Zara Rahman

Following my annual tradition, this is a round up of the best books I read in 2025.

Following my annual tradition, this is a round up of some of the best books I read in 2024.

Following my annual tradition, this is a round up of some of the best books I read in 2023.

Following my annual tradition, this is a quick round up of some of the best books I read in 2021.

At a panel I was on at Theorizing the Web in 2017, one of the panellists said: “We don’t have time to wait for social media tools that don’t have blood on them.”

Lots of my reading lately has been around a couple of themes: hope, imagination, and futures.

One of my first consultancy projects is looking at strengthening the open source ecosystem, and as part of it, I’ve been catching up on research that might help inform next steps - such as Nadia Eghbal’s 2020 book, ‘Working in Public: The Making and Maint…

The secret to blogging, they say, is secretly blogging.

Following my annual tradition, this is a quick round up of some of the best books I read in 2021.

Following my annual tradition – this is a quick round up of some of the best books I read in 2020.

Following my annual tradition – this is a quick round up of some of the best books I read in 2019.

“The illusion of unique identity is much more divisive than the universe of plural and diverse classifications that characterize the world in which we actually live.

Following my yearly tradition – this is a quick round up of some of the best books I read in 2018.

This post is a run through of my favourite books from 2017 – the majority of which are written by women.

I can remember quite distinctly the first time I realised people think about the world in very different ways.

It's increasingly insufficient to think that more information leads to better decisions, or even a better informed public.

I went to see Hidden Figures last week after being excited about it for a long time.

When somebody asks me how I got to where I am, there are a few words I use generously: luck, serendipity and kind people.

This year, I loosened my resolve to read only books by women, partly for practical reasons and partly to see if I could notice a difference when starting to read books by men.

Inspired by my friend Lisa Rost’s ‘year in review’, here’s a summary of what I’ve been thinking and writing about this year.

A few weeks ago, I received the unexpected news that I’d been awarded a Shuttleworth Flash Grant - one of the Shuttleworth Foundation’s “small grants to a collection of social change agents, no strings attached, in support of their work.”

A few months ago I was talking to a (white, male) friend about the current political situation in Bangladesh.

It’s been just over two weeks since the US Presidential election, and like many around me, I’m still gathering my thoughts.

“You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself.

I’m coming up to two months in my fellowship at Data & Society, and I’m trying my best to appreciate it, and not take any of it for granted.

"I thought then: no matter how deep the dung, no matter how long the task, if you just go at it one shovel at a time the day will come when you can see clean earth at the bottom of the pile. ...I know better now.

I’m almost 2 months into my stint here in the US, which means I’ve spent a lot of time on subways over the past few weeks, and I’ve been listening to a lot of podcast episodes.

I’ve just started my fellowship at Data & Society, and I wanted to write about the feelings I had a few months ago when I found out about it.

Morning clouds of disbelief have given way to sadness.

3 months ago, I started writing a newsletter for the engine room, on the topic of Responsible Data.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the honour of giving my very first keynote, at CSVConf in Berlin.

Over the past year or so, I’ve been trying out a couple of informal event styles to bring people together around a certain topic, and enable a deeper style of discussion than often happens at bigger conferences.

If we think long enough through the ‘theories of change’ of many of the organisations and movements I find myself around, we should eventually come to the step of making ourselves redundant.

Warning: really long post.

Tomorrow is International Women’s Day; in my mind, a day for celebrating, and thanking, inspiring women.

Last week, my friend Tin wrote about being intentional about who was in his networks.

Unusually for me, I’ve just spent the last two weeks pretty much solidly in the company of people who I’m working closely with; first at the Global Voices Exchange workshop last week, then at the engine room organisation retreat, which brought together our

The more I spend time working with data, the more I’m becoming convinced that the most important tool we have in our advocacy or social change toolbelts, is storytelling.

On Friday, a bunch of smart organisations (including the engine room, where I’m spending a lot of time these days) brought together 35 artists, researchers, academics, activists, journalists and more, to talk about Responsible Data Visualisation.

At the end of 2013, I came across a lot of ‘feminist round ups’ of the year that covered only achievements happening in the US and Europe.

Here are a few of the best talks I had the chance to see, and those that were recommended to me - mostly along the lines of technology and its use among under-represented communities.

In 2014, I followed the #readwomen movement very strictly, and prioritised reading 50 books by women.

Disclaimer: some of these are more confirmations of obvious-sounding things, and others, you might disagree with.

Recently, Julia set up this site, and I purchased the domain superrr.ninja for it to live at.

I recently spent a couple of weeks in South Africa.

Last Wednesday, on November 18th, the Bangladeshi government ordered blocking of social messaging apps until further notice - first blocking Whatsapp, Facebook, Messenger, and in a second directive later the same day shutting Line, Tango and Hangouts.

Last week, a new book Data Journalism: Inside the global future was launched, to which I contributed a chapter.

Last week, I was invited by IDEO to attend a small event on the theme “Design x Intimacy.”

I’m a big ‘open’ advocate, and inclusivity and diversity are very important to me.

Writing has always been cathartic for me.