C4FCM team

A native of Washington, DC, Andrew holds a B.A. in Communication from Wake Forest University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Emerson College. He worked previously in higher education publishing at Houghton Mifflin and at the Feinstein International Center, a humanitarianism research center at Tufts University.

In his all-too spare time, he is the fiction editor for Identity Theory and maintains his blog at fungibleconvictions.com.

Christina is that tall Asian girl you see walking around the Lab with her rollerblades strapped to her backpack. She splits her time at C4FCM between working as the project administrator for ExtrAct and as the new out(/in)reach coordinator, thinking up new ways for the Center to grow, outwards as well as inwards. She is a recent alum of Harvard College, where she majored in History of Science and wrote an undergraduate thesis about the history of instant messaging software, but more importantly did lots of other stuff like work in Jamaican prisons for a summer and organize a conference about internet culture with 700+ attendees.

She would like very much to meet all of you!

Dharmishta Rood is a Masters student at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, studying social media tools and their applications for informal learning. With this interest in new media, she also works at the Berkman center as a RA for Yochai Benkler, delving into online cooperation. She holds a BA in Design | Media Arts from UCLA.

She is the co-founder of Populous, a Knight funded project that aims to provide collegiate and small town newspapers with the tools they need to survive in a web 2.0 environment. The project exists with three goals: to create an open-source CMS that newspapers can use for free, to create a platform newspaper staff can use to organize around goals, community events and the creation of news, and to integrate networking features that will allow community members to both share and create news.

Katrin Verclas is the co-founder and editor of MobileActive.org, a global network of practitioners using mobile phones for social impact.

Jeffrey Designs maps, visual programming environments, and other stuff at the MIT Media Lab's Design Ecology group.

Lisa Williams is the founder and CEO of the largest searchable index of local weblogs, Placeblogger.com. It was a winner of the Knight 21st Century News Challenge Award, a program aimed at funding innovative, open-source tech projects that promote new forms of journalism and access to civic information.

Ethan Zuckerman is a Fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Before his work at the Berkman Center, which he joined in 2003, he founded Geekcorp, a non-profit technology volunteer corps that has done work in over a dozen countries.

Ethan and Berkman colleague/MIT alum Stephen Schultze are working on Media Cloud, a project that builds an archive of news stories and blog posts, applies language processing, and presents ways to analyze and visualize the resulting data. Media Cloud can be used to answer a simply-asked yet complicated question: Who is covering what?

Benjamin Mako Hill is a technology and intellectual property researcher, activist, and consultant. He is currently a senior researcher at the MIT Sloan School of Management, a fellow at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, and an adviser and contractor for the One Laptop per Child project. He has been an leader, developer, and contributor to the free and open source software community for more than a decade as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects.

Eric Klopfer is Associate Professor of Education at MIT, Director of MIT's Scheller Teacher Education Program (TEP), with a joint appointment at the MIT Media Lab.

Nadav is a researcher and PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab. He is a member of the Human Dynamics research group and the MIT Center for Future Civic Media. His research revolves around the intersection between communication networks, social dynamics, and systems that learn. A strong emphasis is given to systems and architectures that empower the edges of the network, giving end users control and ownership over their information and supporting security and privacy features.

Prior to the Media Lab, Nadav had been working at a start-up company making communication chips for fiber-to-the-home networking. His R&D roles included system engineering and algorithm development. In addition, he performed consulting for several firms in areas of system engineering, product definition, network security, and locating seed investments. He received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology cum laude in 2004, specializing in computer networks, machine learning, and signal processing.

I am a PhD student in the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. My primary research interest is the development of technologies to support communities of practice, particularly the case of supporting educators working with Scratch.

I am a PhD Candidate in the Affective Computing Group. The overall goal of my research is to foster intergroup understanding. Here, intergroup spans human diversity ranging from people of different gender, race, culture, ethnicity, age, economic class, and disability status. Drawing from ideas in social neuroscience, intergroup relations, and computer science, my specific research endeavors focus on the design and implementation of computational technologies that support human beings the development of empathic capacities. Further, because empathy is rooted in emotional self-awareness, much of my research is in the development of technologies to foster internal reflection on feelings.

I am currently working in Birmingham, Alabama where they have just received 15,000 XO laptops. See side tab for more information on this project I'm doing in conjunction with g8four.

Charlie is a graduate student in the Speech + Mobility group.

