OSS Watch's total staff complement is 5.0 FTE (full time equivalent) divided across the following individuals, who each have other roles with the Research Technologies Service as well:
Elena has been involved in many different aspects of academic computing provision since 1991. A techie at heart she has many years of hands on experience in Unix systems administration and network infrastructure support. Somewhat unusually for a sysadmin she likes to put pen to paper and in recent years she has moved in a content focussed direction. She has been managing OSS Watch's content since 2005, commissioning and editing the content that you see on the OSS Watch website, and produces OSS Watch's monthly newsletter.
Lou has worked at the intersection of information technology and academic research in the humanities since the 1980s. He is currently Assistant Director at Oxford University Computing Services with responsibility for a range of information and support services. His track record includes work on the development of XML, the TEI, the BNC and many other acronyms. He is proud to be considered an open source bigot, XML maniac, and digital text bore.
Ross is Vice President of Community Development at The
Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and manager of JISC OSS Watch. Ross is a strong
believer that community is more important than code. His work enables him to
examine and understand approaches to sustainability through open development and
open innovation in many different fields. Ross engages with and advises on
community management in a wide range of projects from newly funded short term
research and development projects, international educational and research
collaborations such as Opencast Matterhorn and the Open Bioinformatics
Foundation, open source spin outs from research projects such as Apache Wookie
(Incubating) and Jena, software foundations such as the ASF and mixed
closed/open source initiatives such as the Microsoft Biology Foundation. Ross is
also chair of TransferSummit, an open innovation conference focussing on
collaborative exploitation of intellectual property in software.
Gabriel is a social scientist with an interest in the social dynamics of open communities. His main role in the team is to shed light on the social and cultural implications of open source collaboration. In this capacity he coordinates OSS Watch's project support and provides consultancy on the community building aspects of open source development. After a Masters in France and PhD research at Oxford, Gabriel worked on various projects funded by JISC and the UK Research Councils, including a study of UK researchers' engagement with the national research infrastructure. More recently he started a series of video interviews with open source leaders, including representatives of open source software foundations such as Apache, Gnome, Mozilla, Wikimedia, Codeplex, and open source businesses such as Sourcesense and 100% Open. Gabriel is a keen supporter of an interdisciplinary approach to the study and dissemination of open source practices. He published on the interplay of visible and invisible communities, and draws his inspiration from work in e-research, museum and educational contexts.
Judy provides administrative support for the various groups within Oxford University Computing Services, including OSS Watch. She has a degree from the University of Auckland, New Zealand - majoring in Anthropology and Maori Studies. Her interests include archaeology, travel and working on stained glass projects.
Elizabeth originally trained as a teacher but has been a book editor for most of her working life. She has worked for several educational and general publishers in South Africa and the UK, in subject areas as diverse as primary maths, art, travel and history. In her role as content editor at OSS Watch she strives to make open source as accessible as possible. This involves ongoing collaboration with team members to produce documents that are clear, accurate and easy to read. She also commissions freelance writers to blog at OSS Watch events - including the Engaging developers in open source workshop and TransferSummit - and edits their follow-up reports.
As one of the most technical members of the OSS Watch team, Sander has
presented at technical workshops on the best practices in open development. He
is also involved in the organisation of workshops and conferences, ranging from
a developer-oriented workshop on the Apache Wookie (Incubating) project to the
TransferSummit/UK conference. Sander also writes about issues relevant to open
source developers on the OSS Watch website and blog. His extensive hands-on
experience as a Java Software Engineer in the private sector has proven to be
useful in advising open source software projects on how to make best use of the
key tools in open development. Furthermore, Sander contributes to the
development of the open source project registry framework Simal. Leveraging semantic web
technologies, Simal is used by OSS Watch to form a project registry in order to
catalogue open source software projects of interest to the academic sector. This
enables the OSS Watch team and anyone interested to track relationships between
people, skills projects and needs. Sander has a specific interest for projects
in the fields of Green IT, Big Data and Linked Data.
Rowan has been involved in web development using a variety of CGI languages since 1996. He was the co-creator of the earliest fully automatic domain-name ordering, DNS setup and virtual-server allocation software deployed by a UK ISP (FDD), using a combination of Apache-SSL, Sendmail, Perl and Bind. Since then he has developed web-based internal product management systems for the ISP Netscalibur, again using open source software (Postgres, Perl, Apache). He now works within the Research Technologies Service of Oxford University Computing Services.
OSS Watch is located within the Research Technologies Service (RTS) which is co-ordinated by Sue Fenley. Further information about the RTS may be found at http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/rts/
Steve has been an enthusiastic user, developer and consultant in open source for many years, and his role as OSS Watch community development officer allowed him to further develop his skills and knowledge of best practice in open development. Working as Full Measure, he now follows his passion to combine open development and accessibility to bring the benefits of innovation and engagement to users who often need something extra in order to have equal access computers and technology. He is actively involved in several key accessibility communities including Mozilla, GNOME, OATSoft and Project:Possibility and has developed wide experience with many contacts in the field. While at OSS Watch he was pleased to provide support to several accessibility projects including the JISC TechDis toolbar, In-folio, AccessApps, Maavis and REALISE. He looks at his involvement with the first ever TransferSummit as an important highlight, not least as he believes open innovation will produce much of value for users of accessibility.
Pablo Barrera is currently working for Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid, Spain) as a Teaching Assistant.
He has a PhD in Computer Science and a Masters in Business Administration. His
work in OSS Watch is related to the study of business models in open source
projects. He has been working with open source for the last ten years and he has
been involved with different Linux Users Groups.
