Rafe Kaplan - Google

Google Tools As Decentralized Communication
Rafe Kaplan is a leading software engineer. He worked for 5 years with the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, integrating data formats of various types into a form useful for large scale statistical analysis. Building flexible tools for human rights workers around the world and teaching multinational groups of technicians data management techniques.
Kaplan joined Google in June of 2007 and became one of the core engineers working on Google AppEngine.

The practical side of his work is helping human rights organizations to collect and analyse data that document violations of human rights.