Who
I'm an Australian living and working in Israel; a huge music fan and a budding urban gardener. I'm married and have two wonderful kids.
Work
I'm Chief Product Officer at Open Knowledge International. We are a non-profit dedicated to openness and transparency, and the creation of knowledge through open data. We do this via a combination of advocacy and technical work. I'm responsible for the driving the strategy and implementation of our technical product. This includes platforms like OpenTrials and OpenSpending, through to the wide range of open source and data specifications we do.
For the previous 10 years, I've worked in a range of startups in the highly competitive Israeli hi-tech industry. In this time, I've had the opportunity to work in a range of roles across the broad areas of Marketing, Product and Engineering. I've been working a "full stack" approach for years, and I feel equally at home writing (and shipping) code, working on product strategy, and managing teams.
Over this time I've also been I've been both a volunteer and contractor working with open data and open source at Israeli NGO The Public Knowledge Workshop. The Public Knowledge Workshop is a critically important organization in Israel, and I'm proud to be part of the network of volunteers.
I contribute to and maintain a number of open source code bases. I'm also involved in some important specification work around open data packaging and accessibility. You can check out my contributions on GitHub.
Academic
I hold a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Anthropology and Sociology from the University of Western Australia. I wrote a thesis analysing some ethnographic work on reglious/cultural symbolism as a channel for the sublimation of intrapersonal conflict. That was fun. I was fast tracked into a PhD, but jumped ship in my first year. I'm a big believer in the social sciences and humanities, and Anthropology in particular.