Open Knowledge Foundation 
Guidance for our Network
The OKFN is guided by a Board of Directors who are responsible for the financial and legal integrity of the Foundation, and our Advisory Board who give strategic advice and guidance to the foundation. You can find more details about our organizational structure on our wiki here.
To learn about the OKFN’s core staff, see the Team page. For more information on people involved in individual projects, please see our wiki. The Open Knowledge Foundation is a community-based organisation with much of its work done by volunteers and other contributors. Members of the community who have chosen to list themselves can be found in the members section of the site.
Board of Directors
James Casbon
James Casbon has been working with open knowledge throughout his professional career. He has been responsible for analysing and managing large scale data sets in genomics, aerospace and finance. He is currently working on a project to enable parallel resequencing of the human genome at Population Genetics Technologies. He contributes to the Foundation’s work on open data in science and helps to coordinate the systems support for OKFN services.
Jordan Hatcher
Jordan Hatcher is a graduate of the University of Texas School of Law, and holds an advanced degree in IP and technology law from the University of Edinburgh School of Law. Jordan has worked on a number of projects related to open content and copyright, including a study by the CIE about UK public sector use of Creative Commons and similar licences in 2005, an Eduserv Foundation funded study on use of open content by the cultural heritage sector in 2007, and on the Creative Commons Scotland localisation in 2005 and in 2007. More information can be found on his home page.
Becky Hogge
Becky Hogge is a writer and technologist. She was formerly the technology director of award-winning current affairs website openDemocracy.net, and Executive Director of the Open Rights Group, a grassroots digital civil liberties organisation.
Martin Keegan
Martin Keegan has been generally working in the computing industry since leaving school in 1994. He was involved in computing matters whilst at University. Back when he had copious spare time he campaigned on political issues connected to computing and the digital environment and was one of the founders of UK Campaign for Digital Rights.
Ben Laurie
Ben Laurie is a software engineer, protocol designer and cryptographer. He is a founding director of The Apache Software Foundation, a core team member of OpenSSL, a member of the Shmoo Group, a director of the Open Rights Group, Director of Security at The Bunker Secure Hosting, Trustee and Founder-member of FreeBMD and a committer at FreeBSD. He blogs at
Paula Le Dieu
Paula Le Dieu is a new media executive and advisor. Paula has worked with the BBC, Guardian, Fairfax, Ofcom and Creative Commons as well as online content and activism communities such as iCommons and the international documentary community. Her experience spans advising on the future of public service media, open culture theory and practice, the role of archives in the digital age, leading international communities of volunteers, building e-commerce solutions and sitting on the executive board of the leading European Documentary Festival – Sheffield Doc/Fest…amongst other things. More information can be found at ledieu.org.
Dr Rufus Pollock
Dr. Rufus Pollock 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.
Advisory Board
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 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.
Emeritus
Dr Ian Brown
Dr Brown is a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at Oxford University. His research is focused on public policy issues around information and the Internet, particularly privacy and copyright. He also works in the more technical fields of communications security and healthcare informatics. Since 1998 Dr Brown has variously been a trustee of Privacy International, the Open Rights Group and the Foundation for Information Policy Research and an adviser to Greenpeace, the Refugee Children’s Consortium, Amnesty International and Creative Commons UK. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the International University of Japan and the British Computer Society, a senior member of the ACM, and has consulted for the US Department of Homeland Security, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, Allianz, !McAfee, BT, the BBC, the European Commission, the Cabinet Office, Ofcom, the National Audit Office and the Information Commissioner’s Office. He has written for the Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and Guardian. In 2004 he was voted as one of the 100 most influential people in the development of the Internet in the UK over the previous decade.
