Opening Up the ICT Ecosystem through Inclusion, Training and Dialogue (OUI-ITD) GUEST SPEAKERS / DISCUSSANTS
ICTD2013 PRECONFERENCE SYMPOSIUM AND ACADEMIC
WORKSHOP 2-6 DECEMBER 2013
SPEAKER BIOS for OUI – ITD / ICTD2013 pre-conference Julian May
Prof Julian May is a Professor and Director of the Institute for Social Development at the University of the Western Cape. He has a PhD in Development Studies and is an economist who has worked on poverty reduction policy options and systems for monitoring the impact of policy, including social security grants and land reform in South Africa. Internationally, he has worked in Southern and East Africa and in the Indian Ocean Islands on poverty reduction, access to ICT, and the development of official social statistics. He is a Research Associate at the Brooks World Poverty Institute and the Comparative Research Program on Poverty. Gary Marsden
Gary Marsden is a professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Cape Town. His research interests are in Mobile Interaction Design and ICT for Development. He has co-authored a book, with Matt Jones titled “Mobile Interaction Design” which was published in 2006. He is currently director of the UCT ICT4D research centre and the UCTHasso Plattner Research School. He won the 2007 ACM SIGCHI Social Responsiveness award for his research in using mobile technology in the developing world. Despite all of this, he still cannot use all the features on his mobile phone.
Kathleen Diga
Kathleen Diga is a Project Manager to the South African Research Chair in Applied Poverty Reduction Assessment at the School of Built Environment and Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), South Africa. She is current completing her PhD at the Institute for Social Development, University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Her main focus of research is in the poverty and economic dimensions of information and communication technologies for development. Prior to joining UKZN, Kathleen worked at the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) as a research officer under the ICT4D Africa (Acacia) initiative in Johannesburg and Nairobi.
Geoff Walsham
Geoff Walsham is an Emeritus Professor of Management Studies at Judge Business School, Cambridge University. His teaching and research is concerned with the question: are we making a better world with ICTs? He has extensive experience as an academic, consultant and practitioner in a range of countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. He was one of the early pioneers of interpretivism in the information systems field. His publications include Interpreting Information Systems in Organizations (Wiley 1993) and Making a World of Difference: IT in a Global Context (Wiley 2001).
Sajda Qureshi
Sajda Qureshi is Professor at the Information Systems Department at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Information Technology for Development Journal and Senior Editor for the DATA BASE Advances in Information Systems and Electronic Journal for Information Systems in Developing Countries. She holds a Ph.D. in Information Systems from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She was coordinator of the Commonwealth Network of Information Technology for Development and she has lectured at the University of Arizona in the USA, was Assistant Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and has been awarded funded research projects. She has over 170 publications in journals such as Group Decision and Negotiation, Information Infrastructure and Policy and Communications of the ACM, books published by Prentice Hall, Springer-Verlag, Chapman and Hall and North-Holland and conferences such as the International Conference in Information Systems and the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences.
Roger W. Harris
Dr. Roger W. Harris has a PhD in Information Systems from the City University of Hong Kong. He has been advancing the use of Information and Communication Technologies for poverty reduction and rural development in Asia since 1997. Dr. Harris is the founder of Roger Harris Associates, a consulting firm that provides services to Asian governments and development agencies, including the United Nations, the World Bank, International Telecommunications Union, USAID and the Asian Development Bank. He has worked on assignments for project design and implementation, evaluation, policy and strategy development, knowledge sharing and research across Asia, in; Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam. He has a long association with a remote indigenous community in Borneo where he recently set up Malaysia’s first community radio station. Dr. Harris is also Visiting Professor at the Institute of Social Informatics and Technological Innovation at Universiti Malaysia Sarawak.
Arul Chib
Dr. Arul Chib, Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, researches mobile phone healthcare systems, particularly in the resource-constrained environments of developing countries. As Assistant Director of the Singapore Internet Research Center, he leads SIRCA, a research capacity-building programme for emerging scholars in developing countries. Dr. Chib is a recipient of the 2011 Prosper.NET-Scopus Award for the use of ICTs for sustainable development, sponsored by the United Nations University and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. He serves on the editorial boards of Human Communication Research, Communication Yearbook, and Mobile Media and Communication, and is Senior Editor of the Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries. Dr. Chib is co-editer of the 2012 volume, Linking Research to Practice.
Khaled Fourati
Khaled Fourati works with partners in Southern Africa to help the region’s countries apply information and communication technologies (ICTs) to social and economic development. Fourati has been working with partners to better understand the constraints on access to knowledge in Africa, looking at telecom policy, Intellectual Property Right reforms and exploring the use of alternative licensing models and open access publishing. He is currently working with universities in Southern Africa to explore alternative mechanisms for promoting African knowledge and improving scholarly communication. When he first came to IDRC, Fourati worked on research related to trade, employment, and competitiveness. He has also worked in the international marketing departments of computer technology companies Sun Microsystems and Oracle. Fourati holds an MBA in finance and computer information systems and a master’s degree in international affairs.
