Ken Banks

Ken specializes in the application of mobile technology for positive social and environmental change in the developing world. He combines over 25 years in information technology with more than 18 years of experience living and working throughout Africa. In 2005 Ken created the first version of FrontlineSMS software. Since this point Ken has built a strong FrontlineSMS team and a community of users that spans over 70 countries. Ken is widely recognized as a thought-leader in the application of mobile technology for social good.  You can learn more about Ken on his blog, Build it Kenny, and they will come…..

 Brenda Burrell

Brenda Burrell was born in Zimbabwe in 1959. She lives permanently in  Harare and has been involved in civil society work since the late 1990s. She cut her activist teeth co-founding Zimbabwe’s first out gay and lesbian organization, GALZ in 1989. She has been involved with IT and technical support since the early 1980s, and in 2001 established the online civil society portal, Kubatana.net with Bev Clark. Through Kubatana, Brenda has innovated with a variety of new media tools to increase ordinary Zimbabweans’ access to civil society information. She built the Kubatana website – now over 18,000 pages; set up email mailing lists – now over 20,000 strong and established an SMS alert network – now comprising more than 30,000 recipients. Brenda’s current focus is Kubatana’s Freedom Fone project, a telephony platform that provides SMS, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), voicemail, callback and campaign dialing functionality that makes it easy for organizations to share audio information with ordinary mobile phone users.

Jan Chipchase

As Executive Creative Director of Global Insights Jan’s role is to bring real world insights into frog, and to use this inform & inspire the design process. Its a journey that has taken him to the four corners of the globe – from understanding the media consumption patterns of teens in Tokyo, the communications patterns of bankers in New York all the way through to redesigning the holistic mobile experience of illiterate farmers on the outskirts of New Delhi.

His industry experience includes ~10 years and multiple roles in Nokia including Design Strategist in the Advanced Design Studio Los Angeles, and Principal Scientist in the Tokyo Research Laboratory. He has submitted over 26 patents in the telecoms and user experience space, his work is widely covered in the media including the New York Times, The Economist, Nikkei and Business Week, and he is a frequent keynote speaker on design and design strategy events ranging from design conferences, governmental & C-level events through to TED. In 2010 Fortune named Jan one of the 50 smartest people in tech.

He travels up to half the year.

Linda Raftree

Linda Raftree has worked at the intersection of community development, participatory media, rights-based development and new information and communication technologies over the past 15 years, starting off in El Salvador where she lived for the decade of the 1990s. In addition to hands-on work with frontline staff and youth in various countries, Linda has conducted research and provided strategic input on the use of ICTs in development programs for Plan International and ways that ICTs can enhance Communication for Development (C4D) approaches with marginalized adolescent girls for UNICEF. Linda manages Technology Salons in New York City and writes ‘Wait… What?’ a blog that is widely read by development practitioners and technologists interested in the overlap of technology and development work. She serves as an informal advisor to Project Restart and TechChange, serves on the board of the kiwanja Foundation, and is part of the Visualizing Humanity project, which addresses stereotyping in the use of images of people in the so-called ‘developing’ world. Linda has been listed in The Guardian’s 20 Global Development Twitterati, Levo League’s Twitterful List of Women Crucial to Foreign Policy, CIPE’s 20 Empowered Women That You Should Be Following on Twitter, Vodafone’s World of Difference Top 10 International Development Blogs and Foreign Policy’s List of 100 Female Tweeters Everyone Should Follow.

Jeff Wishnie

Together with Rohit Bansal, Jeff jointly directs ThoughtWorks’ practice to support non-profits, NGOs, governments, and other mission-driven organizations. Social impact clients include: Grameen Foundation, World Vision, Human Network International, Wikimedia Foundation, The GSM Association Development Fund, and Democracy Now! Jeff and Rohit also develop and manage ThoughtWorks’ pro-bono social impact programs. Since 2009, these programs have contributed expertise and code to a wide range of Open Source (OSS) and Information and Computing Technology for Development (ICT4D) projects including: OpenMRS, RapidFTR, FrontlineSMS, and DataWinners. Jeff joined ThoughtWorks in the fall of 2009. Prior to this, he spent nearly 20 years as a silicon valley entrepreneur working in both large organizations and small —as engineer, user-interface designer, product designer, architect, and founder. In 2006, Jeff turned his focus to the use of technology for social good—taking on the role of CTO for Inveneo, a San Francisco based non-profit which designs and implements information technology for developing countries. While at Inveneo, Jeff gained first-hand field experience implementing projects in education, health care, relief, and economic development in Uganda, Rwanda, Mozambique, and Sierra Leone. Jeff gained additional experience as a consulting field-engineer for UNICEF in Senegal.Away from his professional life, Jeff flies paragliders competitively as often as work allows.

