Renata Ávila

CEO

Renata is an international lawyer, author and advocate. She brings nearly 20 years of experience in access to knowledge, freedom of expression, policymaking and global digital rights. Renata is an Affiliate with the Stanford Institute of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Renata is part of the World Economic Forum Expert Network on Digital Technologies and a member of the Global Board of Trustees of ​Digital Future Society, among other affiliations in a vast professional network extending across Europe, Latin America and North America. She co-founded the <A+> Alliance for Inclusive Algorithms, the Progressive International and the Polylateral Association - an international platform cooperative for knowledge workers.

Cassandra Woolford

Director of Operations and Finance

Cassandra is responsible for the organisation’s operational management and ensures that the core organisation support functions enable the team to deliver the mission, vision and strategic objectives of the organisation. She is finance director and responsible for managing staff wellbeing and development. Cassandra's background is in finance where she has over 20 years experience. She has been on the Leadership team at Open Knowledge Foundation since 2019.

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.

Carol Matos

Data Literacy Project Coordinator.

Carolina is a brazilian project manager based in São Paulo, supporting the work of the Data Literacy team. With 20 years of experience coordinating cultural and educational projects, she has been serving as a liaison for a broad variety of digital communication initiatives in Brazil and Spain. With a passion for the intersection of technology and culture, she is also an art historian and obtained her PhD at Universidad Complutense de Madrid with a thesis on the impact of digital experiences in the GLAM environment. In the past two years, Carolina was also a curator for open data projects in South America, with a focus on data decolonization. She speaks English, Portuguese and Spanish and is always trying to find the most creative way to build solid and fun bridges between the digital world and people.

Ben Hur Pintor

Data Training Lead

Ben Hur is a free and open stuff advocate based in The Philippines who works at the intersections of the openness, data, development, and geospatial fields. He is an alumnus of the School of Data Fellowship and Data Expert Programme and has provided training, support, and consulting services on data literacy and free and open source software for geospatial (FOSS4G) applications to individuals, private corporations, and organizations over the years.

He supports the open data and open mapping communities in the Philippines as an individual and through BNHR, his consultancy service, and SmartCT, an open data and citizen-centric non-profit that he is part of.

Nikesh Balami

International Open Data Lead

Nikesh is an open data advocate and tech researcher based in Nepal. He is a strong supporter of open source software and believes in the vision of Open Knowledge to empower citizens regarding technology usage and open data. He loves coffee chat, tweeting, hackathons, blogging, traveling, and open data. As an International Open Data Lead, Nikesh works closely with Open Data communities from all over the world. He also leads Open Knowledge Nepal, one of the active networks of OKF since 2013.

Patricio Del Boca

Senior Developer

Patricio is an Information Systems Engineer and enthusiast of open data and civic technologies. He likes to build and collaborate with different communities to disseminate technical knowledge and participate as a speaker in events to spread the importance of civic technologies.He's also a member of Open Data Córdoba, an Argentinian NGO working in the open data, data journalism and civic technology space. When not on the computer, he loves music, photography and hiking. Currently based in Alta Gracia, Córdoba, Argentina.

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.

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.

Edgar Zanella Alvarenga

Software Developer

Edgar is a software developer working with open source, open access and the creation of open knowledge for over 20 years now. Before joining Open Knowledge Foundation, he founded a non-profit organization in Brazil that developed free and open source tools. Later he helped to create Open Knowledge Brasil and worked in different projects of Open Knowledge Deutschland in Berlin. His projects range from the analysis of EU green subsidies and soil pollution using public sources of data; creating data visualization using open data; helping journalists to investigate the pharmaceutical industry and influence open access research journals; public access and visualization of cities budget planning to the development of open source tools used in democratic systems. When not in front of a computer, he is probably cooking in Italy, on a slackline or traveling around the world by bike

Shashi Gharti

Developer

Shashi is a software developer from Nepal. She has mostly worked on web application development. She did her MSc in Computer Science from AIT, Thailand. She loves coding and learning new technologies. She enjoys the process of developing applications, exploring new ideas and working with the team. In her free time, she also likes to contribute to open source projects and keep up with recent developments in machine learning and AI research.

Sara Petti

International Network Lead, Project & Community Manager

Sara works with communities. She leads the Open Knowledge Network and manages the Frictionless Data community. She is also project manager. Sara has previously worked in EU policy research, advocacy, and communications. She has managed projects on digital education with schools and public libraries from all across Europe. Sara is an enthusiast of the open movement and strongly believes in removing barriers and opening knowledge as a means of empowering citizens and fostering democracy. She has studied comparative literature and political science, and is currently based in Bologna, Italy. She speaks English, French, Italian, and German.

Andrés Vázquez Flexes

Software Developer

Andres is a software developer mainly working with open data on free software. He's a civic and government technology advocate and also a member of Open Data Córdoba (an Argentinian NGO). He worked with open data inside and outside governments for the last decade. He is currently based in Mendiolaza, Córdoba, Argentina.

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.