Sharek961 is an independent, unaffiliated, non-partisan, all-volunteer project, and the result of the hard work and collaboration of many partners and individuals. Sharek961 empowers Lebanese citizens to participate in society by reporting on the political process. Sharek961 is launching in time for the June 7th parliamentary elections so that people across Lebanon can report fairly on the elections and related events through SMS, email, and the web.

Here are short bios of the core team members in alphabetical order.

From Sharek961:

Abdallah Chamas is a volunteer developer who has some related know-how and is interested in working on a community-based project as well as observing the election process in Lebanon.

David Munir Nabti believes Lebanon should be a primary source of, not only recipient of, positive and world-changing innovation and ideas. He likes open systems, ICT for dev, and social innovation. He is the CEO (Chief Entrepreneur and Organizer) of RootSpace, a co-coordinator of Sawt Ashabab, and he doesn’t sleep much.

Ian Pye has been press-ganged into service. He is also interested in Lebanon and new paradigms of content creation.

Katherine Maher works on making information and communication technology work for development purposes and is interested in the principles of open society and communities of practice and participation.

Mustapha Hamoui is a Lebanese web designer who is interested in doing community-based projects for Lebanon. He lives in Ghana, where in addition to running his family business, he and his wife run a design studio named Zanizeal.

Sacha Tueni works on connecting the world of mobile communication with the future in social media and is interested in the power of communities.

From eMoksha

Selvam Velmurugan is the founder of eMoksha.org, a non-partisan non-profit organization to enable stronger democracies through increased citizen awareness and engagement.

From Sawt Ashabab

Dara Mouracade is a digital media enthusiast who studied marketing in Lebanon and Canada and is currently working with Amphipole (hosted in Berytech) in web marketing, content management and book publishing

Dima Saber is a media instructor and media researcher, and works to promote information and media literacy to high school and university students.

From Meedan

George Weyman is a community director for Meedan who runs the translation team and works to extend Meedan tools and translation community to other crowd-sourced Middle East web projects.

Chris Blow is an interaction designer who has worked on several projects related to crowdsourced data analysis.

Volunteers

Abby Tonge

Ayman Itani is the author of onoffbeirut.com

Mike W Hills is a journalist and blogger at the Frontline Club.

Rayane Alamuddin