Trip Allport

Trip is an experienced Senior Manager in Accenture’s Strategy Consulting Practice based in Cape Town, South Africa.  Trip is responsible for managing Accenture Development Partnerships (ADP) portfolio of work and client relationships in Southern Africa, along with a number of key relationships and programmes in Eastern and Western Africa.  ADP provides management & technology consulting services to the international development sector on a non-profit basis, aiming to support International NGOs, Donors, Foundations, Development Agencies, Emerging Market Governments and Corporates to strengthen their organizations, build and innovate development programmes and broker & manage cross-sectoral partnerships.  In his role as ADP Global Programmes Lead for Southern Africa, Trip is responsible for driving business development, managing client relationships and providing strategic input to and oversight of a broad range of projects in the region.  He has gained considerable experience in the international development sector across a wide range of thematic areas such as in health, agriculture and social enterprise, and functional areas in strategy, operating and business models, partnership structures and strategy, ICT for development, among others.  He has traveled widely around Africa and has gained a deep appreciation of the challenges in international development and the realities of working in Africa, and aims to apply this experience to support more effective execution of development initiatives on the ground in Africa.

Diane Coyle

Economist and author Diane Coyle runs the consultancy Enlightenment Economics. She specializes in competition policy, network markets, the economics of new technologies and globalization, including extensive work on the impacts of mobile telephony in developing countries. Ms. Coyle is Vice-Chair of the BBC Trust and a member of the Migration Advisory Committee, which advises the UK government on migration issues. She is also a visiting professor at the Institute for Political and Economic Governance, University of Manchester. She is the author of several bestselling books, including The Economics of Enough (2011) and The Soulful Science (2007). Her first book was The Weightless World (1996), one of the very first to identify the impact of new technologies on the economy and society. Others include Sex, Drugs and Economics (2002), Paradoxes of Prosperity (2001) and Governing the World Economy (2000). Ms. Coyle was previously Economics Editor of The Independent newspaper in the UK, and before that she worked at the Treasury and in the private sector as an economist. She has a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard.

David Edelstein

David is Director of the Grameen Foundation Technology Center and Vice President of Technology Programs at Grameen Foundation. As the leader of Grameen Foundation’s work in technology, he guides programs that create innovative and sustainable approaches to employing technology for the benefit of the world’s poor. This includes efforts to develop services that can be accessed on widely available mobile phones, in domains such as health and agriculture, to improve lives and livelihoods. It also encompasses efforts to enable the poor to manage their finances using mobile phones.
Before joining Grameen Foundation, David spent three years at Microsoft, designing business models to provide affordable technology products for people in emerging markets. David also worked in Brazil for four years with the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, where he developed business strategies tailored to the needs of consumers and businesses in developing countries.
Previously, David conducted economic analyses and evaluated public policy with the White House Council of Economic Advisers and with Resources for the Future. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science and Economics from Colby College and a Master’s degree in Economics and Public Policy from Princeton University.

Joel Selanikio

Joel is a pediatrician, former Wall Street computer consultant, and CDC epidemiologist with a passion for combining computer science and public health to address health inequities in developing countries. He leads DataDyne.org’s efforts to develop and promote new technologies for health, and is a pioneer in the promotion of open-source development for public health. His work has been reported on by The Economist, BBC, and the Washington Post, among others. In 2009, DataDyne has been named a Social Enterprise of the Year by FastCompany magazine, and Dr. Selanikio has been named the recipient of the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT prize for sustainability.
In his former role as an officer of the Public Health Service, Dr. Selanikio served as the Chief of Operations for the HHS Secretary’s Emergency Command Center in the aftermath of 9/11. In 2005, he was given the Haverford Award for Humanitarian Service for his work in treating tsunami victims in Aceh, Indonesia (for which he was profiled in the Washington Post). Dr. Selanikio holds a bachelor’s degree from Haverford College, and an MD from Brown University, and is a graduate of the Epidemic Intelligence Service fellowship of the CDC. He continues to practice clinical pediatrics both as an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University and on the Emergency Response Team of the International Rescue Committee, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics.