Our Team

Contents

Leadership Team
Network Unit
Knowledge Unit
Long Term Projects Unit
Services Unit
Operations Unit

Leadership Team

Rufus Pollock — Co-Director

Rufus Pollock

Rufus is a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, an Associate of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge and a Director of the Open Knowledge Foundation which he co-founded in 2004. He has worked extensively as a scholar and developer on the social, legal and technological issues related to the creation and sharing of knowledge. More information can be found on his home page.

Laura James — Co-Director

Laura is a dynamic and adaptable leader who makes things happen, builds things and solves problems. She has worked extensively in technology, innovation and leadership roles in R&D, startups and other organisations, and enjoys making a positive impact on the world through her work. She has worked at AT&T Labs, was VP Engineering and the first employee at AlertMe.com, a connected home startup, and was Head of Knowledge at True Knowledge, a startup creating an artificial intelligence search platform. Laura holds Masters and PhD degrees in Engineering from the University of Cambridge, received the Royal Academy of Engineering Leadership Award and a NESTA Crucible Fellowship, and is a Chartered Engineer. Laura is also Co-founder and Director of Makespace. More information can be found on her home page.

Jonathan Gray — Director of Policy and Ideas

Jonathan Gray

Jonathan coordinates the Foundation’s policy, advocacy and outreach activities to expand the open knowledge commons and helps to catalyse new projects and collaborations that use this commons to improve the world. He has helped to start numerous initiatives at the Foundation, including the Data Journalism Handbook, Europe’s Energy, the Open Data Challenge, the #opendata film, OpenGLAM, OpenSpending, the Panton Fellowships and The Public Domain Review. He studied Philosophy at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and is currently completing his PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London. You can follow him on Twitter at @jwyg or visit his website at jonathangray.org.

Network Unit

Naomi Lillie — Head of Network Unit

Naomi Lillie

Naomi joined in 2011 as Community Coordinator and Foundation Administrator, and has been supporting Network since 2012.

Naomi lives in Edinburgh and still considers herself an English Literature graduate, although these days she reads for fun. She has a professional background in project management and coordination, and has worked in academia where the closed nature of information was a source of much frustration – she is very pleased to be contributing to the cause for open knowledge. She also volunteers with a debt-counselling charity and sings in a choir.

Adam Green — Editor, The Public Domain Review

Adam is the Editor-in-Chief of The Public Domain Review

Adam currently lives in Berlin and studied Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and Religion/Philosophy at SOAS. In January 2011, he and Jonathan Gray co-founded The Public Domain Review, on online journal dedicated to highlighting interesting and curious public domain works. When not working on the Review he spends his time dabbling in various literary projects and failing to learn German.

Beatrice Martini — Events Coordinator

Beatrice is the Foundation’s Events Coordinator, curating the global events strategy and currently organizing OKFestival 2013.

She has a Master degree in Music Studies, sharpened her team leadership skills at digital media academy Hyper Island, Stockholm and has years of experience as project manager in the Internet startup sector. Currently based in Berlin, she’s also a core member of OpenTechSchool, a community initiative offering free programming workshops and meetups. You can follow her on Twitter at @beatricemartini and visit her website at beatricemartini.it.

Theodora Middleton — Blog Editor

Theodora lives in London and works a few days a week on the OKFN’s blog, newsletter, annual reports and conferences like Open Government Data Camp. She is interested in how to build links between people from different backgrounds and in how to find a common language for all those whose lives are touched by open knowledge – whether they’re academics, citizens, coders or journalists. Her background is in campaigning and she is particularly excited by the open government data movement.

Ross Mounce — Community Coordinator, Open Science

RossMounce

Ross is an OKFN Panton Fellow for 2012/13, encouraging scientists to put their data in the public domain.

He is based in Bath, but can regularly be found in London and elsewhere. His mission is to promote an Open Data ethos in the science community, and to re-extract a significant volume of data from the scientific literature and release this openly so it is free again for re-use. Ross had an undergraduate education in Biology at Imperial College London, before going on to a Master’s at the Natural History Museum specialising in systematics. He is now in his third year of his PhD research at the University of Bath and is looking forward to sharing this with the world when he submits his thesis and publishes some more papers.

