Our Advisory Councillors are technology and campaigning experts. It is their responsibility to:
Richard Allan has worked on information technology policy issues for over 10 years. With an interest in very old and very new things, Richard studied and worked in archaeology before moving into IT. He built information systems for the National Health Service during the early 1990’s. From 1997 to 2005, he was Liberal Democrat MP for Sheffield Hallam. In Parliament, Richard specialised in IT policy taking a leading role on the Data Protection Act, Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and Communications Act. During this time, he was Chair of the House of Commons Information Committee and a member of the Public Accounts Committee. He left Parliament in 2005 and now works in the technology sector.
Owen Blacker runs a technical team at an ad agency 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 and used to co-ordinate Stand.org.uk. 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 (Nicholas) Bohm is a retired solicitor, a member of the Law Society's Technology and Law Reference Group and a guest lecturer at the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory. In addition, Nick is the General Counsel for the Foundation for Information Policy Research
Heather Brooke is a journalist and writer living in London. She is the author of 'Your Right to Know', a citizens' guide to using the Freedom of Information Act. In May 2008, she won a High Court case against the House of Commons for the full disclosure of MPs' second homes allowances. The ruling resulted in calls for full-scale reform of the Parliamentary expense system. Her book 'The Silent State: How Secrecy & Misinformation is Destroying Democracy' will be published in Spring 2010 by Heinemann. Heather was runner-up for the inaugural Paul Foot award for investigative journalism and her project 'Justice by postcode' for The Times was one of the first examples of computer-assisted reporting in the UK. She is a visiting fellow at City University's Department of Journalism and is a
consultant and presenter on several Dispatches documentaries for Channel 4. Prior to moving to the UK, Heather was a newspaper reporter covering politics and crime and has just finished writing her first crime novel.
Ian Brown works on a range of computer science and public policy issues as a senior research fellow at Oxford Internet Institute. 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 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.
Michelle Childs is the Head of European Affairs at Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), an organisation that searches for better outcomes, including new solutions, to the management of knowledge resources. Ms Childs works with NGOs throughout Europe on Access to Medicine and Access to Knowledge issues and regularly travels to Brussels and Geneva to lobby the European and UN. She is a member of the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue working group on IP, adviser to the Stop Aids Campaign drug pricing group and CEO of Essential Inventions. Prior to this post, Ms Childs was Head of Policy Research and Analysis at the Consumers' Association UK. She has also been a personal advisor to the Director General of the Office of Fair Trading UK, a consultat to the Hong Kong Telecoms Regulator and a policy adviser to the UK Telecoms Regulator. She has also worked as a lawyer (solicitor) in the Commercial Litigation Department of a London law firm handling a range of disputes. She holds a law degree LLB (Hons). Photo by TACD
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 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. Photo by Joi.
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. Photo by Anna Bialkowska.
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 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 is Professor of Internet Law at Sheffield University. Her principal research interests are in the law relating to the Internet, the Web and new technologies, with a European and comparative focus.She has co-edited two bestselling collections on Law and the Internet (Hart Publishing, 1997 and 2000 - 3rd edn due 2008) with Charlotte Waelde, and a third collection of essays The New Legal Framework for E-Commerce in Europe was published in 2005. Her work in on-line consumer privacy won the Barbara Wellbery Memorial Prize in 2004 for the best solution to the problem of privacy and transglobal data flows. She worked at Strathclyde University from 1986-1988 and Edinburgh University from 1989 to 2006 before moving to become Chair of Internet Law at Southampton from 2006-2008. She is Associate Director, and was co-founder, of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Centre for IP and Technology Law, funded from 2002-2012. She has taught IT, e-commerce and Internet law at undergraduate and postgraduate level since 1996 and been involved with law and artificial intelligence (AI) since 1985. She has been a visiting scholar and invited lecturer to universities in the USA, Canada, Australia, Mexico, and Latin America and has undertaken consultancy for the the European Parliament, the European commission and McAfee.
Louise Ferguson is a user experience consultant focused on user research for strategy in the private and public sectors. Her publications include Getting By, Not Getting On: Technology in UK workplaces (The Work Foundation) and Touching the State: What does it mean to be a citizen in the 21st century? (Design Council). Louise was previously VP of the UK Chapter of the Usability Professionals Association and is a co-director of its Voting and Usability Project. She is on the Advisory Council of the Foundation for Information Policy Research and on the Management Committee of Dulwich Going Greener. She advises the Electoral Commission on the usability of elections. In her spare time she is involved in the Cinema for Crystal Palace campaign and is often to be found growing, hiking, camping, cooking, cycling, and DJing.
