Team

The Open Data Policy Lab is an initiative from The GovLab, with support from Microsoft and guidance from a Global Advisory Board of open data leaders.

    Rudi Borrmann

    Open Government Partnership

    Jaimie Boyd

    Government of British Columbia

    Ania Calderon

    Data & Society

    Ciro Cattuto

    University of Torino & ISI Foundation

    Charles Duan

    R Street

    Adam Neufeld

    Anti-Defamation League Foundation

    Catherine Stihler

    Creative Commons

    Jeni Tennison

    Open Data Institute

    Barbara Ubaldi

    Organisation for Economic Coordination and Development (OECD)

    John Wilbanks

    Biogen

    Stefaan Verhulst

    The GovLab

    Andrew Young

    The GovLab

    Adrienne Schmoeker

    The GovLab

    Andrew J. Zahuranec

    The GovLab

    Uma Kalkar

    The GovLab

    Sampriti Saxena

    The GovLab

Supported by

Rudi Borrmann

Rudi Borrman joined OGP in March 2020 and leads OGP’s work at the local level, helping to accelerate impact and reforms where government is closer to citizens by supporting strategic national-local integration, enhancing subnational participation in OGP and improving knowledge and learning opportunities for open government reformers. Previous to this role he was Undersecretary of Public Innovation and Open Government at the Cabinet Office of Argentina from 2015 to 2019. In this position, Rudi was in charge of the National Open Government Strategy, developing Argentina’s first open data infrastructure, establishing open government reforms with three open state action plans and running LABgobAR (the National Government Lab) to support capacity building and innovation projects using user-centered design with more than 30.000 government officials involved. In 2018 he chaired the Digital Economy task force during Argentina’s presidency of the G20. In 2012 he founded the Buenos Aires Innovation Lab, led the city’s Open Government project and was part of the very first new media office of Latin America, three pioneers projects in Argentina.

Jaimie Boyd

Jaimie Boyd serves as the Chief Digital Officer of the Government of British Columbia, Canada. She leads efforts to embrace digital change, helping government to better serve citizens using modern technologies. She previously served as the Director of Open Government in the Government of Canada, supporting government transparency, accountability and citizen engagement. Ms. Boyd has held past roles across the Government of Canada and in the private sector. She is an alumnus of the Government of Canada’s Accelerated Economist Training Program, Action Canada, the Institute for Technology and Society’s Global Policy Fellowship and the Organization of American States’ Fellowship on Open Government in the Americas. In 2019, Apolitical listed her amongst the World’s 100 Most Influential People in Digital Government. Find her on Twitter at @jaimieboyd.

Ania Calderon

Ania Calderon is a leading open government advocate who supports reformers from around the world to publish and use openly available and well-governed data to respond effectively and accountably to complex policy challenges. She is the Managing Director of Data & Society. She is also the former Executive Director of the Open Data Charter, a collaboration between 120 governments and partner organizations working to open up data based on a shared set of global principles. As General Director for the National Digital Strategy from 2012-2016, Ania delivered a key presidential mandate for open data in Mexico and coordinated its implementation across more than 200 public institutions and with a network of over 40 cities. She advocates for targeted open data commitments globally and in multiple regional and multilateral fora. Ania holds a Masters Degree in Public Administration from Columbia University and was part of the Harvard University Berkman Klein Center and MIT Media Lab’s 2019 Assembly Fellowship program for Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence where she co-founded AI Blindspot, a discovery process to spot unconscious biases and structural inequalities that may creep into product design and deployment. She is chair of the Board of Directors for Global Integrity and sits on multiple advisory boards. Ania was recently named one of the top 20 of Apolitical’s World’s 100 Most Influential People in Digital Government 2019.

