Ethan Zuckerman
Ethan Zuckerman is "Co-founder of Tripod, Geekcorps and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkmen Center and co-creator of Global Voices."
URL = http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/
Bio
Excerpts from his bio:
"My main affiliation is with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. Berkman is a remarkable institution - it's a think tank for folks who effect change as well as study phenomena. A number of my favorite people in the world of technology and international development hang their hats there and, as a result, it's a great place to explore activist and research ideas. I'm working on a number of projects there at the moment:
- Global Voices - Along with Rebecca MacKinnon, I lead a team that's building Global Voices, a group of bloggers from around the world who are bridging cultural and linguistic differences through their weblogs. It's a little bit of a multinational news service, a little bit of an international movement of webloggers, and a whole lot of fun.
- Research on the Global Attention Gap - the tendecy of major media outlets to report more thoroughly on rich nations than on poor ones. My current project - Global Attention Profiles - gives graphical portraits of where different media sources are focusing their attention and demonstrates correlations between these distributions and economic and population statistics. I'm currently trying to determine, statistically, the differences between media attention in new media like blogs and traditional media.
- Blogging in the Developing World - I'm interested in helping people around the world build weblogs and contribute to the global dialogue taking place between webloggers. One project in this area is BlogAfrica, a project to help Africans learn about weblogs and to aggregate content from African weblogs. I'm also looking into anonymous blogservers for use by people in the human rights community, allowing human rights workers to blog about situations in their countries without compromising their security. I recently wrote about these issues in an essay titled "Making Room for the Third World in the Second Superpower", a reaction to an essay by my good friend Jim Moore called "The Second Superpower Rears Its Beautiful Head".
- Digital Democracy - Last fall, I helped lead a class at Harvard Law School called "Digital Democracy". I'm co-leading it again this fall, under the tutelage of Charlie Nesson. The class will attempt to address the question "What happens to goverment in a digital age?" from a number of perspectives. I plan to focus my teaching on the potentials and pitfals of eGovernment in developing nations and on "semantic democracy" - the ability of various different people to have their stories told in a digital age.
Details
Geekcorps
Geekcorps was my main project until quite recently. It's an international non-profit organization that transfers tech skills from geeks in developed nations to geeks in emerging nations, especially entrepreneurial geeks who are building small businesses. In other words, it's a Peace Corps for geeks. I co-founded the organization in early 2000 with a number of friends who were interested in bridging the gaps between the geek world and the international development world. I've had the pleasure of leading teams of extremely cool people in North Adams, MA, USA; Osu, Accra, Ghana; Dakar, Senegal and Bamako, Mali. I stepped down from the organization in April, 2004.
Geekcorps succeeded several orders of magnitude beyond any reasonable expectation, yielding not only some great e-development success stories, but a cool ad for whiskey and occasional friendly words in the press. In August 2001, Geekcorps joined forces with the International Executive Service Corps, resulting in an organization the BBC refers to as "Geeks and Geezers". IESC now manages Geekcorps from its DC office.
Also worth a visit is geekhalla.org, the ongoing online journal of Geekcorps volunteers serving in Accra. Started by the first volunteers in Ghana in late 2000, the site is now in the hands of volunteer geeks around the world. My favorite posting so far is Shara Karaisic's comparison of geek life in Accra and San Francisco... though Richard's obroni site ("obroni" is Twi for "foreigner" or "white person") runs a close second.
Tripod
For many years, this page was hosted on Tripod, for a variety of sentimental reasons. (Now only a few side projects are.) In 1994, I dropped out of graduate school and joined a couple of friends in Williamstown, MA in building one of the first "pure" dot.com companies - Tripod. As the only person on the team who knew HTML, I got to be "tech guy" - outclassed by guys who could program circles around me, I became bizdev guy, legal guy, customer service guy and R&D guy before settling, briefly, on "retired guy".
Contrary to popular belief, Tripod wasn't originally intended to be a webhosting provider or homepage site. In its first incarnation, it was designed to be a collection of content and services for 20-somethings, described as "tools for life". Discovering earlier than most that online content is a tough sell (check out some of our server logs from late 1995 if you don't believe me), we moved into the growing area of user-created content before discovering (again, earlier than most) that fifteen million users a day weren't particularly helpful if they didn't buy anything or click on ads. We sold the company to Lycos in 1999, slightly before money paid for internet companies got way out of hand, but well before selling Internet companies was harder than selling ice in Siberia." (http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/)
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