We’re delighted to welcome Nat Torkington to the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Advisory Board!
You may have seen his two recent pieces on O’ Reilly Radar on the future of open data: Truly Open Data and Rethinking Open Data (also co-posted on the OKF blog).
His thoughts on the topic have a lot in common with our approach here at the Foundation – especially regarding applying open source software development methodologies to the collaborative development of data, the importance of community, compelling exemplars, and so on. His project management and event organising experience in the world of open source software will be invaluable for us at the OKF.
A brief bio:
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.
A list of current Advisory Board Members is available at:
Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.