Ciro Cattuto

Prof. Ciro Cattuto is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Torino, Italy, and a Principal Researcher and Research Area Coordinator at ISI Foundation (Torino, Italy). His research interests include data science, digital epidemiology and computational social science. He holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Perugia, Italy and has carried out interdisciplinary research at the University of Michigan, USA, at the Enrico Fermi Center and Sapienza University in Rome, and at the Frontier Research System of RIKEN, Japan. He is a founder and principal investigator of the SocioPatterns collaboration, an international effort on studying human contact networks with wearable sensors, with applications to epidemiology and social network analysis. He is an editorial board member of the Nature Scientific Data, EPJ Data Science, PeerJ Computer Science, Journal of Computational Social Science, Data & Policy journals. He is a Fellow of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). He cares deeply about the social impact of data science and AI, and he was recently designated by the European Foundation Centre to join the Strategic Planning Committee of CRT Foundation (Torino, Italy).

Charles Duan

Charles Duan is the Director, Technology & Innovation and Resident Senior Fellow at R Street. Charles focuses his research on intellectual property issues. He was previously the director of the patent reform project at Public Knowledge, where he handled all aspects of patent policy ranging from outreach on the Hill to writing white papers and filing amicus briefs. Prior to this, he was a research associate to Professor Paul Ohm on an NSF-funded project that investigated the policy implications of newly proposed Internet architectures. He also worked as a patent attorney at Knobbe Martens. Charles is the author of A Five Part Plan for Patent Reform (2014). He received his associate bachelor’s degree in computer science from Harvard College and his juris doctor from Harvard Law School. Charles lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, two kids and their cat.

Adam Neufeld

Adam Neufeld is the Vice President of Innovation & Strategy at the ADL (Anti-Defamation League), a civil rights group focused on fighting hate and extremism. Previously, he served as the Deputy Administrator of the General Services Administration. In addition to being the chief operating officer at the 11,500-person agency, he also helped start new initiatives including a group of coders and designers called 18F to work on the government’s most difficult technology issues, an office of evaluation science, and innovative financing for real estate transformation. Prior to GSA, he worked in other agencies, including as a lawyer. He also was a consultant at McKinsey & Co., where he served government and nonprofit clients. Adam has a BS in Neuroscience from Brown University, and a JD from Harvard Law School.

Catherine Stihler

Catherine Stihler OBE has been the Chief Executive Officer of Creative Commons since July 2020. Previously, she was the CEO of the Open Knowledge Foundation. Prior to this, she represented Scotland as a Member of the European Parliament for nearly 20 years. As Vice-Chair of the European Parliament’s Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee, she worked on digital policy, prioritising copyright reform, digital skills, better accessibility of digital products for the disabled, as well as citizen online data protection and privacy. As leader and founder of the All-Party Library Group she promoted and advocated for the importance of libraries and how libraries can remain relevant in the new digital age. Catherine was educated at Coltness High School, Wishaw and St Andrews University, where she was awarded a MA (Hons) Geography and International Relations (1996), and a MLitt in International Security Studies (1998). Before becoming a MEP, Catherine worked in the House of Commons for Dame Anne Begg MP (1997-1999). She has a Master of Business Administration from the Open University, and in 2018 was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews. Catherine was elected to serve as the 52nd Rector of the University of St Andrews between 2014 and 2017, and was awarded an OBE in 2019 for services to politics.

Jeni Tennison

Jeni Tennison is Vice President and Chief Strategy Adviser at the Open Data Institute. She gained a PhD in AI from the University of Nottingham, then worked as an independent consultant, specialising in open data publishing and consumption, before joining the ODI as Technical Director in 2012, becoming CEO in 2016, and Vice President in 2020. She served on the W3C’s Technical Architecture Group from 2011 to 2015 and co-chaired the W3C’s CSV on the Web Working Group. She also sits on the Advisory Board for the Open Contracting Partnership; the Board of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data; the UK’s Health Tech Advisory Board; and advises the Board of OpenUK.

Barbara Ubaldi

Barbara Ubaldi heads the OECD Digital Government, Open Data and Data-driven Public Sector Team and is the Deputy Head of the Public Sector Reform Division within the Public Governance Directorate. Barbara leads country reviews, the work on the use of emerging technologies in governments to enhance openness, efficiency and innovation, and is responsible for monitoring the implementation of the OECD Recommendation on Digital Government Strategies and for the development of the OECD OURdata index and of the Digital Government Index. Prior to the OECD Barbara served for eight years as Programme Officer within the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. She gathered extensive experience working with developing countries on digital government, ICT and knowledge management for development. A Fulbright Scholar, Barbara holds a M.S. on Public Administration from Northeastern University in Boston. Apolitical listed Barbara among the 2018 and 2019 TOP 20 most influential figures on Digital Government worldwide.