Zara Rahman – International Community Manager

Zara is the International Community Manager. She is currently based in Berlin, but grew up in the UK and is of Bangladeshi descent. She previously worked for OpenOil, where she worked on opening up data in the extractive industries, focusing especially on contract transparency and improving accessibility of public domain information.

She holds a BA in Modern Languages and Cultures (French, Spanish and Arabic), and is looking forward to working with people from a wide range of cultural backgrounds as part of her position at the Open Knowledge Foundation. She enjoys writing, and has contributed to openDemocracy, and Think Africa Press among other outlets.

Christian Villum — Community Manager, Local Groups & Open Government Data

Christian divides his time between community management for Local Groups and for Open Government Data. He lives in Copenhagen, Denmark, and has a background in media and culture entrepreneurship, co-working facilitation, community creation, hacktivism – and is a dedicated open-everything advocate. He holds an MA in Culture, Communication & Globalization from Aalborg University and has previously lived, worked and studied in Berlin, New York and Chicago. On the side he runs a few smaller projects including Uhrlaut Records, a small boutique record label for challenging electronic music from Scandinavia.

Knowledge Unit

Lucy Chambers — Head of Knowledge Unit

Lucy has been working with the OKFN on the OpenSpending project as a researcher and community coordinator. She has been particularly focussed on two topic areas: how technology can be used to promote transparency and accountability around government finances and how civil society organisations use (or could make use of) technology to help in finding, using and presenting government information.

Besides OpenSpending, Lucy has been working to train journalists across the world on how to treat and work with data as a source, through in-person training and helping to produce the Data Journalism Handbook. She is looking forward to channeling this hands-on experience into courses that anyone can benefit from with School of Data.

Michael Bauer — Data Wrangler, School of Data

Michael lives in Vienna and works as a Data Wrangler with the OKF mostly around the School of Data. After a detour in biomedical research, where he learned to love datawrangling, he spent some time doing advocacy for his passion: freedom in the digital age. He joined the Open Knowledge Foundation to satisfy his curiosity. He will gladly jump on any topic that you point him to.

Tryggvi Björgvinsson — Tech Lead, OpenSpending

Tryggvi is a software engineer and a digital freedoms activist/promoter based in Iceland. He holds a Civilingenjörsexamen (M.Sc. equivalent) in computer engineering from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and a Ph.D. in software engineering from the University of Iceland. Tryggvi has a passion for digital freedoms in all of its forms and his expertise lies in free and open source software. He co-founded the Icelandic Digital Freedoms Society (FSFÍ) and has worked for and consulted the Icelandic government on various things related to our freedom in cyberspace.

Lisa Evans — Data Wrangler, OpenSpending

Lisa is a software engineer and journalist. After helping to create Where Does My Money Go, she worked with the Guardian’s datablog. She is now back with us and works on OpenSpending and Spending Stories.

You can follow her on Twitter at @objectgroup.

Tony Hirst — Data Storyteller, School of Data

Tony Hirst works part time for the School of Data in shaping the materials, masterminding the blog and running workshops. He’ll also be out and about on site visits to learn more about how organisations use data “in the wild” to help build on and shape the courses.

When he’s not with us, he’s a Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Systems at The Open University, Visiting Senior Fellow in Networked Teaching and Learning at the University of Lincoln, and regular blogger at OUseful.info.

With a background in electronics and artificial intelligence, he has authored on OU courses ranging from robotics to information skills, and most recently a course on computer game design and appreciation. He is passionate about open and lifelong education, and is actively involved in developing course models to support informal as well as formal education.

Anders Pedersen — Community Coordinator, OpenSpending

Anders Pedersen is Community coordinator at OpenSpending and currently based in The Hague. He holds an MA in Political Science from University of Copenhagen (2010). As an independent journalist he has crunched numbers on issues like health care, lobbying, taxation and the financial crisis in EU. He has worked as analyst and media professional with both the International Criminal Court and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. As a civil servant he worked on community outreach among Somalis in Copenhagen. Through volunteer roles he has conducted trainings across East Africa and since 2010 assisted an initiative to establish a community FM radio station in Puntland, Somalia. You can follow him on Twitter at @anpe.

