Advisory Council biographies

Owen Blacker

Owen Blacker writes software for a dot-com by day and by night works for a handful of Internet-related groups pressing for social and political change. As well as working with the Open Rights Group, he is a director of mySociety Ltd and a trustee of UK Citizens’ Online Democracy, the charity that runs it. He also helped found FaxYourMP.com and NO2ID, used to co-ordinate Stand.org.uk and has worked with MakeMyVoteCount. He can usually be found wasting what he laughably calls “free time” playing with Flickr and contributing to the Wikipedia projects, which might explain why he still hasn’t got round to making himself a website.

Nick Bohm

Nick (Nicholas) Bohm is a retired solicitor, a member of the Law Society’s Electronic Law Committee and a guest lecturer at the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory. In addition, Nick is the General Counsel for the Foundation for Information Policy Research.

Ian Brown

Ian Brown works on a range of computer science and public policy issues as a senior research fellow at University College London. He has campaigned for stronger privacy laws and more balanced intellectual property regimes for over a decade as a trustee and adviser of NGOs such as European Digital Rights, Privacy International, No2ID and the Foundation for Information Policy Research. He has also consulted for a range of organisations including the BBC, Greenpeace, Credit Suisse, JP Morgan and the US Department of Homeland Security.

John Buckman

John Buckman is the founder of Magnatune, the largest online store/recording company/media website that uses Creative Commons licenses. Magnatune selects its own artists, sells its catalog of music through online downloads and print-on-demand CDs and licenses music for commercial and non-commercial use. Frustrated by the music industry’s unfair treatment of artists, Buckman decided to create Magnatune as an artist-friendly record label that shares profits equally with musicians and allows them to retain the rights to their work. Magnatune has successfully used Creative Commons and open source principles to establish a new kind of business model for the music industry, and is believed to be the creator of the term “open music”. His most recent project is BookMooch, a non-profit online used book exchange service which was launched in August 2006. In November 2006, Buckman was elected to the Board of Directors of the Creative Commons as well as the Metabrainz Foundation.

Richard Clayton

Richard Clayton has a background in software development, joint-owing the successful 1980s UK software house “Locomotive Software”, which developed the system software for Amstrad’s CPC Home Computers and the word processing software “LocoScript” for Amstrad’s hugely successful PCW machines. In the 1990s he led the team that developed Turnpike, one of the first Windows based Internet access packages. In 1995 Locomotive was sold to Demon Internet, then the largest UK ISP, and Richard worked for Demon on software development and, increasingly, regulatory issues. In 2000 he became a researcher at the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and his PhD thesis on “Anonymity and Traceability in Cyberspace” was completed in 2005. Although he continues to consult for Demon and the ISP industry, he remains in academia at Cambridge with numerous publications on censorship, spam, and other “abuse-of-the-Internet” issues.

Tom Coates

Tom Coates currently works for Yahoo, promoting social media and social software and scheming up innovative new applications and products. Before that, he ran a small R&D team at BBC Radio & Music Interactive, working to make BBC media navigable, addressable and explorable, finding new models for engagement and annotation. Before that, he worked with UpMyStreet.com developing the geo-coded online community ‘UpMyStreet Conversations’. Tom has also worked as Production Editor of TimeOut.com, developed online communities with the crew behind b3ta while working at emap, contributed film reviews to the BBC’s films site and written for The Guardian.

Alan Cox

Alan Cox has been central to the development of the Linux kernel since its early days. He used to maintain the 2.2 branch of the Linux kernel and was the “second in command” after Linus Torvalds himself, before reducing his involvement to study for an MBA. Alan is a security and IP policy advisor for FIPR.

Grahame Davies

Grahame Davies co-founded Demon Internet, the pioneering low-cost Internet access service, in 1992. He was Group Managing Director for Easynet Group Plc for 6 years and has been a Director and Chairman of the London Internet Exchange (LINX) since 1999. He is an active investor in a number of IT based service companies including MediaServiceProvider Ltd with a special interest in his digital sheet music website Great Scores.

Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow is an activist, writer, blogger, public speaker, and a technology person. He evangelises on behalf of the EFF, works on policy research, participates in standards bodies, and works to enlist the support of other organizations in EFF’s issues. In a previous life, he was a software entrepreneur, co-founding a company called OpenCola. He is an award-winning science fiction writer, as well as co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing and frequent contributor to Wired Magazine and the O’Reilly Network.

