Main Speakers

Ellen Miller, co-founder and executive director of the Sunlight Foundation will be giving the plenary talk introducing the Open Data, Government and Governance programme at OKCon 2013 on Tuesday 17 September. The Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based, non-partisan non-profit, is dedicated to using the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency. She is the founder of two other prominent Washington-based organizations in the field of money and politics — the Center for Responsive Politics and Public Campaign — and a nationally recognized expert on transparency and the influence of money in politics. Her experience as a Washington advocate for more than 35 years spans the worlds of non-profit advocacy, grassroots activism and journalism.

Ms. Miller’s work has recently been featured by 2013 Campaigns & Elections Magazine (“CampaignTech Nonpartisan Innovator” ), in Government Technology (“Top 25 Doers, Dreamers & Drivers in Public Sector Innovation,” March 2011), Washingtonian Magazine (“100 Tech Titans,” May, 2009), Fast Company, (“The Most Influential Women in Technology,” January, 2009), WIRED Magazine (“15 People The Next President Should Listen To,” October, 2008), The Chronicle of Philanthropy (“Seeking Online Exposure,” January, 2008). Ms. Miller also served as deputy director of Campaign for America’s Future, was the publisher of TomPaine.com and was a senior fellow at The American Prospect. She spent nearly a decade working on Capitol Hill.

Ms. Miller serves on the Board of Directors of the Sunlight Foundation, Publish What You Fund, the Center for Responsive Politics and Heaven Hill Distilleries. She is a Trustee of the Awesome Foundation, Washington, D.C. and is a member of the Policy Advisory Council of Transparency International, US.

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Jay is the Chairperson of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), a global foundation headquartered in Geneva that is committed to addressing malnutrition facing two billion people in the world. He will be giving the plenary talk introducing the Open Development and Sustainability programme at OKCon 2013 on Wednesday 18 September.

GAIN is a public–private partnership that brings together United Nations (UN) agencies, private businesses, philanthropic organizations, governments and civil societies around practical programmes in some 30 countries worldwide.

Jay is the co-founder an investment and management company in South Africa, the J&J Group. In 2007 he set up the J&J Development Trust and dedicates himself full-time today to voluntary work and social activism on a global scale.

He serves in an advisory capacity for a number of international organizations including the Broadband Commission of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Lead Committee of the UNSG on Nutrition. He also serves on the Board of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation which focuses on Governance in Africa.

Jay Naidoo is currently the Patron of the Scatterlings of Africa, which is a science education initiative that celebrates Africa’s status as humankind’s ancestral home.

He served as the Chairperson of the Development Bank of Southern Africa, a major infrastructure financing development institution, headquartered in SA, from 2000-2010. From 1994 to 1999, Jay was the Minister responsible for South Africa’s Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and Communications Minister in Nelson Mandela’s Cabinet. He was the founding General Secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the largest labour movement in SA, where he served three terms (1985 to 1993).

Jay was the recipient of the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur (Legion of Honour), one of France’s highest decorations and many other awards. He publishes a blog at jaynaidoo.org and wrote his autobiography, Fighting for Justice.

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Chris Vein is the Chief Innovation Officer for Global Information and Communications Technology Development, World Bank. Chris’ role is to help the World Bank embed technological innovations across its operations and to ensure that the benefits of this are seen in projects throughout its client countries. On Wednesday 18 September, Chris Vein will be giving a plenary talk and will be part of a high-level panel discussion with Jay Naidoo, Chairperson of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), as part of the Open Development and Sustainability programme at OKCon.

Formerly, Chris Vein was the Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer for Government Innovation in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In this role, he convened those with transformative ideas to support development of innovation ecosystems across the USA; supported the testing of those transformative ideas through open systems, repeatable methodologies, and rapid customer-centric iteration; and showcased those that work.

Prior to joining the White House, Chris Vein was the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the City and County of San Francisco (City) where he led the City in becoming a national force in the application of new media platforms, use of open source applications, creation of new models for expanding digital inclusion, emphasizing “green” technology, and transforming government.

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Rakesh Rajani is the Head of Twaweza (‘we can make it happen’ in Swahili), a ten year initiative that connects information, citizen agency and public accountability in East Africa. He will give a plenary talk as part of the Open Data, Government and Governance programme at OKCon on Wednesday, 18 September. Until 2007 he was the founding Executive Director of HakiElimu which works to realize equity, quality, and democracy in education. Rajani serves on several national and international boards, and has been a fellow of Harvard University since 1998, at present at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. He has written and edited over 300 papers and popular publications in English and Swahili. Rajani studied at Brandeis and Harvard universities.

He advises on several boards, including Revenue Watch International, the International Budget Partnership (IBP), ONE, the Foundation for Civil Society in Tanzania (FCS), and the Hewlett/Gates Foundations initiative on Quality Education in Developing Countries (QEDC). As a fellow of Harvard University, he was most recently involved in its Joint Learning Initiative on Children and AIDS (JLICA). He has written or edited over 300 papers, popular publications, and op-eds in English and Swahili.

Rajani completed his university education at Brandeis and Harvard, graduating summa cum laude and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. His interests include the connections between information, imagination and public action; political economy of policy-making; and budget transparency and public engagement.

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Professor John Ellis (CERN, King’s College London) will be giving a plenary talk as part of the Open Science and Research programme at OKCon 2013 on Tuesday 17 September. John Ellis is one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists, and also a great communicator. He has been influential in setting CERN’s strategic direction and contributed to the recent discovery of the Higgs Boson. John Ellis is a strong advocate of involving non-European nations in CERN scientific activities.