Israel Herraiz is a PhD candidate in University Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid, Spain). His research topic is the Evolution of large community-based open source projects. He is studying the use of time series analysis and some other statistical analysis to characterize the evolution of that kind of projects. For the past few years he has been working in the study of the evolution of open source and empirical software engineering. He is participating in the EU-funded FP6 projects QUALOSS, FLOSSMetrics and Qualipso, and has participated in CALIBRE. He has experience in participating in other projects funded by the Spanish government and private companies such as Telefonica and Vodafone.
Inevitably staff both join OSS Watch and eventually move on to further endeavours. We appreciate everything they did for OSS Watch and wish them all the best. But we still think of them as part of the OSS Watch team!
Apart from working for OSS Watch, Ramón is reading for a DPhil in Medical Image Processing at Oxford. The topic of his dissertation is a study of contractility of the heart using contrast dobutamine stress echocargiography. He graduated in Telecommunication Engineering in Madrid (Spain) and has been an enthusiastic user of open source software for the last 5 years. Currently he releases a template for LaTeX (TempLaTeX) and is involved in the use of subversion and GNU/Linux in his lab. Other interests include poetry, photography, wikis and blogging.
Barry moved to Oxford University Computing Services in March 2005 where his time was divided evenly between OSS Watch and the computing services' Information Services team. He was instrumental in supporting the introduction of OSS Watch's MoinMoin wiki. He also had principal responsibility for OSS Watch XSLT stylesheets for the transformation of our XML documents into html, pdf and more. Barry conducted a small survey on the use of Linux at the University of Oxford in 2005. In 2006 he managed the much larger national survey on the use of open source software in higher and further education, OSS Watch Survey 2006. OSS Watch continues to use the university newsfeed system that Barry developed for Oxford. Prior to moving to Oxford, he was a support person in the IT Service at the University of Durham. There he looked after Apache web servers, Apache tomcat, MySQL and OpenLDAP servers. Prior to this he was a lecturer in Computer Science. He has interests in XML, XSL, Java, C# and Web Services, and has produced books on Modula-2 and Java.
Randy started as OSS Watch's Communications Manager and later (2005) took over the role of Service Manager. Early successes included organising OSS Watch's inaugural conference in 2003, initiating a series of Open Source Road Shows for Further Education in 2004-5, and overseeing OSS Watch's first national survey. Along the way he organised four further national conferences and 2 expert workshops, and gave dozens of presentations on the nature of open source software across the UK (mostly), in Germany, Italy, and beyond. His early briefing note, Top Tips For Selecting Open Source Software, continues to be a popular resource. In 2007 he oversaw the commissioning and editing of JISC's Sustainability Study: A case study review of open source sustainability models . Perhaps the aspect of open source he was always (and continues to be) most fascinated by is community. That may relate to his passion for internal communications and team building. His flare for the later helped make the OSS Watch team a vibrant force at Oxford University Computing Services throughout his tenure. Randy left OSS Watch to return to Canada where he intends to further pursue his interest in open source and rediscover his Canadian roots.
Sebastian is the reason OSS Watch is OSS Watch. He wrote the original bid for what was, initially, a very small pilot advisory service funded by JISC. He had the vision for what OSS Watch might become in time, and gathered the team that has helped bring that vision to fruition. Sebastian's involvement with free and open source software goes back to the late 1980's as a developer in the community around the TeX typesetting system, on which he has published widely. He maintained an open source TeX distribution for ten years, and a variety of TeX-related packages. He is now an active member of the XML and XSLT communities, most importantly as one of the technical leads for the Text Encoding Initiative in which he serves on the Board of Directors and Technical Council. He continues his role as Information Manager at Oxford University Computing Services, and deputy leader of its Information and Support group.
Despite a youthful passion for programming his ZX Spectrum, James somehow ended up taking his doctorate in English Literature, looking at the influences of classical rhetoric and enlightenment aesthetics on the poetry of the mid eighteenth century, in particular the poetry of Christopher Smart. James began working at Oxford University Computing Services for the Humbul Humanities Hub whilst completing his doctorate, and worked for OSS Watch from April 2006 to April 2007, having left to take over the Service Manager's position for Intute: Arts and Humanities. While at OSS Watch, James rediscovered the delights of computing, began fiddling with PHP, and, especially, wrote numerous briefing notes, book reviews and conference reports.
Stuart joined OSS Watch at its inception and has been a hugely enthusiatic member of the team. He arrived with already strong interests in open source coupled with interests in interoperability, user-centred design and metadata-rich information systems. A stalwart coneference goer, Stuart was particularly adept at drawing in the more reserved members of the academic community. Stuart has also been a prolific blogger, starting with his own blog on the EDUCAUSE website (for which he received a nomination for Best Newcomer in 2005), and then contributing heavily to the OSS Watch Team Blog. During his time at OSS Watch, Stuart also managed to finish a Ph.D. in computer science through Waikato University, specialising in using Markov models to infer intra-document metadata within digital libraries. He has now returned to his native New Zealand.
Whilst directing OSS Watch, Michael Fraser was Coordinator of the Research Technologies Service at Oxford University Computing Services and he was also Director of Intute Arts and Humanities and an Associate Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre. He has been involved in a wide range of JISC projects and services, especially relating to virtual research environments, humanities computing and access management. All the projects in which Michael has been involved have engaged with open source software, whether in development or deployment (some more successfully than others). He is a lapsed theologian with a PhD in theology from Durham University.
As well working at OSS Watch, Amir is also Assistant IT Officer at the Department of Medieval and Modern Languages within Oxford University. He has a degree in Computing from Oxford Brookes University.
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OSS Watch is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee.