Advisory Council

About

The Advisory Council was created in the Autumn of 2007 as the body formally responsible for maintaining and developing the Definitions and associated material found on this site. Its mission is to take forward the ‘Open Definition’ work for the general benefit of the open knowledge community. In addition, it has specific responsibility for deciding on license conformance with the Definition.

It should be emphasized that it is the hope, and intention, that overall development continue in the same community based and collaborative manner used until now with the Council’s role being to provide oversight, guidance and input into this process, not to replace it.

See participate for information on joining the Council and contributing to Open Definition work in other ways.

People

Chair: Mike Linksvayer
Secretary: Daniel Dietrich

  • Baden Appleyard is National Programme Director of AusGOAL, the Australian Government’s Open Access and Licensing Framework, which provides support and guidance to all levels of Australian government, government agencies and the research sector to facilitate open access to publicly funded information. Baden is a Barrister of the Supreme Court of Queensland and Barrister of the High Court of Australia, and holds degrees in law and commerce, in addition to tertiary qualifications in management. Baden was a Principal Research Fellow with the Faculty of Law at the Queensland University of Technology from 2007–2008. During this time he managed Project 3.05, for the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information. Project 3.05 provided assistance to develop the Queensland Government Information Licensing Framework (GILF), the predecessor of AusGOAL. Baden launched GILF in 2008 and lead the creation of AusGOAL for the Australian Governments’. He currently has responsibility for AusGOAL’s implementation and day to day management, and engages on a wide variety of related copyright, contractual and administrative law issues (e.g. FOI and Privacy).
  • Rachel Bruce is JISC’s innovation director for digital infrastructure. She oversees JISC’s innovation and research programmes which relate to digital preservation, management of research data, resource discovery infrastructure, open access of scholarly communication, geospatial infrastructure and resources as well as open educational resources. This also includes activities which take place in partnership with JISC’s services UKOLN, JISC Observatory, Jorum and the Digital Curation.
  • Jordan Hatcher is a lawyer and consultant working on copyright and content issues. You can learn more about what he does (and has done) on his website.
  • Tariq Khokhar is the World Bank’s Open Data Evangelist. His interests lie where technology, transparency, poverty and data meet. He guides the World Bank’s Open Data Initiative and is responsible for internal and external strategy, outreach and communications, and supporting client countries with their own open data programs. Prior to joining the Bank, Tariq led innovation and community engagement work at Aidinfo and the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). He was formerly a director of Bond UK and the Chief Development Officer of Aptivate. He holds degrees from the University of Cambridge, has close relationships in the global Open Data and Open Government communities and currently lives in Washington DC.
  • Herb Lainchbury is a citizen, software developer, entrepreneur, partner at mddatabank.com, founder at dynamic-solutions.com, OpenDataBC.ca, and waterly.ca and blogs at herblainchbury.com.
  • Tom Lee is the Director of Sunlight Labs, where he oversees the Sunlight Foundation’s software and data work, supervising engineering activities and contributing to the organization’s policy advocacy on related issues. Prior to assuming leadership of the labs, he managed Sunlight’s Subsidyscope project, a data-driven effort to explore the level of federal involvement in various sectors of the economy.
  • Mike Linksvayer writes about open matters on his blog.
  • Federico Morando is an economist, with interdisciplinary research interests focused on the intersection between law, economics and technology. His research activity at the Nexa Center mainly concerns new models of production and sharing of digital contents. He also taught intellectual property and competition law at Bocconi University in Milan and he is an associate editor of the IJCLP. He has an undergraduate degree in Economics from Bocconi Univ. and a master’s degree in Economic theory and econometrics from the Univ. of Toulouse. He holds a Ph.D. in Institutions, Economics and Law from the Univ. of Turin and Ghent with a dissertation about software interoperability. He joined the working group of the Nexa Center at the beginning of its first year of formal activity. From Dec. 2012, he leads the Creative Commons Italy project and he is a member of the Open Team of Regione Piemonte that launched and steers the development of the first Italian open government data portal. From Dec. 2008, in his position as the first Managing Director of the Center, he works closely with the Directors to define staff and project goals and to coordinate the Center’s fellows.
  • Paul Miller joined Talis in September 2005 from the Common Information Environment (CIE), where as Director he was instrumental in scoping policy and attracting new members such as the BBC, National Library of Scotland and English Heritage to this group of UK public sector organisations. Previously, Paul was at UKOLN where he was active in a range of cross-domain standardisation and advocacy activities, and before that he was Collections Manager at the Archaeology Data Service. At Talis, Paul is exploring new models of collaboration and identifying further areas in which our technology or knowledge would be of value. Paul has a Doctorate in Archaeology from the University of York.
  • Peter 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.
  • Rufus Pollock was one of the founders of the Open Knowledge Foundation and has continued as a Director ever since. He has worked extensively both at a practical and academic level on open knowledge issues.
  • Peter Suber is the Director of the Harvard Open Access Project, Faculty Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Senior Researcher at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, and a non-practicing lawyer. For more details, see his home page.
  • 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.
  • Luis Villa is Deputy General Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation. Previously he was an associate in the Palo Alto office of the Greenberg Traurig law firm, where his practice focused on counseling companies on intellectual property, technology licensing and related matters, with a particular focus on open source licensing. His clients were both for-profits and non-profits, including Mozilla, the Wikimedia Foundation, Amazon, and Facebook. He also advised Google in the Oracle v. Google trial, and led the first revision of the Mozilla Public License in a decade. Luis is a director of the Open Source Initiative, and serves as an invited expert on the World Wide Web Consortium’s Patents and Standards Interest Group. Before law school, Luis worked in software, including several years working on the GNOME Linux desktop at a small startup.
  • Jo Walsh has been hacking for more than ten years and working with geodata for for more than five. As well as her involvement with the OKF she is also on the board of the Open Source Geo-Spatial Foundation and is one of the authors of O’Reilly’s Mapping Hacks. As one of those people who still think that the semantic web will save the world she gets very excited about metadata standards and data sharing..

Emeriti

Thanks to all who have previously served on the Advisory Council.