Dan Blah

I co-founded Reset and the Open Technology Fund. When I’m not fully immersed in or advocating for the work we and the hundreds of projects we support, I try to capture and experience the beauty of existing (but mostly just dog photos). In the margins, you’ll find me consuming books, news, and tinkering with anything that may help us embrace our rapidly changing future.

Below is an attempt at a more official-sounding bio for conferences, speaking engagements, or other purposes. Need more, here’s my cv.

Dan Blah (Daniel Meredith), co-founded Reset in January 2020. As Chief Technologist, he is a part of Reset’s leadership and executive team, responsible for setting and executing strategies that accomplish Reset’s goals.

Over the past decade, Dan has identified as activist, technologist, journalist, philanthropist, and bureaucrat. He continually works to explore, develop, and sustain emerging technologies that affect and transform human rights, social justice, democracy, transparency, accountability, privacy, security, and policy in our digital age.

Before launching Reset, Dan co-founded the Open Technology Fund in January 2012 as the Principal Director and Chief Technologist. He was responsible for OTF’s strategic development, long-term planning, and day-to-day operations. Now as Co-founder Emeritus, he serves as a strategic advisor to the OTF team and board.

Dan joined OTF after being a Senior Producer and Technologist for the Al Jazeera Network based in Doha, Qatar. Leading up to and during the Arab Spring, he worked to modernize traditional investigative journalist tool-kits with safe communication technology to protect field reporters and their sources from repressive surveillance, create a privacy-protecting global whistle-blowing and newsgathering platform, and produce technology-centric stories for global television broadcast.

Prior to Al Jazeera, Dan was a Technologist and Senior Technology Fellow at New America Foundation in Washington, DC. He was the Open Technology Institute’s first full-time staff member in 2009, working to operationalize new “code-as-policy” technology projects with global communities of policymakers, journalists, and technologists. While at OTI, Dan honed his focus to create, educate, demystify, and evangelize open, distributed, and decentralized technologies that increased democratic participation, combated repressive censorship, and disrupted authoritarianism globally.

Earlier in the 2000s, Dan was a Software Developer, Network Engineer, and Volunteer within the Indymedia movement at Urbana-Champgian’s Independent Media Center. Within the local movement, he worked with other organizers to build: Radio Free Urbana, a low-power FM community radio station; the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN), a decentralized, community-owned network to foster democratic culture and local content; and, an open-source community web hosting project at Chambana.net.