No matter how narrow you think the use of your website or service will be, if it's successful, it'll be used in ways you'll never expect - including life or death fights over human rights in foreign countries. Your code might make the difference between a free press or a government clampdown, tortured dissidents or a bloodless coup. Twitter aids activists in Iran; Facebook helps the independent press in Ethiopia; World of Warcraft is policed for sedition in China. What is happening on your site that you don't know about? And how can you design it so you help the good guys?
Danny O'Brien was the Electronic Frontier Foundation's International Activist from 2007-2010, and is a founder of the UK's digital civil liberties organization, the Open Rights Group. He now works as the Internet Advocacy Coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists: https://cpj.org/internet
He also co-edited http://www.ntk.net/ , invented the term "lifehacks", and did a one-man show about USENET in London's glamourous West End.
Ebele Okobi-Harris is Director of Yahoo!’s Business & Human Rights Program, leading Yahoo!’s efforts to promote privacy and free expression on the Internet. Before joining Yahoo!, Ebele worked as a corporate securities and mergers & acquisitions attorney at Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York, Paris and London, an attorney fellow at Consumers Union (a consumer rights advocacy non-profit) in San Francisco, a director of Advisory Services at Catalyst (a non-profit with the mission of advancing women in business) in San Jose and Amsterdam and at Nike’s EMEA headquarters in Amsterdam, where she created marketing, corporate responsibility and business development strategy for Africa.
In 2001, she took a sabbatical in order to volunteer for human rights organizations in the US and Senegal.
Ms. Okobi-Harris earned a BA in Psychology from the University of Southern California, a JD from Columbia Law School and an MBA Certificat des Études from HEC-Paris.
Jillian C. York is a writer, blogger, and researcher. She works at the Berkman Center, writes for Global Voices Online, and is a frequent speaker and panelist on issues of Internet censorship, with a special focus on the Middle East and North Africa.
Rebecca MacKinnon is a Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, where she conducts research, writing and advocacy on global Internet policy, free expression, and the impact of digital technologies on human rights. She is one of the world’s leading experts on Chinese Internet censorship. Her first book, Consent of the Networked, a treatise on the future of liberty in the Internet age, will be published by Basic Books.
MacKinnon is cofounder of Global Voices Online (globalvoicesonline.org), a global citizen media network. She also serves on the Boards of Directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists (cpj.org) and the Global Network Initiative (globalnetworkinitiative.org).
Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, MacKinnon worked as a journalist for CNN in Beijing for nine years, serving as CNN’s Beijing Bureau Chief and Correspondent from 1998-2001 and then as CNN’s Tokyo Bureau Chief and Correspondent from 2001-03. From 2004-06 she was a Research Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where she began her ongoing research and writing about the Chinese Internet in addition to launching Global Voices Online. In 2007-08 she taught online journalism at the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre. In 2009 she conducted research and writing as an Open Society Institute Fellow, and in the Spring of 2010 she was a Visiting Fellow at Princeton’s Center or Information Technology Policy. MacKinnon received her AB magna cum laude from Harvard College and was a Fullbright scholar in Taiwan in 1991-92.
