The Advisory Board is an informal group who are consulted together and individually for various matters to do with OKF projects, strategy and operations, but hold no legal responsibility for the organisation. For more information, see the Open Knowledge Foundation governance page.
Contents
Dr Sören Auer
Dr. Sören Auer leads the research group Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web at Universität Leipzig. His research interests are semantic technologies and knowledge representation aspects of Open Knowledge environments. Sören is founder of the open-source, adaptive knowledge engineering framework !OntoWiki, founding member of the DBpedia project and chair of the first Social Semantic Web conference.
Christopher Corbin
Christopher Corbin is an independent researcher and advisor on the information society and the knowledge economy with specific interest in policy and its implementation with respect to public sector information. He is an openly selected expert advisor on Europe to the UK Advisory Panel for Public Sector Information (APPSI). Recent project involvement with respect to public sector information policy has included the European Union eContentplus funded ePSIplus Thematic Network (2006-2009), the Geographic Information Network in Europe (GINIE) (2001-2004). He has also contributed to the OECD initiatives on Public Sector Information policy principles.
Dr Tim Hubbard
Dr Hubbard is responsible for the bioinformatics groups that carry out analysis and annotation of the vertebrate genome sequence produced by the Sanger Institute. He is joint head of the Ensembl genome annotation project, which is the leading database and access point for the human genome sequence. Following the controversy surrounding the ownership and access to the human genome sequence, he has become a leading advocate of the benefits of openness in science and in society as a whole. He is involved in a number of NGO/Industry forums regarding the world patent system and access to essential drugs, including the plan by Medecin Sans Frontieres to set up a public domain drug development industry, DNDi
Benjamin Mako Hill
Benjamin Mako Hill is a technology and intellectual property researcher, activist, and consultant. He is currently working full time on research into the application of technologies and lessons learned in free and open source software toward the production of other types of creative works a graduate student at the MIT Media Laboratory. He has been an leader, developer, and contributor to the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community for more than a decade as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects.
Glyn Moody
Glyn Moody is a UK based technology journalist and consultant covering the Internet since March 1994, and the free software world since 1995. His most recent books are “Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution” and “Digital Code of Life: How Bioinformatics is Revolutionizing Science, Medicine and Business”. Glyn blogs at opendotdotdot.
Dr Peter Murray-Rust
Dr Murray-Rust leads a research group in the Department of Chemistry at Cambridge University. Co-creator of the Chemical Markup Language (CML), he has long been a pioneer of data exchange and information-mining in the chemical sciences. Firmly committed to promoting openness and data availability throughout the discipline, he recently started the world-wide molecular matrix, the largest open online repository of molecular information in the world.
Professor John Naughton
John Naughton is Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University, and a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, where he is Director of the Wolfson Press Fellowship Programme. He is also the Observer’s Internet columnist, with a weekly column in the Business section of the paper. He co-founded www.livingwithoutmicrosoft.org and is a long-time advocate of open source software. His other commitments include chairmanship of One World international, membership of the Public Advisory Board of Creative Commons UK, and a co-founder of the Ndiyo project.
Professor Hans Rosling
Hans Rosling is Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institutet and Director of Gapminder Foundation, Stockholm, Sweden. His research has focused on poverty and health in rural Africa, but as Director of Gapminder he now mainly works on promotion of a fact based world view through free access to socio-economic and environmental statistics in understandable and interactive animations. His goal is that data on the major global trends should not only reach the eye but pass on into the brain and affect how actions are decided.
Professor Nigel Shadbolt
Nigel Shadbolt is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Southampton, and is the Head of the Web and Internet Science research group. He is a Director of the Web Science Trust and of the Web Foundation. Both organisations have a common commitment to advancing our understanding of the Web and promoting the Web’s positive impact on society. Since 2009 he has been advising the UK Government on its Open Data strategy. He is also the co-founder and Chairman of the Open Data Institute. He was President of the British Computer Society in its 50th anniversary year (2006-7).
Andrew Stott
Andrew Stott was the UK’s first Director for Transparency and Digital Engagement. He led the work to open government data and create “data.gov.uk”; and after the 2010 Election he led the policy development and implementation of the new Government’s commitments on Transparency of central and local government. Following his formal retirement in December 2010 he was appointed to the UK Transparency Board to continue to advise UK Ministers on open data and e-government policy. He also advises other governments on Open Data both bilaterally and through the World Bank and the World Wide Web Foundation. He is an expert adviser on Open Data strategy to the EU Citadel On The Move programme and co-chairs the OKFN Open Government Data Working Group.
Professor Peter Suber
Peter Suber is a Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, Senior Researcher at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), and the Open Access Project Director at Public Knowledge. He is the author of the Open Access News weblog and the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. He was the principal drafter of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, and sits on the Steering Committee of the Scientific Information Working Group of the U.N. World Summit on the Information Society, the Publishing Working Group of Science Commons, and several other groups devoted to open access, scholarly communication, and the information commons. He has been active in promoting open access for many years through his research, speaking, and writing.
Mark Surman
Mark Surman is currently the executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, with a focus on inventing new ways to promote openness and opportunity on the Internet. On the side, Mark convenes conversations about ‘open everything’ in his home town of Toronto and around the world. Before joining Mozilla, Mark was an open philanthropy fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation, looking at new ways to apply open source thinking to social innovation. Mark blogs at commonspace.
Nat Torkington
Nat Torkington ran the first production web site in New Zealand back when you had to convince people to use “the World-Wide Web” instead of the more popular Gopher. This led to ten years in America before moving back to NZ in 2005. He cowrote the bestselling Perl Cookbook, was a trend-spotter for O’Reilly Media, and ran many conferences including OSCON and Where 2.0. He runs Kiwi Foo Camp and started Open New Zealand, an organisation that develops and hosts projects around transparency, participatory democracy, and making central and local government useful to citizens and businesses.
Jo Walsh
Jo has been involved with OKF since 2005, focusing on open geodata and software development. These days she is is managing geospatial web services at the EDINA National Data Centre based at the University of Edinburgh. Her software career has involved media art, the semantic web, neogeography, community wireless networks, and all sorts of metadata. She was a founding director of the Open Source Geo-Spatial Foundation and co-author of O’Reilly’s Mapping Hacks. More information can be found on her home page.
