DCI Speakers
DCI 6.0 Speakers (2011):
Anriette Esterhuysen
Anriette is the Executive Director of the Association for Progressive Communications. APC is an international network of organisations working with ICTs to support social justice and development. Prior to joining APC as a staff member, Anriette was executive director of APC member SANGONeT, an internet service provider and training institution for civil society, labour and community organisations in South Africa. She is a founder of Women’sNet in South Africa and has served on the African Technical Advisory Committee of the UN’s Economic Commission for Africa’s African Information Society Initiative and was a member of the United Nations ICT Task Force from 2002 to 2005. Currently she serves on the boards of GeSCI (Global e-Schools and Communities Initiative) and Ungana-Afrika. @APC_News
Bobby Soriano
Bobby has fifteen solid years of systems and network administration experience, developing NGO-tools and implementing projects, He has also spent five years as an information and communications technology trainer. He is currently working on the further development of the NGO-In-A-Box and other toolkits. His particular specialities are in security issues and the use of mobile technologies for advocacy. His recent work for Tactical Tech includes digital security and privacy workshops, for Highway Africa, the Southern African Human Rights Defenders Trust and the Civil Initiative on Internet policy in Kyrgyzstan. He helped establish the pioneering Overseas Filipino Workers SMS Distress System (OFW-SOS). @Info_Activism
David Robert Lewis
David is a prolific blogger, author of the Electronic Freedom Charter and one of the world’s first hacktivists. His online activism began in Athlone, where he wrote about free software to campaigning for tech-rights in the South African Constitution. In 1994 he initiated the world’s first act of online civil disobedience, with a mass public demonstration against a UK Poll Tax, from an Apple Powerbook 180 using a 1400 band modem. This was followed by a landmark 1995 communications first, ISDN digital be-in and Internet love-fest, linking the continents of North America and Africa. @ethnopunkorigin
Dumisani Moyo
Dumisani is the Media and ICTs Programme Manager at OSISA. He was Senior Lecturer and Head of Department of Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand before joining OSISA in 2010. Prior to that, he worked as Lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe and an Assistant Lecturer at University of Oslo where he was also a researcher. Dumisani holds a doctorate in Media Studies from the University of Oslo and has published widely on media policy and media regulation and democracy in Southern Africa, radio in Africa and new media in Africa. @OSI_SA
Erik Charas
Erik is the Founder and Managing Director of Charas, LDA, a private sector company investing in and driving the growth of entrepreneurship in Mozambique. He is also the owner of the well known news paper Verdade, which is a free newspaper with the biggest circulation in Mozambique. Among his other accolades, Erik was voted a Hero of Africa in 2005 by media group MSN and was also named a Young Global Leader in 2006 by the World
Economic Forum, 2007, Archbishop Tutu African Leadership Fellow. @echaras
Harry Dugmore
Harry is the newly appointed director of the Discovery Centre for Health Journalism at Rhodes University. He is also the MTN Chair of Media and Mobile Communication at the same School of Journalism and Media Studies. In his position as MTN Chair at Rhodes, Harry is running a major project funded by the USA-based Knight Foundation entitled “Iindaba Ziyafika – The news is coming”. This project aims, among other things, to better equip media producers in Africa with the skills and the software to use mobile phones to democratise both news production and news dissemination.
Harry has PhD in history from the University of the Witwatersrand, and lives and works in Grahamstown. @HarryDugmore
Julie Posetti
Julie is an award-winning journalist and journalism academic who lectures about social media in radio and television reporting at the University of Canberra, Australia. She has been a national political correspondent, a regional news editor, a TV documentary reporter and presenter on radio and television with the Australian national broadcaster, the ABC. She is currently writing her PhD dissertation on ‘The Twitterisation of Journalism’ at the University of Wollongong. She’s a correspondent with the US website PBS MediaShift. @julieposetti
Lucky Lukhele
Lucky is currently the spokesperson for the Swaziland Solidarity Network (SSN) and manages all their publications. He was elected into the NEC of the Swaziland Youth Congress (SWAYOCO) in 1997. He is a political refugee in South Africa who was forced into exile in December 1998. @LuckyLukhele
Mzonke Poni
Mzonke is the chairperson of Abahlali baseMjondolo in the Western Cape. He was previously a leader of the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign. The Sunday Times has described him as “the face of an ANC nightmare – an angry activist mobilizing the township masses to protest at what he calls the government’s failure to create a better life for the poor”. Poni lives in the QQ Section Informal Settlement in Khayelitsha. @mzonkep
Ndesanjo Macha
Ndesanjo is a digital activist, social media trainer and consultant in Sub Saharan Africa. He is the Sub Saharan Africa editor for Global Voices Online, a global citizen media organisation. He is the co-founder and online manager for Namibia Legal Information Institute. He received Kaybees Blogging Award in 2006 for pushing boundaries and encouraging bloggers to blog in Kiswahili and other African languages and for publishing an online Kiswahili blogging guide. He started the first blog in an African language and was instrumental in the growth of Swahili Wikipedia and Swahili blogoshere. He has been named one of 100 influential Africans by the New African Magazine, June 2011 edition. @ndesanjo
Mendi Njono
Mendi works for the Africa Technology and Transparency Initiative (ATTI), a joint initiative of Omidyar Network and Hivos. She has a Master’s degree in conflict resolution from the University of Massachusetts in Boston and has over 15 years experience working with groups on how to use ICTs for social change. @opendataafrica
Rafiq Hajat
Rafiq is the founder & director of the Institute for Policy Interaction (IPI) in Malawi. In July he drafted a Petition entitled ‘Uniting For Peaceful Resistance Against Poor Economic & Democratic Governance -“A Better Malawi Is Possible!” – which was presented after a landmark demonstration march that drew overwhelming support and huge international media coverage. This month IPI offices were burnt by arsonists and invaluable research
archives destroyed. @rafiqhajat
Fambai Ngirande
Fambai is a Zimbabwean social justice activist, formerly the Spokesman for Zimbabwe’s largest Civil Society coordinating body the National Association of Non Governmental Organisation. He is currently working on a programme to support the initiatives of thirty Zimbabwean Civil Society organisations to enhance the structured organisation and informed participation of poor and marginalized groups. @iccotweet
