Jon Gosier
Data Science + Design
Jonathan Gosier (wikipedia) is a designer, software developer, lover of data science and the co-founder of metaLayer.com which aims to make the world's information easier to understand, visualize and share.
From 2009 to 2011 he served as Director of Product for SwiftRiver at Ushahidi working on an open-source platform for drawing insight from real-time communication during crisis events. The SwiftRiver project was selected as a 2011 Knight News Challenge award winner.
In 2009 Jon spoke at TED about his company Appfrica and one of their projects which connected rural African villages with the internet through a call center and light infrastructure. The service, in collaboration with non-profit OpenMind, was called QuestionBox and allowed people with no access to the internet to ask questions and get timely, vetted answers as a sort of 'quora for developing countries'.
Jon is also the organizer of the annual Apps4Africa competition which encourages African software developers to develop solutions to local problems and rewards winners with thousands of dollars in funding for their projects.
Jon is a frequent public speaker and has been invited to present at the Economist's Ideas Economy, Strata, Google Zeitgeist/BigTent, TechCrunch:Disrupt, Personal Democracy Forum and more. Links to articles about his work, presentation slides, and video of his talks can be found here.