Stefan Wehrmeyer — Developer

Stefan is a software engineer and creator of civic applications. He has created Mapnificent, a public transport utility, and Frag Den Staat, Germany’s Freedom of Information portal.

Long Term Projects Unit

Sander van der Waal, Head of Long Term Projects Unit

Sander van der Waal is Head of Long Term Projects at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Overseeing many of the grant funded projects the OKFN is involved with, Sander ensures any funded project will benefit maximally from cross-fertilization with other related initiatives across the wider OKFN community, both nationally and internationally. Sander has a strong background in the open source world, having advised academic projects on open source software development at OSS Watch, based at the University of Oxford. He is a committer and contributor to the Apache Software Foundation and co-organised several big and smaller open source events.

Velichka Dimitrova — Project Coordinator, Open Economics

Velichka is the Coordinator of the Open Economics Working Group.

Velichka lives in London and is the point-of-contact for people who want to get involved in the Open Economics project. She holds a degree as a international project manager in NGOs and civil society movements from the Globalverkstan programme in Gothenburg, Sweden. Velichka studied Economics at the Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin and MPhil Environmental Policy at the University of Cambridge, doing research on environmental and natural resource economics. She believes there is a great potential for a more transparent and inclusive academic environment.

Sam Leon — Project Lead, DM2E

Sam is the Community Coordinator for the Open GLAM and Open Humanities working groups, and for the TEXTUS and DM2E projects.

Sam Leon lives in London and has a BA in Philosophy and an MA in the History of Ideas. He is interested in debates around open culture and the emerging discipline of the Digital Humanities. He works specifically with the Open Humanities and Open GLAM working groups. He is co-editor of the OKFN blog and coordinates an OKFN project called TEXTUS, an open source platform for working with collections of texts and associated metadata.

Joris Pekel — Community Coordinator, OpenGLAM

Joris is the Community Coordinator for OpenGLAM.

Joris lives in Amsterdam and works specifically with digital heritage related projects like OpenGLAM. He graduated from the University of Amsterdam in 2011 with a degree in New Media where he specialised in digital heritage and identity building. He is interested in opening up collections belonging to different cultural institutions and linking them together to facilitate new and innovative ways of looking at our shared history. Besides his work with digital heritage, he is also a member of the Network Unit where he coordinates the different Working Groups and the Task Force.

Services Unit

Gavin Chait — Head of Services Unit

Gavin lives in Oxford and leads the development and implementation of commercial operations for OKFN. While a student at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, he started a non-profit organisation supporting small business development and entrepreneurs which he led for 10 years. He then spent four years in corporate consulting before managing business analytics and knowledge management at GE Healthcare. In his spare time he writes for a number of business newspapers and technical journals.

Nigel Babu — Data Wrangler and Developer

Nigel Babu

Nigel is a web developer working out of Bangalore, India.

He loves open source as it enables him to contribute to an ever-growing intellectual pool of knowledge. When he isn’t writing code for OKFN, he likes to cook, play with his Rasbperry Pi, or contribute to Mozilla. In the past, he’s worn various hats, including a sysadmin one. Nobody is sure if he actually ever sleeps.

Vitor Baptista — Developer

Vitor is a developer at the Open Knowledge Foundation. You can find out more about him at vitorbaptista.com

Irina Bolychevsky — Project Manager and Product Owner, CKAN

Ira

Ira is based in London, and is the CKAN project manager and product owner. Ira oversees most things CKAN-related – evangelism, strategy, road map, design, clients, communications – and is always happy to point people in the right direction. Irina is a web-tech geek who enjoys finding better solutions to problems. In the rare moments when she isn’t busy with CKAN, Irina likes tea and dancing.

Toby Dacre — Developer, CKAN

Toby is a north London based potter and occasional Python developer. A believer in Free Software and clean code. Long time campaigner on the dangers of circular imports in Python. He has dreams of helping streamline the CKAN codebase.