Alison Gillwald
Photo: ©Brainstorm. Photo by Karolina Komendara Prof. Alison Gillwald (PhD) is Executive Director of Research ICT Africa, a Cape Town-based think tank which hosts an Africa wide ICT policy and regulatory research network established a decade ago with the purpose of developing the data and analysis necessary for evidence-based ICT policy and effective regulation on the continent. She is also Adjunct Professor at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business, Management of Infrastructure Reform and Regulation programme, where she convenes a doctoral and professional development executive programme. A former broadcasting and telecommunications regulator, she is involved currently in advising governments on broadband policy and regulatory bodies on competition and access regulation. Internet Governance and multistakeholderism is one RIA’s current research streams.
François Bar
François Bar is Associate Professor of Communication in the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California. He is a steering committee member of the Annenberg Research Network on International Communication. His research and teaching focus on the social and economic impacts of information technologies, with a specific concentration on telecommunication policy, user-
driven innovation and technology appropriation. His most recent work examines the impact of information technology for development, in places ranging from East Africa to Latin America. His work has been published in books of collected studies, in policy reports, and in such journals as Information Technologies and International Development, Communications & Strategies, Telecommunications Policy, The Information Society, Media, Culture & Society, Organization Science, Infrastructure Economics and Policy, Communications & Strategies, RĂŠseaux, and the International Journal of Technology Management. He is co-Editor in Chief of Information Technologies and International Development (ITID).
Steve Song
Steve Song is an advocate for cheaper, more pervasive access to communication infrastructure in Africa. He is the founder of Village Telco, a social enterprise that builds lowcost WiFi mesh VoIP technologies to deliver affordable voice and Internet service in underserviced areas. Village Telco was incubated during a three-year fellowship that Steve spent at the Shuttleworth Foundation in South Africa. Steve also works with the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) to develop strategies for expanding the utilization of wireless technologies through shared spectrum strategies to enable more Internet access in Africa and other emerging market regions. Previously, Steve worked at the International Development Research Centre, where he led the organization's Information and Communication Technology for Development program in Africa, funding research into the transformational potential of ICTs across the continent.
Jacqueline Tamri
Ms Jacqueline Tamri is a South African, living in Cape Town, South Africa. After engaging with communities in empowerment initiatives for more than 25 years, she was granted access to the academy via a special senate application, starting her academic career at Post Graduate level; Completing Honours in Development Studies, she proceeded and is currently registered for Masters’ Degree in Economics at the Institute for Social Development at the University of the Western Cape. Her areas of key interest are Gender, Policy, Governance and Development. She is the Chairperson for several NGO’s dealing with economic empowerment for women locally as well as on the African Continent. The NGO, “Leading Women of Africa”, which Jacqueline chairs’ is a key player in discussions globally around matters for women’s participation in development.
Lorna Holtman
Professor Lorna Holtman is a South African who lives in Cape Town, South Africa. She completed her PhD at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA in 2000. Her PhD thesis examined the importance of the biology laboratory in facilitating conceptual change. She is currently the Director of Postgraduate Studies at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa and therefore part of Senior Management. Lorna is the current chairperson of the South African National Committee of the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS) and is an Executive Member of IUBS, as well as President of the Commission on Biology
Education (CBE) for the period 2012 to 2015 and the Africa representative. She is currently also the South African Co-ordinator for the ERASMUS MUNDUS project which promotes academic and administrative exchanges between South African and European Universities.
Desiree Lewis Desiree Lewis is Associate Professor and Head of Department in the Women's and Gender Studies Department. She has published on feminist knowledge and cultural production in various sites. She has recently become especially interested in action research focusing on feminist digital activism.
CONTACT DETAILS NAME 1
Alison Gillwald
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Arul Chib Desiree Lewis Franรงois Bar Gary Marsden Geoff Walsham Jacqueline Tamri Julian May Kathleen Diga
10 Khaled Fourati 11 Lorna Holtman 12 Roger W. Harris
INSTITUTION Research ICT Africa
EMAIL ADDRESS agillwald@researchictafrica.net
Nanyang Technological University
arulchib@ntu.edu.sg dlewis@uwc.ac.za fbar@usc.edu gaz@cs.uct.ac.za gw10@cam.ac.uk jtamri@uwc.ac.za jmay@uwc.ac.za digak@ukzn.ac.za
University of the Western Cape
University of Southern California University of Cape Town
Cambridge University University of the Western Cape University of the Western Cape University of the Western Cape / University of KwaZulu-Natal International Development Research Centre University of the Western Cape Roger Harris Associates / Universiti
kfourati@idrc.ca lholtman@uwc.ac.za roger.harris@rogharris.org
Malaysia Sarawak 13 Sajda Qureshi 14 Steve Song
University of Nebraska
Village Telco
squreshi@unomaha.edu stephen.song@gmail.com