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Co-Founder/Editor, MobileActive.org

Katrin Verclas is co-founder and editor of MobileActive.org, a global network of practitioners using mobile phones in social change work. She was, until recently, also the Executive Director of NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network, the national association of IT professionals working in the more than one million nonprofit organizations in the United States.

Katrin is passionate about the use of technology in democratic participation, economic empowerment, community organizing, and government accountability.

She believes in the importance of community, the power of networks, the good will of people, our ability to collaborate for a common good, the inherent political-ness of everyday life, and the power of people using technology to better this world.

Katrin has a strong background in IT management, IT in social change organizations, and in philanthropy. Prior to NTEN and MobileActive, she has led several nonprofit organizations, and served as a program officer at the Proteus Fund for six years, focusing on the use of technology in civic and democratic participation, and in government transparency.

She is currently engaged in researching and writing a publication on mobile use in civil society with the UN Foundation and Vodafone Foundation Group, among other projects.

Katrin has written widely on mobile phones in citizen participation and civil society organizations, open source software in the nonprofit sector, and information and communication technologies (ICTs) in development. She is the editor of a forthcoming book on IT Leadership in organizations published by Wiley & Sons, and is the author of an essay in a book to be published in 2008 on the use of technology in engaging young people in democratic movements. She is a frequent speaker on ICTs in civil society at national and international conferences and has published numerous articles and publications on technology for social change in leading popular and industry publications.

Katrin serves on the boards of Mobile Voter and NTEN, and is a member of IEEE Computer Society and the Development Executive Group.

MobileActive.org is a global network of practitioners using mobile phones in social change work. MobileActive.org features a community blog with the latest case studies and analysis of the use of mobile phones in civil society organizations; data on mobile penetration worldwide, and a comprehensive directory of projects, vendors, and tools using mobile technology. The network organizes a popular conference for practitioners and technologists at the cutting edge of using mobiles in social change work around the world.

Katrin can be reached at kverclas [at] techstrategy.org or katrin [phat] mobileactive.org.