PRIZE ADVISORY PANEL AND MANAGEMENT
A distinguished Advisory Panel of national leaders in public interest computing plays a critical, ongoing role in shaping and administering The Pizzigati Prize, serving as ambassadors for the prize initiative. Panelists, chosen through an application process administered by Tides Foundation, have shaped the basic guidelines for the prize submission review process and select the prize awardees. Winners of the Pizzigati Prize also serve on the panel for three years after they win.
Current Advisory Panel
Yaw Anokwa, a Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of Washington, won the Pizzigati Prize in 2010. His research interests are building, deploying, and evaluating technologies for the developing world. Originally from Ghana, Yaw first grasped the impact technology could have on the world's poor when he spent six months in a Rwandan village deploying a medical record system. That experience was the driving force behind his current work on Open Data Kit -- a modular set of tools which helps organizations use mobile phones to collect and deliver data on everything from deforestation to human rights violations.
Ken Banks won the Pizzigati Prize in 2011 for his creation of FrontlineSMS. An anthropologist by training, he has lived and worked all around Africa since the early 1990s. A long-time computer coder, Ken first started thinking about connecting computers and mobile phones while working on a conservation project in South Africa. In 2003, Ken founded kiwanja.net which has helped empower local, national and international non-profit organizations to make better use of information and communications technology in their work. Among his many honors, he was named a Stanford University Reuters Digital Vision Fellow in 2006, a Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellow in 2008, a Laureate of the Tech Awards in 2009, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer in May 2010, and an Ashoka Fellow in 2011.
Erika Bjune is co-founder of startup company Native Cloud Systems (NCS), where she steers the development of next-generation business applications with integrated social computing. She has over 20 years of technology experience across a spectrum of areas, including multimedia, education, communications, web and business application design, development, and management. Prior to NCS, Erika served as Vice President of IT at Tides, where she started and directed the Avatar Action Center—the first nonprofit organization established in Second Life. She has also been production manager for Addison Wesley Longman’s Media Lab, part-time faculty member at San Francisco State University’s multimedia extension program, and a speaker at the Technology Affinity Group conference.
Nathan Freitas has been writing code since he was seven and hasn’t stopped looking for difficult problems to solve with software ever since. A lifelong mobile technology enthusiast, his career has included work on academic research projects, popular consumer gadgets, award-winning digital art pieces and groundbreaking technology for activism. Currently, Nathan Freitas leads the Guardian Project, a team of software developers that have released a suite of privacy and security-minded mobile applications for Android phones. Mobile devices can be extremely unsafe for the activists who use them, as the world’s most repressive governments can exploit mobile technology to monitor and track down protestors and their organizations. All of the mobile security apps come free and, notes Freitas, “can run just as well on $100 smartphones available in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia as they do on higher-end models popular in the United States and Europe.
Past Advisory Panel Members
George Hotelling won the inaugural Pizzigati Prize in 2006. He has been interested in the online world ever since he first dialed in to local BBSs in the early 90s, and has been developing for the web and with open source tools for over 10 years. George became internet-famous for a brief period in 2003 when he put an iTunes song on eBay to draw attention to issues of property rights and DRM technologies. George is currently working for MediaRica, a start-up focusing on tools to help musicians spread their music online, in Ann Arbor, MI. He is the founder of CitizenSpeak, a free email advocacy service that enables grassroots organizations and individual activists to launch MoveOn-like email campaigns and track participation.
Joseph Mouzon. As Executive Director of Nonprofit Services for Network for Good powered by Groundspring, Joseph Mouzon was responsible for the overall leadership of the West coast division and initiating the merger of the two organizations. Joseph was also a technology pundit for Tech TV, a guest lecturer at Stanford Business School, and a producer of Herbie Hancock performances at Technology Entertainment & Design (TED) events. His board and advisory board experience includes the Council on Foundations Technology Task Force, Ashoka Youth Venture, The Advocacy Fund, Craigslist Foundation, Jewish Vocational Services and San Francisco Unified School District.
Barry Warsaw won the 2008 Pizzigati Prize. He has been writing and sharing open source and free software since his days at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the early 1980's. Early contributions included work on GNU Emacs, various C and C++ libraries, and system administration tools and techniques. Barry has been a core contributor to the Python language project since the mid-1990's and is a current member of the Python Software Foundation. Barry has led large open source projects such as Jython (formerly JPython) and is the current project leader of GNU Mailman, a project on which he has contributed since the 1990's. Barry works for Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu Linux, working primarily on the Launchpad project, a free software hosting site for open source projects.
