Vanessa Barnett is a lawyer who helps clients who are using technology and data to innovate or disrupt established ways of doing things, with particular expertise in Internet/platform based business models. She likes working with people who are changing the status quo. She has supported her clients from household-name global brands to nimble start-ups do this for over 15 years, first as a partner at two traditional City firms and now at disruptor law firm Keystone Law. She regularly advises boards on legal matters and strategy in her role as a lawyer. Vanessa has a specific interest in the cross over between technology, intellectual property and data, and right now is spending most of her working time advising on data related projects. She holds a degree in Law from Exeter University, is the founding author of the Internet section of Practical Commercial Precedents and sits on its editorial board. She is also on the editorial board of Digital Business Lawyer.

Helen Turvey has spent the past two decades working to make philanthropy better. She is honoured to have spent over half of that time working with the Shuttleworth Foundation, an organisation brave and nimble enough to be truly experimental in their approach to changing the world and its own DNA along with it. Having spent time at the beginning of her career travelling, learning and keynoting on most continents, Helen now spends her time working with the Fellows and Alumni of the Foundation, building, supporting, strengthening and enabling leaders who iterate towards a more open and equitable world. She is also on the board of several organisations that drive open ideals.

Irina is the Director of Standards and Interoperability at NHSX and is passionate about products and using technology to make things better. She spent many years working on open data at Open Knowledge (as one of the directors and CKAN product owner), at web startups, and most recently as a product lead or data consultant for W3C, Open Data Institute and the UK, Dubai and UAE governments. She co-founded redecentralize.org — a project to promote and bring together people working on and interested in decentralised digital technologies.

Tim Hubbard is Professor of Bioinformatics and Head of Department of Medical and Molecular Genetics at King’s College London. He is also Head of Genome Analysis at Genomics England, a company established by the UK government to execute the 100,000 Genome Project, which aims to mainstream the use of whole genome sequence analysis for treatment in the UK National Health Service (NHS). From 1997-2013 he worked at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute where he was one of the organisers of the sequencing of the human genome. In 1999 he co-founded the Ensembl project to analyse, organise and provide access to the human genome and from 2007 led the GENCODE project to annotate the structure of all human genes. He is an advocate of the benefits of open access and open data release for science and society as a whole and has served on multiple national information access advisory boards including Europe PMC (PubMedCentral), the repository for open access publications. He received his BA from Cambridge University (UK), and PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London (UK).

Johnny West is director of OpenOil, a Berlin-based consultancy which uses open data and methodologies to build investment-grade financial and commercial analysis for governments and societies of their natural resource assets. He sits on the Advisory Board of FAST, the only open source financial modelling standard, and is an alumnus of the Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowship. Johnny started professional life as a journalist for Reuters in the Middle East (and more recently wrote a book about the Arab Spring), then went into online journalism in the mid-1990s, and media development around the world, heading Internews Europe, an international NGO, where he commissioned a substantial extension of ToR anonymity software into repressive countries. OpenOil’s work is guided by the belief that any effective response to climate change and other planetary boundaries needs a comprehensive open database of natural resources, and the analysis on top of it to feed public policy making. Johnny speaks French, Arabic, German, Spanish and Persian and is passionate about the potential of open knowledge system in the non-Anglophone space.