Speakers Profiles
Speakers Profiles
CRAIG HAMMER
Craig Hammer is Program Leader of The World Bank Institute’s Global Media Development program, a partnership-driven initiative which focuses on information and media as drivers of good governance. A licensed attorney, his work at the World Bank has included strengthening laws, policies, and regulations to enhance the enabling environment for media, as well as collaborative approaches with media practitioners (journalists, editors, media owners/managers, students, developers, and more) to strengthen the role of media as a key driver of the global knowledge economy, and as a tech-enabled, institution of transparency and accountability.
JUSTIN ARENSTEIN
Justin Arenstein is an award-winning investigative journalist and digital strategist currently helping Google and the African Media Initiative strengthen Africa’s watchdog media by working with newsrooms to implement better forensic research and evidence-based reportage. This includes helping media adopt digital tools and data journalism strategies. Justin manages the $1m African News Innovation Challenge, is spearheading the rollout of HacksHackers.com chapters across Africa, and supports newsroom-based experiments with citizen reporting, mobile news, and augmented reality platforms. Justin is also a former Press Councillor in South Africa, and he continues to serve on a number of media industry bodies and think tanks. His investigative reportage has helped put a senator, two legislature speakers and a provincial cabinet minister behind bars, and contributed to the ouster of two provincial premiers and several other cabinet ministers and state officials on charges ranging from child rape to corruption.
CHRIS KABWATO
Chris Kabwato’s portfolio is biased towards knowledge-based development with a focus on ICT, media and the arts. He is currently Director of Highway Africa (www.highwayafrica.com), a position he assumed in 2003. Highway Africa is a Centre within the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University (Grahamstown, South Africa). Among other things, Highway Africa is a network of African journalists which exists to promote the use of digital media by journalists. Highway Africa convenes the largest annual gathering of African journalists. A Zimbabwean national, Chris was previously Head of Education & Public Affairs at the British Council in Harare. He is also Program Director of the Reporting Development Network Africa (http://reportingDNA.org) – a multi-pronged program on media and development. He sits on the board of the African Arts Institute (AFAI, www.afai.org.za). Chris’ interests are in digital media, photography and jazz.
CAELAINN BARR
Caelainn Barr is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist, who has worked with the BBC, Financial Times, the Guardian and Al Jazeera. She headed up the European data research team at the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism on a joint investigation with the FT into European structural funds. The team produced the first and only centralised fund database to reveal the abuse of tax-payers’ money by the Mafia, multinational corporations and property developers. The results were published by the Financial Times and aired by BBC Radio 4 and Al Jazeera. She has also used data analysis to uncover the misuse of expenses by the European Commission and human rights abuses in Ethiopia. She now writes and presents for Citywire, a financial publication based in London.
MARK DE BLOIS
Mark de Blois is Managing Director of Upande Ltd, a consulting firm which provides advisory and technical development services with an emphasis the geoweb, including Geographical Information Systems development, training, and projects implementation, as well as software development and project management. Mark worked as a GIS specialist for more than 13 years. Having started in the Netherlands providing consulting services and GIS training to largely government organizations, Mark joined Google Kenya where he was the Geo Lead in charge of geo-related work across Africa. Mark left Google in June 2011 to inaugurate Upande (a name refers to ‘location’, ‘direction’, ‘destination’, ‘alongside’ and ‘up’, all of which are terms commonly used in GIS).
ADI EYAL
Adi Eyal is Co-founder of the Open Data and Democracy Initiative (ODADI), a Project Manager at Re-Action! (Responsible Action for Health & Sustainability), and Owner of i4Media. He is a Data Specialist and Open Data Advocate and Entrepreneur. He is strongly interested in working with data through-out its entire life-cycle starting from collection through to cleaning, visualizing and modelling. Adi is particularly interested in mobile reporting tools, text mining and natural language processing, and developing data driven documents for reporting, and specializes in Data Mining, Natural Language Processing, Data Quality, Systems Design, Information Technology
FRIEDRICH LINDENBERG
Friedrich Lindenberg is a media scientist turned coder working on open government and transparency initiatives. As a developer at the Open Knowledge Foundation, he is part of OpenSpending, an international effort to make financial data accessible, as well as CKAN, a community-driven data catalogue project. He is the author of Adhocracy, a collaborative drafting software used by the Internet commission of the German Bundestag and several political parties to enable citizens to contribute to policy documents.
