Who I Am
My name is Damian Counsell. I help organisations and individuals to
- store and share digital data,
- publish and debate online, and
- explain and sell technology.
I specialize in projects that cross linguistic and national boundaries.
Who I work for
My main client is:
- The Digital Archiving Consultancy—on whose behalf and independently I’ve done work for:
- The European Commission in Brussels and Lisbon,
- The Center for Documentation and Research in Abu Dhabi, and
- GridwiseTech in Kraków and elsewhere.
I have also done work for:
- Index on Censorship,
- Prospect Magazine,
- The International Federation of Journalists,
- The Chartered Quality Institute, and
- Imagine Art After.
Where I come from
I am a co-author of this European Commission report about the sharing of scientific data, a project I was invited to join after the closure of the Medical Research Council’s Human Genome Mapping Project Resource Centre in Cambridge, UK, where I used to do bioinformatics. At the Bioinformatics.Org Website, you can read my science CV, and also download other publications I have written or contributed to. Occasionally, I speak to drug companies and I am still one of the directors of that organization, but I no longer do science.
Local clients
I am now based in Tamworth in Staffordshire near Birmingham on the Manchester Picadilly-London Euston line (and on the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal), and do a lot of work for clients based in this area. For example, my offices are over the shop at Tolsons Mill Yarns, whose new Website I recently set up. I also took almost all the photos for that Website, I did for the site I created for Midlands air conditioning engineers, Emac Contracts. Sutton Coldfield-based tree surgeon Vito DiMarco, provided me with excellent images of his own that I used for his Treewise Tree Services Website.
How I can help you
Perhaps you want to rescue an archive of documents stored in a defunct proprietary format and share them on the Web or with colleagues, or you need someone to build a high-traffic international blog for you, or you already have a Website and would like people to be able to find it more easily. Even if I can’t help you myself, I probably know someone who can. Contact me by ringing 07967 026293 or by emailing me.
How I operate
In my old work, I relied on, championed, and contributed to open standards and open software. In my new work, I try to do the same. This doesn’t mean I’m a zealot, but free tools are often the best tools. Some of my favourites include Linux, Apache, MySQL/PostgreSQL, PHP, bash, and WordPress. I also use the Web design frameworks YAML and Sandbox. Thanks to YAML, this Website is readable even under Internet Explorer 6, but, if you are using that Web browser, then, please, for the love of Tim, get a better one.