Lilian Edwards

Edwards was Co-Director of the AHRC Centre for IP and Technology Law at Edinburgh from 2002 until 2006, when she was installed as Chair of Internet Law at the University of Southampton. She was awarded the Barbara Wellbury Memorial Prize in 2004 for her article “Reconstructing Consumer Privacy Protection Online: A Most Proposal“. Edwards sits on the legal advisory board of Creative Commons UK and is a member of EURIM, the European Information Society Group. She has presented extensively to international audiences and has been invited as a visiting research fellow to UC Berkeley School of Law, and Stanford Law School. With Waelde, she presented to WIPO on “Online Intermediaries and Copyright Development”. Edwards continues her collaboration with the AHRC Centreunder Phase 2 funding as an Associate. With Laurie, she is the joint founding editor of SCRIPT-ed, the Centre’s online journal of law and technology. A special edition of SCRIPT-ed was published in December 2006 which followed a Privacy and Technology Workshop, convened by Edwards. The edition has since been commented on as one of the most comprehensive collections of privacy and technology related articles available within law. She presented at the Edinburgh International Science Festival in 2005, in a panel discussion featuring Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School, Bill Thomson, technology journalist, and Guadamuz. Her research interest in IT law include privacy, security, ODR, online intermediaries, e-commerce and cybercrime.

Wendy Grossman

Wendy M. Grossman is a freelance writer and former full-time musician who writes for the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, ZDNet, The Inquirer, The Register, and Scientific American (she has also written for New Scientist, Wired, and many other publications). She is author of four books including net.wars (1998, NYU Press) and writes a weekly column by the same name that appears on Fridays at NewsWireless.net. Her Web site pelicancrossing.net includes an extensive archive of her articles and MP3s.

Ben Hammersley

Ben Hammersley is an English emigré, living in Florence, Italy, with his wife, three greyhounds, and the Renaissance. Galileo’s little finger is in a jar only 400 yards from his desk. For a day job, he writes for the British national press, appearing in The Times, The Guardian and The Observer, but in his free time, he blogs excessively. As the author of Content Syndication with RSS, he survived the Great Fork Summer, and as a journalist he has been accosted by the secret police of two countries. To this day, he doesn’t know which was worse.

Paula Le Dieu

Paula Le Dieu is the Managing Director and Director of Open Media at Magic Lantern Productions (MLP). Prior to joining Magic Lantern, Paula was the founding Director of iCommons, the organisation responsible for the international Creative Commons community. This role built on her background as the Project Director of the BBC’s Creative Archive initiative.

Stef Magdalinski

Stef Magdalinski has been an online civic activist for over 10 years; he founded Writetothem.com, and the groundbreaking online geocoded information source and community, UpMyStreet. His most recent project, TheyWorkForYou, is an activist-created and run re-implementation of Hansard, the UK’s parliamentary record. With no co-operation from the authorities, it adds comments, outbound links, trackbacks, functioning search, and finally Wikipedia and Technorati magic to the previously static document, as well as detailed statistics on the performance of UK Politicians. Stef now works at Moo, where they print stuff from the web. -

Kevin Marks

Kevin Marks is author of the weblog Epeus Epigone and a software engineer at Google. He became principal engineer for Technorati after doing work for both Apple and the BBC. He is an advocate of Microformats.

Desiree Miloshevic

Desiree Miloshevic is an International Affairs and Policy Advisor for Afilias, operating out of Europe, London. She represents Afilias and is a speaker at many national and international organisations’ meetings and fora, including ICANN, RIPE NCC, CENTR, APRICOT, IETF, WGIG, W3C, and ENUM UKGROUP. Desiree serves on the Board of Trustees of Internet Society (2004-2007) and this year she chaired the work of the ISOC Board Nominations Committee.

Keith Mitchell

Keith Mitchell co-founded the UK’s first commercial Internet provider, PIPEX. He served as the Executive Chairman of the London Internet Exchange and as a non-executive Director of Nominet UK. Keith was also a founder investor and Chief Technical Officer of XchangePoint, a pan-European commercial provider of Internet interconnect and peering services. Keith chairs the UK Network Operators’ Forum, and currently works for the nonprofit Internet Systems Consortium.

David Rowntree

David Rowntree is the drummer with the band ‘blur‘, an animator and a researcher in computer graphics. He’s been using linux since 0.9.2, and once wrote a pcmcia device driver, before the pcmcia code merged with the kernel. David got involved with Open Rights issues while fighting (a losing battle) to make the European Copyright Directive more focussed on rights creators than rights holders.

David Weinberger

David Weinberger is a ‘marketing guru’ (according to the Wall Street Journal, in light of The Cluetrain Manifesto), author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and contributor to The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, The Miami Herald, The Boston Globe, USA Today, The Guardian, and Wired. He was a philosophy professor for six years, a comedy writer for Woody Allen for seven years and is currently a Fellow at the prestigious Harvard Berkman Institute for Internet & Society.

Jonathan Zittrain

Jonathan Zittrain holds the Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University and is a principal of the Oxford Internet Institute. He is also the Jack N. & Lillian R. Berkman Visiting Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School and co-founder with Charles Nesson of its Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Papers are available.