisan. During his twenty year career, he has sought to integrate the technical, business, and human aspects of creating software. He has taken on various roles in many organizations, from technical support to VP of Engineering. His projects have spanned a diverse range of domains, including embedded systems, corporate IT, web applications, vertical markets, and shrink-wrap consumer software.
At Benetech, Kevin is the technical lead for Martus, a Free/Libre application for reporting human rights abuses. He explains: "Working for Benetech allows me to combine two of my passions: developing software, and helping people." He enjoys both mentoring and learning from the other talented employees at Benetech.
Kevin has long been an advocate of quality-oriented agile development approaches, and has been active on the Extreme Programming mailing list for over three years. He has contributed to several Free/Libre and open source software projects. His favorite programming language is Ruby, and his preferred operating system is Debian GNU/Linux. He is not related to any other Kevin Smiths, such as the American filmmaker, or the Kiwi actor.
David Turner
David "Novalis" Turner is the son of two lawyers, raised to fight injustice wherever he saw it. At Reed College, David discovered the GNU project, and fell in love with the GNU General Public License (GPL). Soon, he had installed GNU/Linux, and written his first Free Software.
Outrage over the DMCA led David to learn more about copyright law, and soon, he was answering Free Software licensing questions at licensing@gnu.org. David helped build the Free Software Foundation's GPL Compliance Lab. He works on about a hundred GPL violations per year, helping companies and individuals comply with the most popular Free Software license. David is also involved in drafting the next version of the GNU GPL.
In his spare time, David practices contact juggling and cooks.
Katrin Verclas
Katrin Verclas is currently a consultant with Summit Collaborative where she works on technology strategy and analysis with her NGO clients with a particular focus on increasing organizational effectiveness through the strategic use of technology. She draws on more than a decade of experience in the non-profit sector, including six years as a grantmaker.
She was previously a program officer for the Proteus Fund and several family foundations and funder collaboratives and an early proponent of strategic funding of technology in the areas of citizen participation and campaign finance reform. While working for the Ottinger Foundation, she was the first national supporter of a list enhancement strategy to increase the capacity of non-profit advocacy groups to engage their members. As program officer of the Piper Fund, a national funders' collaborative on state-based campaign finance reform, she evaluated the strategic use of grantees' money-and-politics database projects and developed cutting-edge grantmaking strategies for the collaborative.
She holds a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts and is completing her M.S. in Information Technology Management and Systems Integration at the Graduate School at Marlboro College. She is a native of Germany and fluent in English, German, and French.
Enrico Zini
I'm Enrico Zini, 27 years, about to graduate in Computer Science at the University of Bologna with a thesis on ergonomics and information visualization. As an official Debian developer, I'm now the author and maintainer of the debtags package metadata system and the guessnet tool to perform automatic network detection. In year 2000 I've worked for an year at CEPS, a non-profit organization working with people with the Down syndrome, providing internal computing infrastructure.
Recently, as a member of the Bologna Free Software Forum (http://www.bfsf.info), I've participated to a volunteer effort to build computing infrastructure for the grassroots political movements located in Bologna, and especially I've participated to providing full, free-software-only computing infrastructure to a local radio station, for which I currently co-conduct a weekly emission about free software. With the same group I've organized and held talks in public events concerning free software, and I've also participated to encounters with local politicians to provide them with background for free software campaigns.
Since this summer I'm also member of the group Prodigi (http://www.pro-digi.org), active in the field of digital divide. With Prodigi I've been part of a project to bring two computing labs to small local communities in Tunisia, where I was directly involved as a teacher to form local experts able to effectively take advantage of the labs.
Ethan Zuckerman
Ethan Zuckerman became a fellow of the Berkman Center in January, 2003. His work at Berkman focuses on the globalization of the IT industry and the geek community. His current projects include a study of global media attention, an examination of adoption of open source technologies in developing nations, a clearinghouse for software for international development, and new models for problem-solving using distributed human/computer systems.
Ethan is also founder and chief technologist of Geekcorps, a non-profit technology volunteer corps. Founded in 2000, Geekcorps pairs skilled volunteers from US and European high tech companies with businesses in emerging nations for one to four month volunteer tours. Volunteers have served in 10 nations, completing over a hundred projects, and will serve in Ghana, Senegal, Rwanda, Mongolia, Armenia and Senegal in 2003. Geekcorps became a division of the International Executive Service Corps in 2001, where Ethan now serves as Vice President of the Geekcorps Division.
Prior to founding Geekcorps, Ethan helped found Tripod, an early pioneer in the web community space. Ethan served as Tripod's first graphic designer and technologist, and later as VP of Business Development and VP of Research and Development. After Tripod's acquisition by Lycos in 1998, Ethan served as General Manager of the Angelfire.com division and as a member of the Lycos mergers and acquisitions team.