Friday, 9 April 2021, 11:30am EDT
The importance of building, contributing to, using and promoting open source and civic technology is greater than ever in this era of surveillance. As a flood of technology shapes and rewrites the rules of economies and our personal lives, life itself becomes intertwined in systems that we have little knowledge of or control over. For whistleblowers, activists, journalists and others in civil society, understanding technology - how it can be weaponized, commercialized or used as protection and as a safeguard - might mean the difference between life and death.
Our main guest will be Giovanni Pellerano, computer engineer, whistleblowing hacktivist, free and open source software contributor, co-founder and co-author of the GlobaLeaks project (https://www.globaleaks.org). Since 2011, Giovanni has been involved in the design of a methodology fully based on open source software and has supported directly and indirectly several hundred whistleblowing projects around the world focused on investigative journalism, anticorruption, human rights and corporate compliance.
The discussion will be moderated by Yale Poynter Fellow Khadija Sharife, a South-Africa-based award-winning investigative journalist and senior editor for Africa at Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. Sharife is the former director of the Platform for the Protection of Whistleblowers (PPLAAF) and currently also a board member of Finance Uncovered. She has worked with diverse forums including the Pan-African Parliament, the African Union, the OECD, and UNEP. Her work is focused on illicit financial flows, natural resources, and political economy. She is the author of “Tax Us If You Can: Africa.”