John Wilbanks

John Wilbanks is the Head of Real World Research Networks and Senior Medical Director at Biogen, and the former Chief Commons Officer at Sage Bionetworks. Previously, Wilbanks worked a legislative aide to Congressman Fortney “Pete” Stark, served as the first assistant director at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, founded and led to acquisition the bioinformatics company Incellico, Inc., and was executive director of the Science Commons project at Creative Commons. In February 2013, in response to a We the People petition that was spearheaded by Wilbanks and signed by 65,000 people, the U.S. government announced a plan to open up taxpayer-funded research data and make it available for free. Wilbanks holds a B.A. in philosophy from Tulane University and also studied modern letters at the Sorbonne.

Stefaan Verhulst

Stefaan G. Verhulst is Co-Founder and Chief Research and Development Officer of the Governance Laboratory @NYU (GovLab) where he is responsible for building a research foundation on how to transform governance using advances in science and technology. Verhulst’s latest scholarship centers on how technology can improve people’s lives and the creation of more effective and collaborative forms of governance. Specifically, he is interested in the perils and promise of collaborative technologies and how to harness the unprecedented volume of information to advance the public good.

Andrew Young

Andrew Young is the Knowledge Director at The GovLab, where he leads research efforts focusing on the impact of technology on public institutions. Among the grant-funded projects he has directed are a global assessment of the impact of open government data; comparative benchmarking of government innovation efforts against those of other countries; a methodology for leveraging corporate data to benefit the public good; and crafting the experimental design for testing the adoption of technology innovations in federal agencies.

Adrienne Schmoeker

Adrienne Schmoeker is a Senior Fellow at The GovLab. She previously served as the Director of Civic Engagement and Strategy at the NYC Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics and Deputy Chief Analytics Officer for the City of New York. She advised New York City’s Chief Analytics Officer, managed a team of data-savvy strategists and supports a variety of strategic initiatives such as designing data partnerships, supporting the Census2020 team, and supporting community-driven data literacy and data empowerment efforts. Previously, she managed the City’s Open Data Program for two years, increasing the volume of datasets on the platform by more than 30% and led Open Data Week, a citywide community engagement initiative around public data. Adrienne originally joined the City of New York via the Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation in 2015, a new office led by the City’s first Chief Technology Officer, where Adrienne led a variety of open innovation initiatives in partnership with New York City’s urban tech, civic tech and startup communities.

Andrew J. Zahuranec

Andrew J. Zahuranec is Research Fellow at The GovLab, where he is responsible for studying how advances in science and technology can improve governance. In previous positions at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and National Governors Association, he worked on issues as far-ranging as election security, the commercial space industry, and the opioid epidemic. He has a Master of Arts in Security Policy Studies from the George Washington University and a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Intelligence from Mercyhurst University.

Uma Kalkar

Uma Kalkar is a research intern at The GovLab and a dual-degree candidate for a Master of Public Policy specializing in Digital and New Technology at The Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) and a Master of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. She is also the Innovation Director of 18by Vote, a youth-led non-profit that helps 16, 17, and 18-year-olds understand how to vote, when to vote, and why to vote. Her work focuses on digital inequities, open data initiatives, and civic organizing in digital spaces. Uma was a 2019-2020 Presidential Fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress (CSPC) researching the political effects of the urban-rural digital divide in the United States. Uma holds a B.Sc. (Honors) majoring in Peace, Conflict, and Justice and double minoring in Mathematics and Biology from the University of Toronto.

Sampriti Saxena

Sampriti Saxena is a research intern at The GovLab. She recently completed her master’s degree in International Social Public Policy with a specialization in Development from the London School of Economics. At The GovLab, she supports the Data Program research team across a number of their projects. Sampriti also holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics with a double minor in Global Studies and French from the University of California, Berkeley.