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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 basic goal is to take forward the ‘Open Definition’ work for the general benefit of the open knowledge community.

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.

People

  • Jordan Hatcher. 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.
  • Mike Linksvayer. Mike Linksvayer is Vice President of Creative Commons, where he manages core programs and operations. He joined Creative Commons as CTO in 2003. In 2000 he co-founded an early open content/open data company, Bitzi, which provides a file metadata service integrated with several P2P clients. Mike’s professional background is in web, enterprise and multimedia software development and he holds a degree in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
  • Paul Miller. 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. 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.
  • Rufus Pollock. 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.
  • Rob Styles. Rob Styles is a technologist working with large-scale internet systems at Talis.
  • 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.
  • Luis Villa. Luis Villa is a second year student at Columbia Law School, where is focusing on technology and intellectual property law, with a particular interest in helping innovators, creators and startups to do their thing. Before going to law school, he was geek in residence at the Berkman Center For Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, and an employee of Ximian, Inc., leading engineering work on the Linux Desktop. He is also a member of the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors and of the Open Source Initiative’s Legal Advisory Board. More details can be found on his website and blog.
  • Jo Walsh. 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. More information can be found on her home page.
  • John Wilbanks. John Wilbanks runs the Science Commons project at Creative Commons. He has a background in law, technology, science, and policy. He has worked at Harvard Law School, the World Wide Web Consortium, and the U.S. Congress, and he served as CEO of a bioinformatics company from its founding to acquisition. He has a degree in philosophy from Tulane University in the U.S. and studied modern letters at the Sorbonne. John serves several non-profit organizations as an advisor or Board member.