About Me
As a day job, I am head of server-side development at iris, an experiential and marketing agency, running a team of developers.
Outside the office, I am also a trustee of UK Citizens' Online Democracy and a director of our mySociety project. I am also a director of the Open Rights Group, having been on their Advisory Council since the organisation's creation, and a technical advisor to Ada Lovelace Day.
In what little spare time I have remaining, you can generally find me on Twitter (as @owenblacker) and the Wikipedia (User:OwenBlacker, originally enough).
My Links
My blog
I'm terrible at updating it, but my blog has a mini-biog page and links to my presence on all those social network platforms.
My Wikipedia profile
iris
My employer
mySociety
mySociety is a non-profit that makes "social good" software, primarily to help ease interaction between citizen & state. See our sites like TheyWorkForYou, WriteToThem and Mapumental for examples of our work. I am a non-exec director and trustee.
Open Rights Group
The Open Rights Group is a grassroots technology organisation which exists to protect civil liberties wherever they are threatened by the poor implementation and regulation of digital technology — our “digital rights”. I sit on the Advisory Council.
Career History
Head of server-side development at iris
From April 1, 2008 and still in this role.
I run the server-side technical discipline at iris, where I line-manage and mentor a team of full-time developers and a varying number of freelancers building the .Net back-end and Flash interop for website projects for a variety of major blue-chip clients.
Senior developer at uSwitch.com
From April 1, 2006 until April 1, 2008.
At uSwitch.com I was both an accessibility champion, working closely with the user experience team, and responsible for building and maintaining the core control library in C# and .Net 2.0, creating accessible, reusable dumb components to generate valid XHTML for the rest of the dev team and providing QA feedback to developers who make their own edits to the library, against code standards I helped write.
Founder and director at Open Rights Group
From September 1, 2005 and still in this role.
The Open Rights Group (ORG) is a UK-based organisation that works to preserve digital rights and freedoms by campaigning on digital rights issues, acting as a media clearinghouse service putting journalists in touch with experts, and fostering a community of grassroots activists. It campaigns against digital rights management (DRM), the extension of the term of copyright protection afforded to sound recordings, e-voting, as well as numerous other issues.
As a member of the Advisory Council and founder member of the organisation itself, I feed into ORG policy and how we should implement those policies, as well as more concrete work — mainly contributing to and proof-reading responses to government and parliamentary consultations. In June 2012, I was elected to the board of directors, so I now also have more responsibilities in the day-to-day running of the organisation.
Founder, director and trustee at mySociety and UK Citizens' Online Democracy
From September 1, 2001 and still in this role.
mySociety has two missions. The first is to be a charitable project which builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. The second is to teach the public and voluntary sectors, through demonstration, how to most efficiently use the internet to improve lives.
Over the last few years, we have build several award-winning websites, such as TheyWorkForYou, WriteToThem, PledgeBank, HearFromYourMP, FixMyStreet and the Number 10 e-petitions system. We have also built a handful of "back of the envelope" sites, such as HassleMe, Downing Street Says and Placeopedia. In addition, we are currently running a campaign to try to persuade Parliament to change the way Bills are published, to allow modern technology to further empower our political system.
Senior developer at The Presentation Company / pres.co / Wheel:
From December 1, 1997 until April 1, 2006.
At a leading digital media agency, my work included an award-winning site for Allied Domecq: a design-intensive accessible website with major C# / .Net customisations to MCMS; e-commerce sites customising Commerce Server; and several years working as lead developer on the Marks & Spencer account, amongst many others.
Education and Qualifications
Randomly, I have a BSc in Molecular Biology and Genetics. :o)
Blog comments by Owen Blacker
