Dan Blah
"Dan joined RFA in January 2012 as OTF’s inaugural director and co-founder.
"As the program’s principal director, he is accoutable for OTF’s day-to-day operations and responsible for long-term planning.
"Over the past decade, Dan has identified as an activist, technologist, journalist, and now funder exploring emerging trends intersecting human rights, transparency, global communication policy and technology, information security, and the Internet.
"Before directing the Open Technology Fund, Dan was a senior producer and technologist for the Al Jazeera Network based in in Doha, Qatar. Leading up to and during the Arab Spring, he modernized traditional investigative journalist toolkits with safe communication technology to protect field reporters and their sources from surveillance, created a privacy-protecting global whistle-blowing and news gathering platform, and produced technology-centric stories for global television broadcast.
"Before his time at Al Jazeera, Dan was a senior technology fellow at New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. While there, he worked with the Open Technology Initiative and Media Policy Initiative to operationalize new “code-as-policy” technology projects with global communities of policy makers, journalists, and technologists. His focus was to create, educate, demystify, and evangelize open, distributed, and decentralized technologies that increased democratic participation, fought censorship, and disrupted authoritarianism globally."[1]
- Director, Open Technology Fund
