Personal information

Full name

Walid Al-Saqaf

Country

Yemen

Bio

graduated from the Computer Engineering Department of the Middle East Technical University of Ankara in 1998 and ever since, has been involved extensively in the design and programming of online content. He is the founder of YemenPortal.net, which is a news and opinion content aggregator with more than 800,000 items on Yemen. He also launched a special Firefox plug-in called (Access YemenPortal!) allowing his website, which was blocked by the Yemeni government, from being accessed normally within Yemen. His future projects center around aggregating software and circumvention technologies. Currently, Walid is carrying out his PhD studies at Örebro University in Sweden and is focusing on ICTs and new media in general.

Projects

• YemenPortal.net: A news, views, blog, forum, and video aggregator (Arabic/English)
• Access YemenPortal! Firefox plug-in as a means of censorship circumvention.
• ArabiaPortal.net (a pan Arab version inspired by YemenPortal.net – under construction)
• Working on software development for new aggregator tools usable for Arabic websites
• Working on a multi-purpose service-oriented website for Yemen

Attended Arab Techies Gathering, Cairo, December 2008

Attended Arab Techies Code Sprint, Cairo, May 2009

History

Member for

3 years 23 weeks