David Kobia is a Kenyan programmer and one of the co-founders of Ushahidi. He programmed the first version of the site. [1] Kobia was named "'Humanitarian of the Year" by MIT's Technology Review. [2] In 2011, Kobia accepted a Webby Award on behalf of Ushahidi. [3]
The Webby Awards are awards for excellence on the Internet presented annually by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a judging body composed of over three thousand industry experts and technology innovators. Categories include websites, advertising and media, online film and video, mobile sites and apps, and social.
The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS) is an organization that was founded in 1998 in New York City to recognize and acknowledge excellence in interactive content across emerging technologies. According to the organization, the academy was founded to help drive the creative, technical, and professional progress of the Internet and evolving forms of interactive and new media.
Samuel Kobia, is a Methodist clergyman and the first African to be elected General Secretary (2004–2009) of the World Council of Churches (WCC), a worldwide fellowship of 349 global, regional and local churches representing a Christian population of over 590 million people. In 2010, Kobia was appointed Ecumenical Special Envoy to Sudan by the All Africa Conference of Churches (AACC). Kobia is married to Ruth, and they have two daughters, Kaburo and Nkatha, and two sons, Mwenda and Mutua.
Jane Metcalfe is the co-founder, with Louis Rossetto, and former president of Wired Ventures, creator and original publisher of the magazine Wired. Prior to that, Metcalfe managed advertising sales for the Amsterdam-based Electric Word magazine. She and Rossetto co-founded TCHO chocolates. Metcalfe is life-partners with Rossetto and they have two children.
MIT Technology Review is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was founded in 1899 as The Technology Review, and was re-launched without The in its name on April 23, 1998, under then publisher R. Bruce Journey. In September 2005, it was changed, under its then editor-in-chief and publisher, Jason Pontin, to a form resembling the historical magazine.
Engadget is a technology news, reviews and analysis website offering daily coverage of gadgets, consumer electronics, video games, gaming hardware, apps, social media, streaming, AI, space, robotics, electric vehicles and other potentially consumer-facing technology. The site's content includes short-form news posts, reported features, news analysis, product reviews, buying guides, two weekly video shows, The Engadget Podcast, The Morning After newsletter and a weekly deals newsletter. It has been operated by Yahoo! Inc. since September 2021.
The Innovators Under 35 is a peer-reviewed annual award and listicle published by MIT Technology Review magazine, naming the world's top 35 innovators under the age of 35.
The New Humanitarian, previously known as IRIN News, or Integrated Regional Information Networks News, is an independent, non-profit news agency. The agency states that it intends to report on stories from regions that it considers overlooked or under-reported.
Reid Garrett Hoffman is an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcaster, and author. Hoffman is the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network used primarily for professional networking. He is also chairman of venture capital firm Village Global and a co-founder of Inflection AI.
Ethan Zuckerman is an American media scholar, blogger, and Internet activist. He was the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, and Associate Professor of the Practice in Media Arts and Sciences at MIT until May 2020, and the author of the 2013 book Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection, which won the Zócalo Book Prize. In 2020, he became an associate professor of public policy, communication and information at the University of Massachusetts.
Ushahidi is an open source software application that collates and maps data using user-generated reports. It uses the concept of crowdsourcing serving as an initial model for what has been coined as "activist mapping" – the combination of social activism, citizen journalism and geographic information. Ushahidi allows local observers to submit reports using their mobile phones or the Internet, creating an archive of events with geographic and time-date information.
Urban Wolf is an online non-verbal drama series, with 15 webisodes of 4 minutes long each.
Erik Hersman is a technologist, blogger and commentator who specialises in the impact and application of technology throughout Africa. Raised in Sudan and Kenya, he is a graduate of Kenya's Rift Valley Academy and Florida State University, he runs the websites WhiteAfrican and AfriGadget, the latter being a multi-author website dedicated to showcasing African ingenuity. AfriGadget was named one of Time's "Top 50 Sites of 2008".
Katerina Cizek is a Canadian documentary director and a pioneer in digital documentaries. She is the Artistic Director, Co-Founder and Executive Producer of the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab.
Juliana Rotich is a Kenyan information technology professional, who has developed web tools for crowdsourcing crisis information and coverage of topics related to the environment. She is the co-founder of iHub, a collective tech space in Nairobi, Kenya, and of Ushahidi, open-source software for collecting and mapping information. She is a TED Senior Fellow.
Jonathan D. Gosier is a software developer, investor, and philanthropist. He was named as one of Ten African Tech Voices to Follow on Twitter by CNN and one of the 25 most influential African-Americans in Technology by Business Insider. He was awarded a TED Fellowship in 2009 and later named a TED Senior Fellow. Jon is Knight News Challenge award winner for Abayima which makes crisis communications technology for disasters. In 2013 Gosier was nominated as one of three Innovators of the Year by Black Enterprise Magazine for his work with data startup MetaLayer.
Crowdmapping is a subtype of crowdsourcing by which aggregation of crowd-generated inputs such as captured communications and social media feeds are combined with geographic data to create a digital map that is as up-to-date as possible on events such as wars, humanitarian crises, crime, elections, or natural disasters. Such maps are typically created collaboratively by people coming together over the Internet.
Highsnobiety is a global fashion and lifestyle media brand founded in 2005 by David Fischer. The youth-focused company is difficult to pigeonhole, as it straddles the line between a media company that reviews fashion and lifestyle products, a clothing company that sells its own clothing lines, and a creative agency that advises other companies how to market their own fashion and lifestyle products.
Karen Hao is an American journalist and data scientist. Currently a contributing writer for The Atlantic and previously a foreign correspondent based in Hong Kong for The Wall Street Journal and senior artificial intelligence editor at the MIT Technology Review, she is best known for her coverage on AI research, technology ethics and the social impact of AI. Hao also co-produces the podcast In Machines We Trust and writes the newsletter The Algorithm.