Jerry Fishenden has a long and successful track record in some of the UK's most senior industry IT positions, including as Microsoft's chief technology policy and strategy advisor; as Head of Business Systems for the chief financial services regulator in the City of London; as an Officer of the House of Commons, where he pioneered the Parliamentary data and video network at the Houses of Parliament, as well as putting Parliament on the World Wide Web; and as a Director of IT in the National Health Service. He is currently engaged in a variety of strategic roles with key individuals and organisations, including as an independent trusted advisor; Director (in both Executive and Non-Executive capacities); charitable Trustee; and as a Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics. He is a regular guest and keynote speaker, drawing on his background across both private and public sectors. Jerry is a Fellow with Chartered status of the British Computer Society (FBCS CITP), a Fellow of the Institute for the Management of Information Systems (FIMIS), a Fellow of the Institution of Analysts and Programmers (FIAP) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA). Jerry's popular blog on new technology observations from a UK perspective (ntouk) can be found at http://ntouk.com
Ben Goldacre is a medical doctor, academic, and writer on evidence based practice, best known for the Bad Science column / book / website.
Wendy M. Grossman is a freelance writer and former full-time musician who writes for the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, ZDNet UK, and Scientific American (she has also written for New Scientist, Wired, and many other publications as well as policy reports and research). She is author of six books including net.wars (1998, NYU Press) and From Anarchy to Power: the Net Comes of Age (2001, NUYU Press), and writes a weekly column, net.wars, that appears on Fridays at NewsWireless.net and at www.pelicancrossing.net/netwars. She is founder and former editor of The Skeptic magazine and editor of the forthcoming book Why Statues Weep: The Best of The Skeptic (Philosophy Press). Her Web site pelicancrossing.net includes an extensive archive of her articles and MP3s.
Ben Hammersley is an English émigré, 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. Photo by MartinAlvarez
William founded Kable Ltd, the London-based public-sector IT market research and media company which became part of Guardian New & Media in August 2007. He tries to create better understanding about the implications of computerisation on government service quality, cost and trust. He moderates the Ideal Government blog, advises the Foundation for Information Policy Research, and is a Fellow of the Young Foundation, the UK's incubator for social entrepreneurship and innovation where he's working on better feedback mechanisms about public services.
Jason Kitcat is Head of Technology at Netmums, a leading grassroots parenting site. Jason also researches voting, e-voting and e-democracy. On these he regularly speaks at conferences and is quoted in the media. He has worked with online communities since the early 1990s and has founded or co-founded a number of technology related companies. He holds a BSc(Hons) from the University of Warwick in Computer Science & Management Science, MSc Technology & Innovation Management from the University of Sussex. He is half English and half French-Canadian. Jason is a Green City Councillor for Regency Ward on Brighton & Hove City Council. In 2007 Jason completed a part-time contract as e-voting co-ordinator at the Open Rights Group, where he continues to contribute in a voluntary capacity.
Paula is the Director of Digital BFI as of October, 2009. Paula has worked with the BBC, Guardian, Fairfax, Ofcom and Creative Commons as well as online content and activism communities such as iCommons and the international documentary community. Her experience spans advising on the future of public service media, open culture theory and practice, the role of archives in the digital age, leading international communities of volunteers, building e-commerce solutions and sitting on the executive board of one of the leading European Documentary Festivals - Sheffield Doc/Fest - and the Open Knowledge Foundation.
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. Photo by Davis Sifrey.
Desiree Miloshevic is an International Affairs and Policy Development 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, IGF, RIPE, CENTR. Desiree also serves on the Board of Trustees of Internet Society - ISOC (2004-2010), an organisational home of the IETF. Between 2006-2009, she served a Special Adviser to the Chair of the UN Multi-stakeholder Advisory Group (MAG) on Internet governance and on the board of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR). Currently, she is a Visiting Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute (2008-), University of Oxford.
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
Rufus is Director and co-founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation as well as being a member of Creative Commons UK and a country coordinator for the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure. He has worked extensively on innovation and intellectual property policy particularly in the area of software patents and copyright.
Judith Rauhofer is a research fellow at the Centre for Law, Information & Converging Technologies at the University of Central Lancashire specialising in online privacy, data protection and online surveillance, particularly communications data retention. She is a proliferate author of articles and book chapters on these topics and a frequent speaker at conferences. During her previous life as a soliticor, she has also advised many media and new media clients in these areas. Living in the UK as a legal alien, she is forever on a quest to "bring rights home".
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.
Paul Sanders brings innovation and inclusiveness as guiding principles into his work in the digital music industry. As well as being the cofounder of several music and technology companies, including Playlouder MSP, the iconic British enabler of music and ISP partnerships, Paul takes an active role in industry bodies and Government relations. Photo by Bowbrick.
Tom Watson is Labour MP for West Bromwich East and former Minister for Digital Engagement. He established the Power of Information task force and has campaigned to open up government more quickly to the 'net. He sits on the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee.
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. Photo by Marco Massarott.
Dean Whitbread is a writer, media producer, and well-known podcaster. From humble beginnings at the birth of web media, having been the first to climb many peaks across the vast and sometimes treacherous internet mountain range, he now runs Small Pictures which makes internet and mobile media for creative luminaries. Dean founded the UK Podcasters Assocation. Photo by Abuddhistpodcast.
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.
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