Ethan Zuckerman

Berkman Center for Internet and Society

Globeshakers with Tim Zak

Ethan Zuckerman

Play now: | Download MP3 | Help with Listening

Who's linking to this?

Host Tim Zak discusses these topics and more with Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, who takes on the direct question: "Why should we care about Africa?"

As a technologist, Ethan has spent much time on the ground working with the new generation of African entrepreneurs, programmers, organizers and young people who are hooking up the countinent to the web. These new netizens are changing the way that villagers and urban dwellers learn, organize, network and face the challenges of poverty, AIDS, political strife and making a living.

Natural catastrophes and their recovery efforts have overtaxed national and global organizations. In the void, Ethan Zuckerman sees networks of concerned private citizens self-organizing on the ground and on-line. As the patterns for collaboration form from the bottom-up, Ethan sees new possibilities in the application of IT to disaster recovery; these flexible models can also be replicated and evolved to address larger, more complex social dilemmas.

Ethan was intimately involved in leading some very interesting efforts combining online communities who used pretty simple technologies to address Hurricane Katrina and the disaster, namely the People Finders Project.

"What a lot of us are discovering in this open source and distributive-effort world," observes Zuckerman, "is that one of the most critical things one can do is hand off projects correctly."

---

IT Conversations' publication of this program is underwritten by your donations and:

As one of the core team members at Tripod in the 1990s, Ethan Zuckerman was at the center of a web-based communitity, that served as an early development lab for the blognation phenomenon.

Currently, his main affiliation is with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. In a former life, he also lead a cadre of self-proclaimed geeks into the colorful chaos of West Africa, through Geekcorps. The organization transfers skills to the Third World, or -- in the words of Jim Moore -- the second superpower.

Geekcorps' early business model was very simple: (1) Geeks beget geeks; (2) Africa needs geeks; (3) Give a geeks money to go to Africa.

His blog is even titled, My Heart's in Accra.

One project in this area is BlogAfrica, a project to help Africans learn about weblogs and to aggregate content from African weblogs. Ethan also works with 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.

Resources:

Ethan's blog - My Heart's in Accra
• BlogAfrica
• Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School
• Ethan speaking at Pop!Tech 2004

This program is from the Globeshakers series.

For Team ITC:

• Series Producer and Editor: Peter Durand
• Production support: Leah Silverman
• Post-production audio engineer: George Hawthorne