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Biographies of the Transparency Board members 

Tom Steinberg

Tom Steinberg is the founder and director of mySociety, a non-profit, open source organisation that runs many of the best-known democracy websites in the UK. These include the Parliamentary transparency website TheyWorkForYou and FixMyStreet. mySociety’s missions are to build websites which give people simple, tangible benefits in the democratic and community aspects of their lives, and which teach the public and voluntary sector how they can use technology better to help citizens.

Steinberg was a policy analyst who worked in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit from 2001 to 2003.

Tom’s most recent publication is The Power of Information Review, co-authored with Ed Mayo and the Strategy Unit, launched in 2007. Tom is convinced of the urgent need for substantial reform in the provision of public sector information from organisations like the Ordnance Survey.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee KBE OM

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a British engineer and computer scientist and MIT professor who invented the World Wide Web, making the first proposal for it in March 1989.

In 2009 Berners-Lee began to work with the UK Government to help make data more open and accessible on the Web, building on the work of the Power of Information Task Force. Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt are the two key figures behind data.gov.uk, the Government project to open up almost all data acquired for official purposes for free re-use.

Professor Nigel Shadbolt

Nigel Shadbolt is Professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deputy Head (Research) of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. He is a Director of the Web Science Trust, and of the Web Foundation - both organisations have a common commitment to advance our understanding of the Web and promote the Web's positive impact on society.

In June 2009 together with Sir Tim Berners-Lee he was appointed to help transform public access to Government information. A major output of this work has been the widely acclaimed data.gov.uk site - a single point of access for all Government non-personal public data.

Rufus Pollock

Rufus Pollock is Director and co-founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation as well as being a member of Creative Commons UK and a country coordinator for the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure. He has worked extensively on issues related to creativity and copyright in the digital age.

Pollock’s background is academic: He is an economist at Cambridge University researching innovation and intellectual property, with particular attention to open models of innovation.