Board of Directors

The Board of Directors meet (or teleconference) annually or as needed.

Georgia Popplewell

Georgia Popplewell is the Managing Director of Global Voices. She has overseen the operations and many Global Voices programs, for nearly 20 years and is an editor in the newsroom. She has a wealth of experience conceiving and organizing events, conferences, and summits for global participants, often in difficult circumstances. She is also a media producer and writer from Trinidad and Tobago who has worked in independent media around the world since 1989. She started Caribbean Free Radio, the Caribbean’s first podcast.

Ellery Roberts Biddle

Ellery Roberts Biddle is a journalist with a special focus on technology and the ways it affects people’s lives and rights. As the former advocacy director for Global Voices, and most recently as the managing editor for Coda Story, Ellery has worked with reporters and researchers around the world to tell stories about online censorship, digital surveillance, abuses of power by Big Tech companies, and the digital dimensions of the climate crisis. Biddle has degrees from the University of Chicago and Kenyon College, and was a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society from 2014-2017. She serves on the advisory council of the Open Technology Fund and on the board of Monument Lab, a public art and history studio in Philadelphia. She has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, Slate, Coda Story, Quartz, Global Voices and Americas Quarterly. She lives in Philadelphia.

J. Nathan Matias

Dr. J. Nathan Matias (@natematias) is a computer scientist and social scientist who organizes citizen behavioral science for a safer, fairer, more understanding Internet. A Guatemalan-American, Nathan is founder of the Citizens and Technology Lab, an assistant professor in the Cornell University Department of Communication, and field member in Information Science.

Nathan is founder of the Citizens and Technology Lab, a public-interest research group at Cornell that organizes citizen behavioral science and behavioral consumer protection research for digital life. CAT Lab has worked with communities of tens of millions of people on reddit, Wikipedia, and Twitter to test ideas for preventing harassment, broadening gender diversity on social media, responding to human/algorithmic misinformation, managing political conflict, and auditing social technologies.

Nathan is also a pioneer in industry-independent evaluations on the impact of social technologies and artificial intelligence in society. Toward this end, he co-founded the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, a nonprofit that supports and defends independent research on technology and society.

Alexandra Esenler

Alexandra Esenler is passionate about knowledge sharing and building systems that amplify impact, improve workflows, and facilitate collaboration. She is the Deputy Director at OpenArchive and serves as an adjunct professor in Columbia College Chicago’s Media for Social Impact Masters Program. Alex has been active in the digital and human rights, media and democracy, and communications spaces for over a decade through work with mission-oriented organizations such as OpenArchive,  Global Voices, the Center for Global Communication Studies, and Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a Masters of Public Administration from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelors in History and Communications from McGill University in Montreal, Canada.