Ethan Zuckerman

Ethan Zuckerman became a fellow of the Berkman Center in January, 2003. His work at Berkman focuses on the impact of technology on the developing world. His current projects include a study of global media attention, research on the use of weblogs and other social software in the developing world, and work on a clearinghouse for software for international development.

In 2000, Ethan founded Geekcorps, a non-profit technology volunteer corps. Geekcorps pairs skilled volunteers from US and European high tech companies with businesses in emerging nations for one to four month volunteer tours. Volunteers have served in 14 nations, completing over a hundred projects, and will serve in Ghana, Senegal, Mali, Vietnam and Morocco in 2004. Geekcorps became a division of the International Executive Service Corps in 2001, where Ethan served as a vice president from 2001-4.

Prior to founding Geekcorps, Ethan helped found Tripod, an early pioneer in the web community space. Ethan served as Tripod's first graphic designer and technologist, and later as VP of Business Development and VP of Research and Development. After Tripod's acquisition by Lycos in 1998, Ethan served as General Manager of the Angelfire.com division and as a member of the Lycos mergers and acquisitions team.

In 1993, Ethan graduated from Williams College with a BA in Philosophy. In 1993-4, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Legon, Ghana and the National Theatre of Ghana, studying ethnomusicology and percussion.

Ethan was given the 2002 Technology in Service of Humanity Award by MIT's Technology Review Magazine and named to the TR100, TR's list of innovators under the age of 35. Recently, Ethan was named a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum.

He lives the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts with his wife Rachel. He serves on the boards of regional and international organizations that focus on technology and education, including on the sub-board of the Open Society Institute's Information Program.

Current Projects:

• Global Attention Profiles: Major media outlets tend to report more thoroughly on rich nations than on poor ones. Media audiences, in turn, tend to pay little attention to news in the developing world. Is this a result of a biased media, or are media companies reacting to market forces and audience desires? And is there a way to short circuit this cycle, drawing attention to critical stories and perspectives in undercovered areas?

  Global Attention Profiles are statistical and graphical representations of where different media sources are focusing their attention. They demonstrates correlations between these distributions and economic and population statistics, most notably a strong correlation between national wealth and media attention. Current GAP research focuses on audience behavior, examining the general public's interest in developing nations through purchasing behavior and weblog authorship.

  Homepage for the GAP project.

• Global Blogging: Early work on bridging the international digital divide has focused on providing information - usually health or agricultural information - to disadvantaged communities. This focus may miss the real promise of the Internet - the ability to include people in developing nations in global dialogues, allowing people to give voice to their issues, concerns and solutions. The world of weblogs, where some of these online dialogues are starting to take place, has great potential as a medium for discussion between people in communities around the world. But, at the moment, these discussions rarely include people in developing nations.

  Including more of the world in the world of weblogs is a project that requires technical changes to weblog software and hosting services, education and advocacy around the world, and the building of connections between people already involved in these conversations and those who want to participate. Ethan outlined a strategy for increased inclusion of the developing world in online dialogues in a recent paper titled Making Room for the Third World in the Second Superpower. He is working with Open Society Institute's Information Program on a project to develop globally compatible weblog software, with AllAfrica.com on BlogAfrica, a project designed to showcase African weblogs, and with Berkman fellow Rebecca MacKinnon on a set of projects and surveys designed to learn more about international blogs and bloggers.

• Social Source Commons: Resulting in part from Ethan's past work at Berkman, Social Source Commons is a new initiative of Aspiration Tech, in cooperation with OSI's Information Program. Social Source Commons is intended to be a repository of software created for use in international development. SSC will collect open source software from independent developers and from government aid programs which commission this software. SSC will then work to identify deficiencies in software available and help mobilize the global community of open source developers to write code to fill these holes.

• Digital Democracy: Several Berkman fellows, including Urs Gasser and Colin Maclay, will be collaborating this fall with Professor Charles Nesson on a class titled "Digital Democracy". The class will attempt to address the question "What happens to goverment in a digital age?" from a number of perspectives. Ethan will focus his contributions on the success and failure of eGovernment projects in developing nations, and on "semiotic democracy" – the ability or inability of people to have their stories heard in mainstream media.

Weblog: ...My Heart's in Accra
Personal web page: www.ethanzuckerman.com
PGP public key: www.ethanzuckerman.com/key.txt