Audubon Dougherty is a filmmaker and digital activist interested in the role of media in international development. She studied writing at Emerson College before transferring to Smith College to complete a degree in anthropology with a focus on visual culture. This led her to the field of human rights, where she traveled to Southeast Asia in 2006 as a blogger and photographer to assess disaster relief projects assisting tsunami survivors. She returned to Thailand the following year to provide multimedia training for an organization serving Burmese migrants and undocumented workers. As a communications specialist for a labor union, she helped develop a new media program which utilized e-communication, streaming video and mobile messaging to help organize 22,000 home care workers in Massachusetts. Outside of work, Dougherty formed her own video production collective, producing and directing films for exhibition at festivals and on the web.

Florence Gallez was a Moscow-based journalist for eight years, most recently as a freelance producer for CNN's Moscow Bureau. She has covered Russian politics, economy and culture for print, broadcast and electronic media organizations, including The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Moscow Times, and the U.S. publisher Bureau of National Affairs. She has reported for the BBC World Service in Budapest and for the Russian daily Segodnya in London. At MIT she is developing a new system for collaborative online news production. She holds a BA in English and Russian from the University of London and a MSc in journalism from Boston University, with additional course work at Harvard. A lifelong Prince fan with an interest in copyright and cyber rights, she has covered Russia’s IP issues and legislation for BNA, and in her spare time she dreams of creating the “ultimate Prince music distribution system.”

Drew Harry is a second year PhD student in the Speech + Mobility Group at the MIT Media Lab focused on the design of mediated social spaces. Most recently, he has designed virtual spaces for meeting, presentation, and play that expand ideas about how we can use the properties of virtual environments to enable new kinds of interaction.

Josh trained as an aerospace engineer at MIT and worked in the "real world" for a year after graduation. Upon deciding that he didn't really want to build killer robots for the Defense Department, he joined the Center for Future Civic Media to help build the next generation of tools for activists.

John is the lead software developer on the Scratch project in the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab.

Prior to joining the Lifelong Kindergarten group, John worked for computer pioneer Alan Kay. Under Alan, John developed key parts of Squeak, an experimental programming system for elementary school children. He also worked at Walt Disney Imagineering, where he built an experimental handheld electronic guide for theme park guests and software for a new attraction that earned the theme park equivalent of an Academy Award. Prior to working at Disney, John worked at Apple, Sun Microsystems Labs, and Xerox.

John has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington and M.S./ B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.

Ryan hails from behind southern California's dreaded Orange Curtain; birthplace of Richard Nixon and NeoCon / Libertarian stronghold. Despite this, he's been able to keep most of his hair and teeth well preserved through an elaborate 5-year-long leathering process followed by long stints at an undisclosed New England cryogenic think tank and racket club.

Jay Silver is a Research Assistant in the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab.

Anna’s background combines community work, youth work, education and new media production. Working with Henry Jenkins, Provost Professor at the University of Southern California and former Principal Investigator at the Center for Future Civic Media, Anna will conduct research on the ways in which participatory culture environments support the kinds of social deliberation, debate, and advocacy practices that allow entry into a shared public discourse.

Most recently, Anna worked as Creative Manager for project New Media Literacies (NML) at MIT's Comparative Media Studies (CMS). She led the production and development of innovative educational materials informed by a deep understanding of the ways youth interact with and produce media.

Prior to working at MIT, Anna developed new media curriculum and taught multimedia production at after school programs and at the college level. An independent video artist, Anna has shown her experimental shorts in festivals internationally. She received her B.A. magna cum laude in Art & Art History from Colgate University, and her MFA in Film & Video from Massachusetts College of Art.

Sara Wylie's research focuses on the anthropology of modern biological research. In particular, Sara studies human intervention into biological systems, as in the cases of endocrine disruption and the production of model organisms in biology laboratories.

Huma Yusuf is a reporter in Pakistan for the Christian Science Monitor and other news organizations. She specializes in writing about social trends as represented in media and media and society issues, in addition to addressing subjects such as low-income housing, "honor" killings, gang wars and the state's ineffective prosecution of rape cases. Her writing garnered the UNESCO/Pakistan Press Foundation "Gender in Journalism 2005" Award and the European Commission's 2006 Natali Lorenzo Prize for Human Rights Journalism. Huma is interested in the interface among media, local politics and global trends.

I am a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab in the Tangible Media Group. My work deals with the dissonance between the physical and virtual in the information age with a focus on human-computer interaction, social science, design, and dreams of the deep future.