Carleton Connects: Ed Bice '88 and the future of our information ecosystems

Is the content streaming onto 5 billion smartphones making our planet wiser? Smarter? Healthier? Is it making our democracies more representative and our institutions more responsive and our social fabric more resilient? Ask Ed Bice ’88, who founded an award-winning nonprofit to help global news and civil society organizations annotate, investigate, fact-check, and verify digital content during critical civic moments like elections, global health emergencies, and natural disasters. Ed Bice ’88 is the CEO and Board Chair of the global technology nonprofit Meedan. Since founding the company in 2006 he has devoted his professional energies to improving equity, accessibility, and credibility in online environments. Ed has led strategy and project definition on open-source software development focused on human-in-the-loop approaches to translating, verifying, investigating and fact-checking digital content. Ed, who majored in philosophy at Carleton, was a recipient of the 2024 Skoll Award for Social Innovation. Meedan’s work has received numerous awards, including two Knight News Challenge Awards, two Online News Association Awards, and two International Fact-Checking Networks’ Collaborative Impact awards.