Catherine Stihler

Chief Executive Officer

Catherine is the Chief Executive Officer of the Open Knowledge Foundation. She represented Scotland in the European Parliament between 1999 and 2019. As Vice-Chair of the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee, Catherine worked on digital policy, prioritising the digital single market, digital skills, better accessibility of digital products for the disabled, as well as citizen online data protection and privacy. She wrote a number of influential reports and opinions leading on EU copyright reform. Over the years, Catherine has been recognised as an ambassador for accessibility, consumer and citizen rights.

She holds a MA (Hons) in Geography and International Relations (1996), an MLitt in International Security Studies (1998) from the University of St Andrews, and a Master of Business Administration from the Open University. In 2018 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews and in 2019 received an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list.

Catherine was recently elected to serve as the Senior Lay Member of the governing body of the University of St Andrews, a role which begins this summer. She previously served as the 52nd Rector, only the second woman to hold the position. Catherine is a Trustee of the Brink Literacy project and the National Prayer Breakfast of Scotland and serves on a number of international bodies and advisory groups. Catherine lives with her husband David and sons, Alex and Andrew, in Dunfermline, Fife.

Jo Barratt

Delivery Manager

Jo Barratt is a delivery manager and product team lead at Open Knowledge Foundation. He has over 10 years experience running projects across a wide range of technology, arts and communications projects. Previously a journalist, Jo has written for and produced audio for international publishing and broadcast organisations and is the producer of a number of award-winning podcasts.

Meg Foulkes

Business Development Manager and Director: Open Knowledge Justice Programme

As Business Development Manager, Meg supports innovation across the Open Knowledge Foundation, developing new project ideas with others. She is supported by a research and development team, and manages contractors in business development.

Meg designed the Open Knowledge Justice Programme in response to the important questions posed by the increasing use of information technology, data and algorithms in the justice system. The resulting training curriculum has developed from her experience within Open Knowledge’s School of Data project team, supporting the delivery of data-driven projects aimed at governments, journalists and citizens. Prior to joining the Open Knowledge Foundation, Meg worked as a legal adviser to detained asylum seekers.

Cédric Lombion

Data and Innovation Lead

Cédric is based in Bordeaux, France, and joined Open Knowledge Foundation in 2015. As Lead of the School of Data programme, he has been responsible for the design and coordination of a wide variety of data-driven projects. He has delivered projects with or provided expertise to institutions such as the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the OECD or the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID). As a trainer, he has led training programmes across a variety of fields such as the oil, gas, mining industry, public procurement or journalism and regularly shares his expertise at international events including the International Anti-Corruption Conference, The International Open Data Conference and the Open Government Partnership Summit. Cédric also teaches data journalism to postgraduate students at the University of Bordeaux. Before joining the team, Cédric worked as a project and community coordinator for Open Knowledge France, and is still active there as a volunteer.

Yan Naung Oak

Fellowship Coordinator

Yan is a data visualisation designer, as well as an open data, data literacy, and civic technology advocate. He splits his time between Phandeeyar, an innovation hub in Yangon aimed at building up an open data community in Myanmar, and Open Knowledge’s data literacy programmes, where he supports data literacy training for civil society organisations and journalists all over the world.

Adrià Mercader

Technical Lead

Adrià has over a decade of experience working in the open data and civic tech fields. He is an enthusiast of the open web, especially the communities built around open source projects and open standards. He is a member of the CKAN technical team and works across different projects. He has a degree in Biology and an MSc in Geographic Information Systems. His first serious program was written in Visual Basic 6 many moons ago, and he once wrote a SOAP interface that ingested GML, in PHP. He currently lives near the shores of the Mediterranean, in the beautiful city of Tarragona.

Evgeny Karev

Senior Developer

Evgeny was born in Moscow gaining an engineering degree at Moscow State Technical University. He has been an entrepreneur and a consultant on leading technical projects in Russia. As a passionate open source developer living in Moscow and Dubrovnik, Evgeny’s work focuses on the Frictionless Data project as the tech lead of the Frictionless Data implementations.

Chris Shaw

Senior Developer

Chris has over 10 years of experience in software development and data wrangling in the civic tech, research and education sectors. He makes recreational contributions to a number of open source and open data projects. Chris is currently focused on helping Open Knowledge Foundation clients with hosting and customising CKAN installations.

Lilly Winfree

Product Manager, Frictionless Data for Reproducible Research

Lilly is the product manager for the Frictionless Data for Reproducible Research project. She gained her PhD in neuroscience from Oregon Health and Science University, where she researched brain injury in fruit flies and became an advocate for open science and open data. Lilly believes that the future of research is open, and is using Frictionless Data tooling within the researcher community to make science more reproducible.

Cassandra Woolford

Finance Manager

Cassandra is responsible for the delivery of the financial services. With over 20 years of experience in the finance / administration sector, she runs a tight ship. The various engagements that Open Knowledge Foundation undertakes keeps the pace moving and not one week is ever the same. From expenses to cash flow management, Cassandra is able to fulfil her passion for numbers and spreadsheets.

Stephen Abbott Pugh

Content Development Manager

Stephen is the content development manager for Open Knowledge Foundation, delivering materials and content production processes to aid organisational strategy as well as supporting proposal and policy development. He previously worked as a portfolio manager focused on developing, shaping and nurturing projects as well as project managing efforts including Open Data for Tax Justice and the Global Open Data Index. Prior to joining Open Knowledge Foundation in 2016, he was an ICFJ Knight international journalism fellow with Code for Africa, working on data-driven projects across sub-Saharan Africa. He previously founded a civic technology company in Rwanda, was head of digital projects for the UK Parliament and worked as an executive producer for the Guardian's website.