Lina Ben Mhenni is a Tunisian blogger [ar] and activist, and has been writing about the Tunisian blogosphere for Global Voices since October 2008.

Through the creation of a Facebook group and a blog [fe], she has led awareness campaigns about the recent case of a Tunisian student, Mohamed Soudani, who has been jailed for giving media interview.

Wissam is the founder of Ethiopian Suicides, a migrants rights blog focused on Lebanon which has been featured in CNN, CNN Arabic, the L.A. Times, the Guardian, El Mundo (Spanish), Angry Arab News Service, The Daily Star (Lebanon), and Now Lebanon. Wissam is also a contributing writer at Migrant Rights.

Jacob Appelbaum is a computer security consultant and developer and advocate for the Tor Project, a tool and privacy network which protects internet users’ privacy and security. At the Arab Bloggers Workshop he gave a presentation about circumvention, online security, and anonymity. He is @ioerror on Twitter.

Rebecca Saab Saade is a social media trainer for the Beirut-based Social Media Exchange. She also works on LGBT rights advocacy work with Meem, “a community of lesbian, bisexual, queer & questioning women and transgender persons in Lebanon.” She helped subtitle the movie 10 Tactics into Arabic.

Ahmad Gharbeia is an advocate of open source software and open content based in Cairo, Egypt. He frequently trains bloggers how to publish information securely and anonymously, and was part of the team that translated Tactical Technology Collective’s Security in-a-Box toolkit into Arabic. He is @agharbeia on Twitter.

Doreen Khoury is a program manager at the Middle East Office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the co-organizers of the Arab Bloggers Meeting. She previously worked as a senior researcher and elections specialist at the Lebanese Centre for Policy Studies, and served as executive director of the Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections. She is @doreen_khoury on Twitter.

For the past year, Ghaida’a al-Absi has been leading citizen media workshops for female activists in Yemen as part of the Hand in Hand Initiative. The project called “Empowerment of Women Activists in Media Techniques [ar]” has been funded by the Rising Voices outreach arm of Global Voices Online.

To follow along with the progress of the project, please visit their Flickr site and Facebook group.

Saed Karzoud is a Palestinian journalist and blogger, who conducted a workshop at the 2nd Arab Bloggers Meeting on the use of music in media analysis. He takes pride in showing the positive aspects of daily life in Palestine on his personal blog.

Nasser Weddady is a native of Mauritania and is the Civil Rights Outreach Director of the American Islamic Council based in Boston, Massachusetts. One of the Council’s initiatives is the Hands Across the Middle East Support Alliance.

One of the workshops he led during the 2nd Arab Bloggers Meeting dealt with the subject of funding sources for bloggers and other members of civil society, and the issues surrounding the perception of different types of funding.

Nasser can be followed on Twitter at @weddady.