Home Page Position: Sticky slide

Bill is the Founder and CEO of Minds.com, a free, open-source and encrypted social networking platform and mobile app. He administrates social media pages with millions of followers in the alternative news industry and is active in viral media research. He also is advisor of Code to Inspire, a nonprofit organization focusing on education of Afghan female students for better life, and has served as advisor in developing the open source network Word of Word Capital, a global macro investment company based in New York.

Prior to that, he was Marketing Director at Gathering of the Vibes, an annual music and arts festival. He graduated from University of Vermont.

Shubhranshu Choudhary is a Knight International Journalism Fellow and the Founder of CGNet Swara, an Indian mobile phone ser­vice that allows citizens to upload and listen to local reports in their own dialect without the need for a Smartphone or an internet connection. He won the 2014 Digital Activism Award from the U.K.-based charity organization Index on Censorship for his Central Gondwana Net Swara community radio, and also named one of Foreign Policy’s 2014 “100 Leading Global Thinkers”.

Choudhary was a TV and radio producer for the BBC’s South Asia bureau for eight years, and a reporter for The Guardian’s South Asia bureau for two years. He also was a reporter for five years at the Hindi-language Daily Deshbandhu. He has served as a media trainer for the BBC World Service Trust, the United Nations and Indian universities. He produced the first television coverage of foreign militants operating in Indian Kashmir and conducted the first television interview with the chief commander of the Kashmiri militant organization.

 

Roya Mahboob is an Afghan entrepreneur and businesswoman. She founded and serves as CEO of the Afghan Citadel Software Company, a full-service software development company based in Herat, Afghanistan.

She has received attention for being among the first IT female CEOs in Afghanistan,where it is still relatively rare for women to work outside the home. On 18 April 2013, Roya Mahboob was named to TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People In The World for 2013 for her work in building internet classrooms in high schools in Afghanistan and for Women’s Annex, a multilingual blog and video site hosted by Film Annex, which gives the women of Afghanistan and Central Asia a platform to tell their stories to the world.

She is also known for her work with online film distribution platform and Web Television Network Film Annex on the Afghan Development Project.