OKCon 2013, in Geneva, Switzerland, is only a few kilometers away from CERN and the LHC – Large Hadron Collider. CERN has always been considered a pioneer in the open science movement and a strong supporter of the open access movement: open source software has been developed at CERN for decades; Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web while working for CERN when trying to improve the information management system of the LHC.

We are certain that John Ellis’ talk will be a great inspiration to remind everyone why openness in science really matters: because – as CERN has recently proven – it helps reveal the deeper beauty of our universe.

Video from BOLDtalks 2013: John Ellis, The significance of the Higgs Boson discovery.

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Jill Cousins, Executive Director of the Europeana Foundation and responsible for Europeana.eu, will be speaking in the session on Building a Cultural Commons as part of the Open Culture programme at OKCon on Wednesday 18 September.  Jill is on the Board of Globethics and advises on the development of other digital libraries. She has many years experience in web publishing which are now applied to the libraries and the cultural heritage arenas.

Her past experience includes the commercial publishing world as European Business Development Director of VNU New Media and scholarly publishing with Blackwell Publishing, running their online journals service. Prior to publishing, she had a variety of marketing and research careers in the information field. These ranged from being the Marketing and Event Director for Learned Information (Online Information) to managing her own research company, First Contact. All of which deviates from her first career as a Middle Eastern Map Researcher for the Ministry of Defence.

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Chris Taggart, co-founder and CEO of OpenCorporates will be speaking in the session From Government to Governance as part of the Open Data, Government and Governance programme at OKCon on Tuesday 17 September.

For most of his career, Chris Taggart worked as a magazine journalist, editor and publisher, including working on The Face and Arena. After selling his company, Chris developed OpenlyLocal to make local public data in the UK open and accessible.  He then developed OpenCharities to match charities and their registration numbers to the council spending data published on OpenlyLocal.

In 2010, Chris Taggart and Rob McKinnon created the website OpenCorporates.  Since its launch, OpenCorporates has grown to be the largest openly licensed database of companies in the world, working with governments and international bodies such as the World Bank to increase the quality and openness of company data worldwide. It is used by journalists and anti-corruption investigators as well as by the banks and the financial community.

Chris Taggart also advises governments on transparency and open data, was the originator of the Open Election Data Project.

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Eric is passionate about open data and building open source visualization tools focused on speed and design. As CEO of MapBox, Eric coordinates product and business development for tools that make it easy for anyone to design and publish a beautiful custom map in the cloud.

Prior to MapBox, Eric co-founded Development Seed. Eric is a recognized expert on open data and open source software and has been featured in publications including the New York Times, Nightline, NPR, and others. He is frequently invited to speak on topics including open data, data visualization, and open source business models and has presented at conferences such as SXSW, Web 2.0, Where 2.0, GOSCON, and NodeJam.

Eric will be speaking in the session on Technology and tools for commercially-sustainable open data platforms as part of the Technology, Tools and Business programme at OKCon on Wednesday 18 September.

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Victoria Stodden, assistant professor of Statistics at Columbia University, and affiliated with the Columbia University Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering will be speaking in the session From Open Data to Open Science: Policy, Literacy and Citizen Engagement as part of the Open Science and Research programme at OKCon on Tuesday 17 September.

Victoria Stodden completed her PhD in statistics and her law degree at Stanford University. Her research centers on the multifaceted problem of enabling reproducibility in computational science. This includes studying adequacy and robustness in replicated results, designing and implementing validation systems, developing standards of openness for data and code sharing, and resolving legal and policy barriers to disseminating reproducible research.

She is the developer of the award winning “Reproducible Research Standard,” a suite of open licensing recommendations for the dissemination of computational results. She is a co-founder of http://www.RunMyCode.org, an open platform for disseminating the code and data associated with published results, and enabling independent and public cloud-based verification of methods and findings.

She is the creator and curator of SparseLab, a collaborative platform for reproducible computational research in underdetermined systems. She was awarded the NSF EAGER grant “Policy Design for Reproducibility and Data Sharing in Computational Science.”

She serves as a member of the National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure (ACCI), the Mathematics and Physical Sciences Directorate Subcommittee on “Support for the Statistical Sciences at NSF,” the National Academies of Science committee on “Responsible Science: Ensuring the Integrity of the Research Process.” She is also on several committees in the American Statistical Association: The Committee on Privacy and Confidentiality, the Committee on Data Sharing and Reproducibility, and the Presidential Strategic Initiative, Developing a Prototype Statistics Portal. She also serves on the Columbia University’s Senate Information Technologies Committee.

She co-chaired a working group on Virtual Organizations for the NSF’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure Task Force on Grand Challenge Communities in 2010. She is a nominated member of the Sigma Xi scientific research society, and serves on several advisory boards including hackNY.org, Galaxy, and the Science Exchange.

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Maya Indira Ganesh is Programme Director at Tactical Technology Collective and will speak in the session on Data-driven storytelling as part of the Evidence and Stories programme at OKCon on Wednesday, 18 September.

She has worked as a researcher, writer and activist with women’s rights organizations in India, international NGOs and academic institutions, including UNICEF, the Association for Progressive Communications’ Women’s Networking Support Program, Point of View and Tata Institute for Social Sciences. She has worked on projects spanning a range from gender rights, violence against women, sexuality rights, HIV/AIDS prevention with young people and digital media use, policy and communication rights. She has published non-fiction and academic writing about old and new media from trashy pulp magazines to sleek mobile phones. She has Masters degrees in Psychology from Delhi University in India, and in Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Sussex, UK.

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