Our project team, advisers and research resources include experienced journalists, humanitarian/social change experts and leading scholars in captology, data visualization, product design and new technologies.
Wendy Norris is a 2010-11 Stanford Knight Fellow and Denver-based investigative reporter, editor/publisher with experience leading three online news startups. She is also a graduate of the USC-Knight Digital Media Center news entrepreneur program. Prior to becoming a journalist, she was a social worker, volunteer manager and nonprofit executive for 20 years. Her Knight fellowship is focused on studying game mechanics, behavioral economics and design thinking to apply motivational frameworks to participatory journalism. Wendy is currently developing a mobile crowdsourcing prototype based on the Ushahidi/Swift River platform as a civic engagement tool for collaborative news reporting besides acute crisis events. Her team won the 2010 San Francisco Hacks and Hackers Urban Hackathon contest with We All Need, a crowdsourced portrait of the Tenderloin neighborhood. Her success using crowdsourcing as an investigative reporting tool was recently featured on the leading social media news site, Mashable.
Project advisers:
Tanja Aitamurto is a recognized expert in the field of crowdsourcing and journalism innovation. She is a fellow of the Stanford Center for Innovation and Communication, a Ph.D. candidate in collective intelligence at Tampere University in Finland and a San Francisco-based technology journalist. Her groundbreaking research focuses on the business models for journalism especially the potential of crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and constructive journalism. Prior to coming to Callifornia, Tanja worked as a staff writer for the leading daily in Finland specializing in foreign affairs. She has done reporting in Afghanistan and in numerous countries in Africa. She has worked for the Namibia Press Agency in Namibia and taught journalism in Zambia.
Patrick Philippe Meier is the Director of Crisis Mapping and Strategic Partnerships for Usahidi. He co-founded the Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and the International Network of Crisis Mappers. He has extensive professional experience in the fields of conflict early warning and humanitarian technology, having consulted for major international organizations in Africa, Asia and Europe. Patrick is also a PhD candidate at The Fletcher School, where his dissertation focuses on digital activism in repressive regimes. He graduated with an MA in International Affairs from Columbia University’s School of International & Public Affairs. Patrick is a 2010 visiting scholar with the Liberation Technology Program at Stanford’s Center on Freedom, Democracy and the Rule of Law.
Project resources:
Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab conducts design, research, and analysis of interactive computing products created for the purpose of changing people’s attitudes or behaviors.
The Spatial History Project at Stanford’s Bill Lane Center for the American West is experimenting with creative visualization techniques to make complex, data-dense information more accessible to the public.
The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (the “d.school”) and Human Computer Interaction Lab are pioneers in rapid prototyping and user-centric design.
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