Janet Haven

I live in Budapest, Hungary, and work for the Open Society Institute's Information Program. OSI is a private, grant-making foundation that works both in the United States and internationally, although I only work on the international side. Which is one of the reasons for writing this blog: my work takes me to the Middle East, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and South East Asia. Three years of amazing travel has gone by without any record, aside from a few pictures on my hard drive and many more in my head.

The job itself is the other reason for starting this blog up again. I'm lucky in my work: I travel quite a bit, regularly see fascinating projects and meet extraordinary individuals. It seems worthwhile to share that information with those who might also be interested.

Within the Information Program at OSI, I run the Civil Society Communications program, which includes a capacity-buliding piece and a toolsets piece. To translate: the Information Program works to enhance the ability to access, exchange and produce information by civil society constituencies (i.e., activists, advocates in a range of areas) . Some of this work is done via policy interventions, or investment in libraries, publishing, translations. What I do is work on the problem of how it's done at a hands-on level - what are the software tools, communications tactics, and capabilities that civil society groups need in order to communicate both with each other and with their target audiences, be that the general public, national governments, or international communities. We look at issues along the lines of "what can blogs do for a human rights community in the Middle East?", "how are networking software tools relevant to public health activists working for anti-tobacco legislation in Eastern Europe?" or "what technologies will help in categorizing hundreds of human rights abuse reports?"

And to wrap up the bio part of things: I grew up in Seal Beach, California, in the heart of Orange County. Unfortunately, I skipped town before Orange County became "the O.C."; when I lived there it was known only (if equally, probably) for its phenomenal number of strip malls, its conservative (and later bankrupt) powers-that-be, and its ska scene. I wasn't into any of the above - regrettably, ska-wise - and moved on majority to SoCal's antonyn, Amherst, Massachusetts. Western Mass was different and quickly beloved, but pork stew, Urgic languages, and nations in transition called, and I moved to Hungary in the mid-1990's.

I spent one year in Hungary, and then moved on to the UK, Prague, and back to Hungary. I fit in a masters' degree at the University of Virginia (in a fantastic American Studies/Computing in the Humanities program, one of the first of its kind in those days). Post-MA, I joined two start-up software companies in Central Europe. One, Netbeans in Prague, was bought up by Sun Microsystems (and survives to this day as their open source Java IDE); the second, Uproar in Budapest, was purchased by Vivendi during Jean-Marie Messier's crazed shopping spree in 2001.

Budapest has been my home for the past six years. I live here with Favorite Husband and the Stuffed Turtle.