Our Team

Posted by KatrinVerclas on Nov 22, 2011

MobileActive.org has a small and agile team (and a big network of people like you!) Our core team includes:

Katrin Verclas

Katrin is the co-founder and editor of MobileActive.org, a global network of practitioners using mobile phones for social impact.

Katrin is currently working on mobile projects in good governance and accountability, and political participation in emerging democracies. She is also leading a team focused on mobile security tools for human rights defenders in represssive regimes.

A native of Germany, she has written widely on mobile phones for organizing, advocacy, and citizen participation for civil society organizations.

She has previously led several nonprofit organizations, including as the Executive Director of NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network, the national association of IT professionals working in the more than one million nonprofit organizations in the United States.

She is the editor of Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission, published by Wiley & Sons. She is a frequent speaker on ICTs in civil society at national and international conferences and has published numerous articles and publications on technology for social change in leading popular and industry publications. She was a 2009 TED Fellow, a 2010 fellow at the MIT Media Lab, and was named by Fast Company one of the most  "Influential Women in Tech" in 2011.

Melissa Ulbricht

Melissa is the project manager at MobileActive for the Mobile Media Toolkit, a resource for journalists, citizen reporters and news organizations on how to use mobiles in media.

Melissa holds a master's degree in journalism from the Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia, Missouri. At Mizzou, she produced a weekly international radio program called Global Journalist. Melissa's studies focused on international communication and issues of press freedom. She attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison for her undergraduate studies.

Becky Hurwitz

Becky Hurwitz is the project manager at MobileActive for the Safer Mobile project that is focused on human rights defenders, journalists and activists using mobile technology more securely and safely.

She has a Master of Information Management and Systems from the UC Berkeley School of Information where she studied the roles of communication technologies in assisting social justice and development work. While at Berkeley, she conducted research in Uganda, investigating uses of ICTs in agricultural development work; and led user experience research in Cambodia for the UC Berkeley War Crimes Studies Center's Virtual Tribunal, a web-based archive and outreach platform for the international criminal court in Cambodia.

Becky received a Bachelor of Science in Media Studies from MIT where she worked as a researcher developing embedded work surfaces. She has also worked as a photojournalist. She is particularly interested in creating usable and effective tools to aid social justice work and in demystifying the role of technology in social change.

Anne-Ryan Heatwole

Anne-Ryan Heatwole is a journalist based in New York City. Anne-Ryan holds a Master's degree in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Prior to that, Anne-Ryan wrote for Virginia Living Magazine. She attended the University of Virginia for her undergraduate studies.

Anne-Ryan works as a writer and researcher for MobileActive.org where she is a frequent contributor to the blog.

Ibrahim Mothana

Ibrahim is a Atlas Corp Fellow from Yemen who is working in 2011/12 for Safer Mobile, a MobileActive project that helps activists, human rights defenders, and journalists use mobile tech more securely in their work. Ibrahim is a writer and activist. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Management from the University of Science and Technology in Sana’a. He is also a youth ambassador for the Arab Thought Foundation, and serves as the youngest member on its advisory board.

Contributors:

Melissa Loudon

Melissa is currently a PhD student in Los Angeles. Previously, she was Research Officer for the Spatial Data Management group at the University of Cape Town in South Africa where she was researching the use of mobile technologies in drinking water quality management, particularly in rural community supplies.

Melissa's work for MobileActive.org includes frequent software reviews and how-to materials that explain for non-technical users how to deploy mobile technologies. 

Prior to her work at the University of Cape Town and with MobileActive, she was a software engineer at Cell Life, a South African NGO, where she focused on Java development in an open source environment. She holds a Master's Degree from the Univerwsity of Manchester in ICTs for Development.

Our Board

MobileActive.org is a corporation in the state of Delaware. We are currently a project of the Nonprofit Technology Network, pending our nonprofit status in the United States. For more about NTEN and its board, which governs MobileActive.org, please go to NTEN's web site.