Julian Todd is a British computer programmer and activist for

freedom of information Freedom of information is freedom of a person or people to publish and consume information. Access to information is the ability for an individual to seek, receive and impart information effectively. This sometimes includes "scientific, indigeno ...

who works in Liverpool. He was inventor and co-founder of

Public Whip The Public Whip is a parliamentary informatics project that analyses and publishes the voting history of MPs in the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It was developed by Francis Irving and Julian Todd following the 18 March 2003 Parliamentary App ...

with

Francis Irving Francis Irving is a British computer programmer, activist for freedom of information and former CEO of ScraperWiki. Francis Irving developed TortoiseCVS. He co-founded Public Whip with Julian Todd and became a developer of the affiliated T ...

, and also the affiliated

TheyWorkForYou TheyWorkForYou is a parliamentary monitoring website operated by mySociety which aims to make it easier for UK citizens to understand what is going on in Westminster, as well as the Scottish Parliament, the Senedd and the Northern Ireland Assembl ...

website, a project that parses raw

Hansard ''Hansard'' is the traditional name of the transcripts of parliamentary debates in Britain and many Commonwealth countries. It is named after Thomas Curson Hansard (1776–1833), a London printer and publisher, who was the first official print ...

data to track how members vote in the UK Parliament. Initially risking prosecution for reusing the raw data under Crown copyright, they were later successful in getting permission to use it. He has since extended this concept of parsing political transcripts to the General Assembly and

Security Council of the United Nations The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations (UN) and is charged with ensuring international peace and security, recommending the admission of new UN members to the General Assembly, an ...

to establish UNdemocracy.com in 200

Todd is a Director of

ScraperWiki QuickCode (formerly ScraperWiki) was a web-based platform for collaboratively building programs to extract and analyze public (online) data, in a wiki-like fashion. "Scraper" refers to screen scrapers, programs that extract data from websites. "Wi ...

. Todd also writes

science fiction Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel unive ...

short stories, and is cited as a major inspiration for the

Mundane science fiction Mundane science fiction (MSF) is a niche literary movement within science fiction that developed in the early 2000s, with principles codified by the "Mundane Manifesto"Geoff Ryman ''et al''. (2004), "The Mundane Manifesto". The manifesto was or ...

movement.

Publications

A machining strategy for toolmaking, A. Flutter and J. Todd

Game credits

*''

Fat Worm Blows a Sparky ''Fat Worm Blows a Sparky'' is action game written by Julian Todd for the ZX Spectrum and published by Durell Software in 1986. Todd wrote the game in the five months before going to university. It was not ported to other systems, and it is the on ...

'' –

ZX Spectrum The ZX Spectrum () is an 8-bit computing, 8-bit home computer that was developed by Sinclair Research. It was released in the United Kingdom on 23 April 1982, and became Britain's best-selling microcomputer. Referred to during development as t ...

, 1985,

Durell Software Durell Software is a software developer based in Taunton, Somerset in the United Kingdom. The company is a provider of back office administration and accounting software to independent financial advisers, mortgage brokers, and general insurance b ...

References

External links

Julian Todd
at

World of Spectrum The ZX Spectrum () is an 8-bit home computer that was developed by Sinclair Research. It was released in the United Kingdom on 23 April 1982, and became Britain's best-selling microcomputer. Referred to during development as the ''ZX81 Colour ...

Freesteel
- blog with Martin Dunschen focused on

CAM Calmodulin (CaM) (an abbreviation for calcium-modulated protein) is a multifunctional intermediate calcium-binding messenger protein expressed in all eukaryotic cells. It is an intracellular target of the secondary messenger Ca2+, and the bind ...

programming and computational geometry {{DEFAULTSORT:Todd, Julian British computer programmers Living people People from Liverpool MySociety Year of birth missing (living people)