Open Licensing and related activities
Open Licensing and related activities
I've worked on many topics related to OSS use and compliance, and analysis of the licences themselves. From 2008 my focus was as a management consultant and advisors to investors and directly to their start ups and scale ups, and then from 2010 when I went in house, on working with developers to implement workable open source policies and review processes.
I had the pleasure of being on the board for the Open Knowledge Foundation from 2009 to 2012. That was a time of growth and a lot of excitement around the open movement, and I was involved in many of the projects there, including the OKF being a home for the Open Data Commons project, as well as many other projects around linked data, the semantic web, open licensing, and so on.
I founded Open Data Commons to provide open licences for data and databases to help solve the lack of clarity in this space for data projects using content or software licences. While the project itself didn't need much maintenance after finding a home with the Open Knowledge Foundation, I was active in explaining the licences and being involved in various projects with the Open Knowledge Foundation. I deprecated my direct involvement after 2018 to focus on other things.
While I was in Scotland, I got involved in the country porting project for Creative Commons Scotland (when CC had jurisdiction-specific ports of CC licences). Met a lot of great people and got very involved in the variations of Scots law vs the rest of the UK, and the international porting process across many different jurisdictions.
I've been involved in many different projects over the years on open licensing of different kinds of information, including map data, foreign aid data, accessibility data, government data, and data in the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museum) sectors.