Dan co-founded OTF in 2012 and was the organization’s inaugural director until 2019.
Before directing the Open Technology Fund, Dan was a senior producer and technologist for the Al Jazeera Network based in Doha, Qatar. Leading up to and during the Arab Spring, he modernized traditional investigative journalist toolkits with safe communication technology to protect field reporters and their sources from surveillance, created a privacy-protecting global whistle-blowing and newsgathering platform, and produced technology-centric stories for global television broadcast.
Before his time at Al Jazeera, Dan was a senior technology fellow at New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. While there, he helped create and worked with the Open Technology Initiative and Media Policy Initiative to operationalize new “code-as-policy” technology projects with global communities of policymakers, journalists, and technologists. His focus was to create, educate, demystify, and evangelize open, distributed, and decentralized technologies that increased democratic participation, fought censorship, and disrupted authoritarianism globally.
