Our founders, volunteers, and contractors are represented on our Board, along with some of the most influential innovators in global online media. Read more about the board and check out the FAQ.

Ethan Zuckerman (Founder)

Ethan Zuckerman is founding director of the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he is associate professor of public policy, communication and information. He is author of Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them, published by W.W. Norton in January 2021. With Rebecca MacKinnon, Ethan co-founded international blogging community Global Voices. Ethan's research focuses on issues of civic engagement through digital tools, international connections through media and publicly funded digital infrastructure. He blogs at https://ethanzuckerman.com/blog, tweets at @ethanz and lives in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts.

Rebecca MacKinnon (Founder)

Rebecca MacKinnon is founding director of the Ranking Digital Rights program at New America. She is the author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom (Basic Books, January 2012). She is also co-founder, along with Ethan Zuckerman, of Global Voices, serves on the Board of Directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists, and is a founding board member of the Global Network Initiative.

Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, MacKinnon worked as a journalist for CNN in Beijing for nine years and was Beijing Bureau Chief and Correspondent from 1998-2001, then served as CNN's Tokyo Bureau Chief and Correspondent from 2001-03. From 2004-06 she was a Research Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where she began her ongoing research and writing about the Chinese Internet.

Akwe Amosu (co-Chair)

Akwe Amosu’s career has spanned journalism, advocacy, and philanthropy. Currently the Program Director at The Symposium on Strength and Solidarity for Human Rights, Akwe served previously at the Chief Integration Officer at the Open Society Foundations (OSF), after earlier stints as the Regional Director for Africa and Director for Africa Advocacy. Akwe began her career in African journalism, moving to the Financial Times, and later to the BBC World Service, where she produced and hosted live news and current affairs programmes for an Africa-wide audience of 18 million. She left the BBC to join the team building the allAfrica.com news site, and later served as head of communications at the UN Economic Commission for Africa in Addis Ababa before joining OSF Washington, DC. She served previously on the Global Voices board from 2008-2012.

Rasha Abdulla

Dr. Rasha Abdulla (Ph.D. Communication, University of Miami) is Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at The American University in Cairo. She is a former member of the United Nations Multistakeholder Advisory Group of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF MAG). She is the author of eight books and monographs, including “The Internet in the Arab World: Egypt and Beyond,” as well as numerous research articles, reports, and book chapters. Her research on social media and political activism leading to and during Egypt's revolution won several research awards, including the AUC Excellence in Research Award. Dr. Abdulla has taught or guest lectured at several universities in Europe and the United States. Her research interests include social media and mobilization, media diversity, freedom of expression, and content moderation. Dr. Abdulla is an international consultant and is featured regularly in local and international media. She tweets at @RashaAbdulla.

Lokman Tsui

Lokman Tsui (徐洛文) is writer and scholar and whose research and advocacy focus on freedom of expression, digital rights, and Hong Kong. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Lokman was an Assistant Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication of the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 2014-2021. Prior to that, he was Google’s Head of Free Expression for Asia and the Pacific (2011-2014), and assistant professor in Media and Communication at City University of Hong Kong (2010-2011). He received his PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where his dissertation was awarded the Gene Burd Journalism Research Prize for Best Dissertation in Journalism Studies. He has also been a Faculty Associate (2015-17) and a Fellow (2008-9) at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Lokman is co-editor, with Joseph Turow, of The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age (2008) and was guest editor of China Information for a theme issue on the socio-political impact of the Internet in China. He is currently working on a book that he describes as a personal history of authoritarianism.

Juke Carolina Bransiecq (Volunteers representative)

Juke Carolina Bransiecq joined Global Voices in 2008 as a translator and began contributing stories to the GV newsroom in 2009. Indonesia-born Juke is passionate about her home region of Southeast Asia, human rights, politics, and maps. She holds a master's degree in geopolitics from the University of Reims, and currently lives in Marseille, France. Juke was GV's social media manager from May 2022 to March 2023.

Subhashish Panigrahi (Volunteers’ representative & co-Chair)

Subhashish Panigrahi is a documentary filmmaker and an interdisciplinary multimedia researcher working across community, culture and the digital rights of marginalized groups. Subha has worked for over a decade in nonprofits that safeguard the open internet, including Wikimedia Foundation, Mozilla, Internet Society, and Centre for Internet and Society. He has built communities to develop Indian-language Wikipedias, mobilized Mozilla Campus Clubs for students across Asia, and led large-scale content donations by negotiating with government entities and publishers. Subha has created documentaries for National Geographic on some of the languages that are facing imminent danger of extinction. He is currently a Digital Identity Fellow at Yoti.

Gabriela García Calderón (Contractors’ representative)

Gabriela García Calderón is a Peruvian lawyer who lives in Lima, two blocks from the Pacific Ocean. She joined Global Voices in November 2007, and at the time of writing has translated more than 12,000 GV stories from English into Spanish, making her GV's most prolific translator of all time. Gabriela blogs at Seis de enero and is currently Translation Manager for Global Voices in Spanish.