Trainer Bios

Marianne Bouchart is the founder and director of HEI-DA, a nonprofit organisation promoting news innovation, the future of data journalism and open data. She runs data journalism programmes in various regions around the world as well as HEI-DA’s Sensor Journalism Toolkit project and manages the Data Journalism Awards competition.

Before launching HEI-DA, Marianne spent 10 years in London where she worked as a web producer, data journalism and graphics editor for Bloomberg News, amongst others. She created the Data Journalism Blog in 2011 and gives lectures at journalism schools, in the UK and in France.

Tatiana is an economist with more than six years of relevant experience in transparency and budgeting, good governance and public finance and management systems. She is also a team member that evaluates the Open Budget Index for Moldova. One of her latest interests is anti-corruption, mainly, carrying out analysis on the allocation and utilization of budgetary and extra-budgetary resources, more precisely verifying their compliance with the law and procedures, as well as if the funds are set up and managed in accordance with financial regulations and rules.

Data visualization makes everything more comprehensible, so from 2013, Tatiana and her team have been developing data stories that make budget data relevant and interesting to the decision factors, influencers, and journalists.

Tatiana coordinates the MACRO Conference since 2016. MACRO is an annual conference organized by the Independent Think-Tank Expert-Grup in partnership with the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. The conference aims to serve as a high-level intellectual platform to dissect the country’s economic, political and security-related opportunities and risks and discuss the way they shape the economic path of the Republic of Moldova.

Aliaume Leroy is an open source journalist with the new Africa Investigation Unit recently created by BBC World News Service. Before, he was a campaigner on the Conflict & Fragile States strand at the NGO Global Witness. He has published works on arms, drug, and diamond trafficking.

His research with the Bellingcat Investigation Team concentrates on Africa and Latin America, while providing support to ongoing investigations. He also delivers training in Open Source investigation tools and techniques on behalf of Bellingcat. He studied Political Sciences, Economics, and History at McGill University and a master in the War Studies department of King’s College London.

Vlad Andriescu is a Romanian journalist with 7 years of experience in big enterprises and national newspapers, but also running newly founded niche websites. He is the Editor in Chief of start-up.ro, a Romanian website dealing with topics ranging from technology startups, SMEs, new technology trends. He is specialized in entrepreneurship, technology, management and producing multimedia content.

Barbara Weidmann-Lainer is an experienced journalist, lecturer, trainer and early adopter, fascinated by digital media and interactive technology, curiously forging new paths. She is working independently as a crossmedia journalist since 2002 and passing on her experiences to colleagues, novices, as well as old hands.
Barbara is conducting courses for several journalistic institutions and associations, focussing on video production, multimedia storytelling and mobile reporting. Newspapers and publishing houses, research institutes and NGOs, enterprises and public authorities engage her for in-house seminars.

Before assuming this role, she spent more than ten years at ProSieben, a private national tv station. For three of these years she and her team developed “Arabella,” a very successful daily talk show format and one of the first in Germany, targeted at a young audience. Changing back to tv news, where she originally started her career as an editor during her studies, she was purveying live reports, worked as a planning editor, executive editor and anchorwoman.
Barbara is a longstanding Member of journalistic mentoring programmes in Bavaria.
She holds an Magister Artium (M.A.) in Political Science from Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München.

Iulian Comanescu is a Romanian entrepreneur and author. After a more than 15 years career as a journalist he started his own business as a communication consultant/content provider, while stil contributing to publications such as Dilema or HotNews.ro or posting on his own mass media and communication blog, Comanescu.ro, which was twice awarded.

He wrote a book, ‘Cum să devii un Nimeni’ (‘How to become a Nobody’ – about celebrity, legacy and digital media), published by Humanitas, and did training and media research work in countries such as Romania, the Republic of Moldova, Armenia and Czech Republic. He is the co-founder of a content network, BrandedCont.net.

Evan Summers is the Partner Implementation Specialist at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), a nonprofit, nonpartisan, nongovernmental organization that supports citizen participation, openness and accountability in government. At NDI, Evan works with staff and partner organizations to promote increased digital security awareness, including efforts to appropriately recommend and apply digital security strategies and tools. Evan also works on the direct implementation of and client support for DemTools, a suite of localized democracy tools designed to power sophisticated organization and communication technology for NDI partners.

Kate Hoof is the director of the Center for Mass Communications at Manchester High School in Richmond, Virginia.  She is a veteran teacher of media studies and video production.  She also works as a freelance videographer.  For the last ten years, she’s been shooting and producing video primarily with non-profit organizations in the Richmond and Washington D.C. areas.

Maarten Schenk is the creator of the Trendolizer engine, a tool to detect trending content on the internet.  Among other things, it is used to find topics to write about on the website of the company he co-founded, http://leadstories.com.  During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election campaign, he discovered that Trendolizer also works quite well to monitor fake news websites and, as a result, he shifted the focus of Lead Stories almost exclusively to debunking emerging fake news stories just as they are going viral.

Vitalie has been programming in some form since he was 12 years old. At College of Informatics and Technical University of Moldova he gained a strong foundation in computer science theory in addition to experience in actual software development through several international companies, side projects, and a couple entrepreneurial endeavors.