Ed Bice

Chairman & CEO of Meedan


United States of America

Ed Bice is the CEO of Meedan, a social tech NGO focused on increasing the online exchange of media, dialogue, and educational materials between Arabic and English speakers. At the confluence of social networking, social translation, and open innovation, Meedan has forwarded ideas and projects with the singular focus of promoting more diverse networks for knowledge, data, and idea exchange between Arabic and English speakers on the Internet. Prominent partnerships include work with Cambridge University to enable faith scholars to converse and to annotate seminal texts across languages (with support from Coexist Foundation and the British Research Council), work with MIT and QFI (Qatar Foundation Intl.) to promote cross-classroom and teacher-to-teacher access to Open Education Resources, a project with the Institute of International Education to promote new media training and networking among MENA NGOs, and work with Al-Masry Al-Youm and Al Jazeera to promote new media translation and annotation in professional newsrooms (supported to the Swedish Development agency – Sida). Meedan’s work has been covered in the NY Times Magazine Year in Ideas issue, and its content is regularly carried in TheEconomistThe Guardian, and other international media outlets. 

Ed has been an invited speaker at the 2010 Harvard Advance Leadership Initiative, the 2009 UN Internet Governance Forum, and many other ICT4D events. Ed is a member of the Partners for a New Beginning (PNB) group, a member of the Qatar Foundation International Educational Technology Working Group, and is a Co-Chair of the United Palestinian Partnership (UPP). Ed has been an invited reviewer at the National Science Foundation in 2008 and 2010. Joi Ito included Ed in his book Freesouls, portraits of 296 people working to build the open web. Ed has co-authored a patent-pending approach to hybrid distributed natural language translation. Ed attended Carleton College where he received a B.A. in philosophy of language.