Dr Marcus Dapp — Principal Consultant

Dr Marcus Dapp

Marcus lives in Munich and has spent most of his professional life working on “digital openness” topics. For nearly three years he was an IT strategist for the City of Munich where he designed and led Germany’s first Open Government/Open Data project called MOGDy (EPSA). As a researcher, he worked intensively on software patents and open source software (PhD). Since then, he has been running his own lecture on “digital sustainability” at ETH Zurich (and, starting in 2012, at TUM Munich!). Find more on his slightly neglected blog at.

John Glover — Developer, CKAN

John Glover lives in Dublin and is a CKAN core developer working 3-4 days per week. He is also in the process of completing the latter stages of his doctoral research in the area of audio signal processing, working with Dr. Victor Lazzarini at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He previously studied Computer Science at University College Cork and Music & Media Technologies at Trinity College Dublin. He believes strongly in the sharing of knowledge and is a keen advocate for open source software, open data and open government.

Sean Hammond — Developer, CKAN

Sean lives in Berlin and focuses on Python web development at CKAN. He has previously worked as the lead developer for CLICK-EAST, a research study that is developing an iPad game to help children with autism learn social and communication skills, and as a Java programming lecture at The University of Edinburgh. For his PhD, Sean developed a story authoring app for children. He enjoys crafting good code and working with open technologies. More info can be found on http://seanh.sdfeu.org/“>Sean’s website.

John Martin — Front End Developer, CKAN

John Martin

John is based in London and is a Front End Developer working on CKAN. He’s previously worked as a designer at a web startup, a developer for a radio station and has worked on a few pet projects as well. He is passionate about making web and mobile apps that are simple, elegant and playful. In his spare time he likes to ride his bike up and down hills.

Adrià Mercader — Developer, CKAN

Adrià lives in Newcastle upon Tyne and is a software developer focused on the Web and Open technologies in general, and the geospatial field in particular. Before joining the CKAN team he built and managed several geo-related projects for different organizations, ranging from online map viewers to spatially enabled services and APIs.

Dominik Moritz — Developer

Dominik is a computer science student from Potsdam, Germany and part-time CKAN developer. He is a strong supporter of open source software, open data, open government and most importantly open knowledge. Dominik started working for the OKFN in the summer of 2012 as an intern during which time he was based in London.

David Raznick – Technical Lead, CKAN

David lives in London and is a data analyst turned web developer with a mathsy background. His main interests are in databases and the general organization of information/data, with the thinking that if everything could be organized better and people made more accountable, the world would be a better place. He formally used to work for a human rights charity in this role and wants a future sorting out more data.

Sam Smith — Designer

With a background in design agencies, where he spent the first seven years of his career, Sam is a graphic designer experienced in design for both on and offline media. Sam has good all round design knowledge but specialises in digital design, with a hands on approach to HTML and CSS.

You can see what Sam has been working on recently on his website.

Joe Tsoi – Developer

Mark Wainwright — Community Coordinator, CKAN

Mark is a gay generation-X Cambridge graduate, who has worked in ESL, housing and stonecutting, inter alia. He has spent a year living and working in Maldives, is addicted to crosswords, and occasionally plays poker or bridge or go. He lives in Cambridge and will turn his hand to pretty much anything.

Operations Unit

Michelle Heydon — Head of Operations Unit

Michelle is an administrative operations all rounder. Having spent the first part of her career as a Systems Administrator, she was part of a small group from the Xerox Reseach Centre Europe who spun out a new software start-up. Although that one didn’t take off, she went on to be at the birth of a further 3 IT start-ups, where she did “everything but the software” during the first few years of rapid growth. As well as being Head of Operations at the Open Knowledge Foundation, she is also a director of Digital Economy Consultants and administers the Press Fellowship Programme at Wolfson College, Cambridge.

Bobby Donovan — WordPress Specialist

Bobby is the Open Knowledge Foundation’s WordPress Specialist, helping to look after the fleet of blogs and other websites that it runs.

Meg Foulkes– Foundation Administrator

Meg studied English at Cambridge. Since then, she has worked as a librarian, private tutor and lawyer in Asylum and Immigration. She also works for the Freedom Movement for Syria and is a published poet. Meg is very happy to now be working for the OKFN.

Joel Rebello — Systems Administrator

Joel is the Open Knowledge Foundation’s main system administrator.