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Biographies
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Willow Brugh, known as willowbl00, is the co-founder and executive director of the NGO Geeks Without Bounds. She's also affiliated with the Center for Civic Media at MIT's Media Lab, and a fellow at Harvard Law's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
She facilitates hackathons from Berlin to Chicago to Nairobi, including the first hackathon ever within Port-au-Prince, embedding technology into local communities through open source and co-design. Since founding both makerspaces and ways to link those community workshops to one another, she's started working on long-term water and sanitation projects in Tanzania with local innovation spaces, the World Bank, Red Cross, and Little Devices out of MIT's D-Lab. In brief, Willow looks at connections, systems, empowerment, and powerlessness and strives to both understand and improve whatever she finds. Sometimes that’s with the Occupy Sandy Movement in Brooklyn, sometimes it’s with National Defense University in Washington DC. She has transcendence tattoos that are impressive enough to be photographed for a National Geographic blog, but has keynoted the IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference. Willow has successfully worked with FEMA’s Field Innovation Team for Hurricane Sandy, and was awarded a ceremony at the White House for her contribution. Willow is on the Selection Committee for MIT's Humanitarian Technology Innovation Conference and has graduated 12 successful small-business teams from the Geeks Without Borders accelerator in places like Bangalore, Pakistan, Spain, and the US. She’s spoken at RightsCon, the Harvard Leadership Conference, Chaos Communication Congress, Knight-MIT Civic Media Conference, at UN-OCHA in Geneva, in Krakow, at US Northern Command in Colorado and for the EU. She is the Coordinator for the Digital Humanitarian Network, and that is a large part of her interest and participation in the Roddenberry DRT. She is specifically interested in the inclusive and responsible business models possible through our empowerment transitions, demonstrating methods for improving disaster economics in the aftermath. |
Team• Eric Rasmussen
• Alex Hatoum • Julie Rider • John Crowley • Steve Birnbaum • Willow Brugh • Eric Wendt TECHNICAL ADVISORS • Colin Hildebrandt: Water Applications Engineer • Gisli Olafsson: Emergency Response Director, NetHope • Brian Steckler: Lecturer; Director, Hastily Formed Networks (HFN) Research Group Associate Chair for Special Programs, US Naval Postgraduate School • Catherine Nelson, Security Researcher / Program Manager, Intel • Harmony Mabrey, Senior Operations Manager for Microsoft Disaster Response • J.A. Ginsburg, writer, editor, producer • Jessica Block - Qualcomm Institute, University of California, San Diego • Lin Wells, Former Director, Center for Technology & National Security Policy at National Defense University |
