Friday May 28, 2010
14:00 – 15:30, Main Auditorium

Over 80% of the world’s population currently lacks access to new media sources such as blogs, Twitter and online news sources. This lack of free flowing information has large implications for development. Widespread access to new media can provide channels through which information on health, farming techniques and community issues can be disseminated. New media can also provide a platform for grassroots social entrepreneurs to market their business and share their ideas and best practices.

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Meet the Panel

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Crystal Watley Kigoni

Executive Director
Voices of Africa

Crystal Watley Kigoni has been in the field of ICT4D for the past 6 years with 3 years in East Africa. Her interest in ICT and education began at the University of North Carolina at Asheville while studying Sustainable Development and was the focus of her work at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. She currently works in Nairobi and founded the non-governmental organization, Voices of Africa for Sustainable Development (VOA4SD) to find innovative solutions to bridging the digital divide with emphasis on marginalized and rural populations. The past three years VOA4SD has been in East Africa implementing programs on the ground and doing field research on the information and development needs of these communities. Now Crystal is working with the Rural Internet Kiosk to implement the project across Sub Saharan Africa for the benefit of the people. VOA4SD was a winner of the World Summit Youth Award in the category “Education for All” and was recently participated in the World Bank’s Innovation Fair.

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Youlia Lozanova

Telecommunication/ ICT Regulatory Analyst
International Telecommunication Union (ITU)

Ms. Youlia Lozanova is currently working as a Telecommunication/ICT Regulatory Analyst with the Regulatory and Market Environment Division of the Development sector of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), where she has worked since 2005. Her main areas of work are regulatory reform and policy development in the ICT sector. Before joining ITU, she spent three years as a Research Assistant in the Sofia University and two years with public media in Bulgaria. Ms. Lozanova has an MA degree in Public Policy Management and a MA in Development Studies from the University of Geneva.

Over the last five years, Ms. Lozanova has specialized in the area of ICT development and regulation and has co-authored materials in several reports on the topics, including the World Information Society Report 2006 and 2007 and Trends in Telecommunication Reform 2008 and 2009.

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Michael Lew

New Media Producer

Michael Lew (Switzerland) is a filmmaker, new media artist, interactive media designer and producer working with all forms of the moving image.  After graduating from EPFL in 2000, he worked as a Research Fellow at MIT Media Lab Europe, in interactive cinema, between 2000 and 2004, and was a Visiting Scholar at USC School of Cinematic Arts between 2004 and 2007. He works as a consultant on visionary technologies for film, performance and interactive media, and has advised directors such as David Lynch, Peter Greenaway, Lars von Trier, and Marie Brassard.  He has taught and lectured internationally on computational film (Canadian Film Centre – Toronto, American Film Institute Digital Content Lab – Los Angeles, Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen – München, HEAD – Geneva, etc.).

He has received multiple awards for his work in film and new technologies, such as the Logitech 2000 Innovation Award, and the FCMM Cyber-Loup 2003 Award.  His nomadic research lab on the future of cinema, the Computational Cinema Laboratory, is currently hosted at the Laboratory of Media & Design, EPFL. The lab explores topics such as : narratology, interactive narrative, artificial intelligence, new camera and display systems, interactive video.  Michael is a member of OLPC.CH, the Swiss branch of the not-for-profit One Laptop Per Child Foundation, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The aim of that association is to bring computing and filmmaking tools to children in rural and impoverished areas around the world.

LEV STUDIO, Michael’s consultancy and design studio, is based in Geneva, Switzerland. For more information, go to : http://www.lev.ch/.

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Ian Harrington

Director, Producer Screenwriter
Stop Genocide

Ian is originally from Titusville, PA USA (the birthplace of the oil industry) and now lives in Los Angeles, CA. He has worked in the film industry for over fifteen years, and much of his training came in Hollywood under the tutelage of many great mentors; the most significant was as Danny DeVito’s Personal Assistant and Associate Producer at Jersey Films. After his long tenure with Jersey, he decided to move on his own to write and direct. He directed short films (was a finalist for the Skyy Vodka Director’s contest at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004) and produced the award winning play, “Belfast Blues” starring Geraldine Hughes, in London, Belfast, Chicago and New York. He was an Associate Producer and documentarian on a large-scale theatrical project called “Truth In Translation” about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which won a number of awards at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2007. He is currently directing a documentary about the political events in Honduras combined with the football team’s miraculous World Cup qualification.

As he traveled and worked in different parts of the world, he developed a sense of community in the world and began to volunteer his media skills for different organiztions such as Soweto Rhythm in South Africa, People Improvement Organization (PIO) in Cambodia, Project Children in Northern Ireland, and most recently was a trip to Eastern Chad to work in the Darfur Refugee camps with a group called i-Act, one of the hardest and most satisfying experiences of his life.

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Moderated by:

Ana Serrano

Director
CFC Media Lab

Ana Serrano, producer, executive producer and interactive architect of Late Fragment, North America’s first interactive feature film, is also the director of the CFC Media Lab, whose Interactive Narrative Feature Program (INFP) co-produced the movie with the National Film Board of Canada.

Serrano, winner of three 2003 Canadian New Media Awards, was selected the sole Canadian expert panel member for the 2003, 2005 and 2007 World Summit Awards, part of the United Nations’ World Summit on the Information Society. In 2000 she produced the Great Canadian Story Engine Project, a national tour and bilingual website comprising an interactive storytelling community for Canadians.

Named one of Maclean’s magazine’s “100 Canadians to Watch,” Serrano, active on the boards of many companies involved in interactive entertainments, adjudicates awards, teaches at York University, and speaks at international venues about the emerging realms of interactive art and entertainment.

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IOMBA Co-ordinator: Matteo Tonarelli