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 and in recent years has moved into technical project management. Somewhat unusually for a sysadmin she likes to put pen to paper.
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 has filled many roles during a varied working life ranging from
owner of a public address hire company, through band management of a reasonably
successful Dub Reggae act and on into Computer Science and Management research
and teaching in both the UK and West Indies. He's also been a freelance
contractor across the UK, working exclusively with open source in order to
deliver solutions well beyond the normal capabilities of a small company. He is
an active contributor to a number of open source projects and is a Member of the
Apache Software Foundation. Membership is a meritocratic status awarded to those
who contribute to the health and vitality of one of the most significant and
longest running open source foundations in the world.
Gabriel is a social scientist with an interest in the social and cultural dynamics of open communities. After a Masters in France and PhD research at Oxford he worked on various e-learning and resource enhancement projects for JISC and AHRC and published on the relationship between visible and invisible communities. He is a keen supporter of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of open source and draws his inspiration from work in e-research and museum and educational contexts.
Since he discovered the quality and ethos of the GNU C compiler (gcc) Steve has been an enthusiastic user, developer and advocate of open source software. His interest in open accessibility and user engagement led to membership of several key communities including Mozilla, GNOME, OATSoft and Project:possibility. Working as MIS web/database programmer at Exeter FE piqued his interest in the application of open source in education, leading to joining Schoolforge-UK, and more recently OSS Watch. This expanded into a wider interest in open educational technology and practices. Steve currently divides his time between OSS Watch and freelance consultancy.
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.
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.
Elizabeth originally trained as a teacher but has been a book editor for most of her working life. She began her publishing career with OUP in Cape Town, South Africa, and has since 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. Her main role in the OSS Watch team is editing content for the OSS Watch website.
Sander studied in Amsterdam where he obtained an MSc in Computer Science and a BA in Philosophy. He combines this academic background with substantial experience as a Java Software Engineer working at private software companies in the Netherlands. At OSS Watch, Sander’s main contribution is to continue the development of Simal using semantic web technologies. Simal will be used to form a project registry in order to catalogue educational-related open source software projects.
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/
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.
Michael Fraser is Coordinator of the Research Technologies Service at Oxford University Computing Services. As well as directing OSS Watch, he is 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. Currently, he is the principal investigator for the e-Infrastructure Use Cases and Service Usage Models (eIUS) project, co-investigator on the Virtual Research Environment for the Study of Documents and Manuscripts project, and co-investigator for the digital repositories-related Bridging the Interoperability Divide project. 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.
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OSS Watch is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee.