Vanessa Barnett
Board Chair
Vanessa Barnett is a lawyer who helps clients who are using technology and data to innovate or disrupt established ways of doing things, with particular expertise in Internet/platform based business models. She likes working with people who are changing the status quo. She has supported her clients from household-name global brands to nimble start-ups do this for over 15 years, first as a partner at two traditional City firms and now at disruptor law firm Keystone Law. She regularly advises boards on legal matters and strategy in her role as a lawyer. Vanessa has a specific interest in the cross over between technology, intellectual property and data, and right now is spending most of her working time advising on data related projects. She holds a degree in Law from Exeter University, is the founding author of the Internet section of Practical Commercial Precedents and sits on its editorial board. She is also on the editorial board of Digital Business Lawyer.
Helen Turvey
Board Vice-Chair
Helen Turvey has spent the past two decades working to make philanthropy better. She is honoured to have spent over half of that time working with the Shuttleworth Foundation, an organisation brave and nimble enough to be truly experimental in their approach to changing the world and its own DNA along with it. Having spent time at the beginning of her career travelling, learning and keynoting on most continents, Helen now spends her time working with the Fellows and Alumni of the Foundation, building, supporting, strengthening and enabling leaders who iterate towards a more open and equitable world. She is also on the board of several organisations that drive open ideals.
Irina Bolychevsky
Board Member
Irina is the Director of Standards and Interoperability at NHSX and is passionate about products and using technology to make things better. She spent many years working on open data at Open Knowledge (as one of the directors and ckan product owner), at web startups, and most recently as a product lead or data consultant for W3C, Open Data Institute and the UK, Dubai and UAE governments. She co-founded redecentralize.org — a project to promote and bring together people working on and interested in decentralised digital technologies.
Vicky Brock
Board Member
Entrepreneur & data specialist Vicky Brock is Founder of Get Market Fit and Founder and former CEO of Clear Returns. In November 2017 Vicky was named Scotland’s Most Inspiring Business Person by Founders4Schools at the Entrepreneurial Scotland Awards. She is a Women’s Enterprise Scotland (WES) Ambassador, sits on the Board of the Women’s Economic Imperative and is a Board Director Emeritus of the Digital Analytics Association. Vicky won Innovator of the Year at the 2014 FDM Everywoman in Technology Awards, is a Tech London Advocate and one of Computer Weekly’s Top 50 Women in IT.
Jarmo Elukka Eskelinen
Board Member
Jarmo is the Chief Innovation and Technology Officer of the Future Cities Catapult. Before joining the Catapult in 2016, Jarmo was the founder and the CEO of Forum Virium Helsinki, the urban innovation lab of the City of Helsinki, since 2006. Jarmo is an internationally recognised expert in smart cities, open data and open innovation. His background is in architecture, and he’s got an eMBA degree from the Aalto University. The mission of the Future Cities Catapult is to help firms develop the products and services to meet the changing needs of cities. Jarmo leads the research & innovation agenda, academic partnerships and international strategic collaborations of the Catapult, building on his diverse experience from working in the urban context, from architecture to club promotion and digital services. In Forum Virium, Jarmo launched the Helsinki region open data activities, and developed the ambitious Six City Strategy of open data, open APIs and open participation for the six largest cities of Finland. Jarmo is the and vice-chair of the international Open & Agile Smart Cities network OASC, member of the Smart London Board, member of the EC Open Innovation Strategy & Policy Group OISPG and a founding member and former President of the European Network of Living Labs ENoLL.
Tim Hubbard
Board Member
Tim Hubbard is Professor of Bioinformatics and Head of Department of Medical and Molecular Genetics at King’s College London. He is also Head of Genome Analysis at Genomics England, a company established by the UK government to execute the 100,000 Genome Project, which aims to mainstream the use of whole genome sequence analysis for treatment in the UK National Health Service (NHS). From 1997-2013 he worked at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute where he was one of the organisers of the sequencing of the human genome. In 1999 he co-founded the Ensembl project to analysis, organise and provide access to the human genome and from 2007 led the GENCODE project to annotate the structure of all human genes. He is an advocate of the benefits of open access and open data release for science and society as a whole and has served on multiple national information access advisory boards including Europe PMC (PubMedCentral) the repository for open access publications. He received his BA from Cambridge University (UK), and PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London (UK).
Rufus Pollock
Board Member
Dr Rufus Pollock is a researcher, technologist and entrepreneur as well as President & Founder of Open Knowledge. He has been a pioneer in the global Open Data movement, advising national governments, international organisations and industry on how to succeed in the digital world. Formerly, he was the Mead Fellow in Economics at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. He has been the recipient of a $1m Shuttleworth Fellowship and is currently an Ashoka Fellow and Fellow of the RSA. He holds a PhD in Economics and a double first in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge. He has worked extensively as a scholar and developer on the social, legal and technological issues related to the creation and sharing of knowledge. More information can be found on his home page.
Johnny West
Board Member
Johnny West is director of OpenOil, a Berlin-based consultancy which uses open data and methodologies to build investment-grade financial and commercial analysis for governments and societies of their natural resource assets. He sits on the Advisory Board of FAST, the only open source financial modelling standard, and is an alumnus of the Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowship. Johnny started professional life as a journalist for Reuters in the Middle East (and more recently wrote a book about the Arab Spring), then went into online journalism in the mid-1990s, and media development around the world, heading Internews Europe, an international NGO, where he commissioned a substantial extension of ToR anonymity software into repressive countries. OpenOil’s work is guided by the belief that any effective response to climate change and other planetary boundaries needs a comprehensive open database of natural resources, and the analysis on top of it to feed public policy making. Johnny speaks French, Arabic, German, Spanish and Persian and is passionate about the potential of open knowledge system in the non-Anglophone space.