Rufus Pollock (born 1980) is a British economist, activist and social entrepreneur. He has been a leading figure in the global open knowledge and open data movements, starting with his founding in 2004 of the non-profit

Open Knowledge Foundation Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a global, non-profit network that promotes and shares information at no charge, including both content and data. It was founded by Rufus Pollock on 20 May 2004 in Cambridge, UK. It is incorporated in England an ...

which he led until 2015. From 2007-2010 he was the Mead Fellow in Economics at

Emmanuel College, Cambridge Emmanuel College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college was founded in 1584 by Sir Walter Mildmay, Chancellor of the Exchequer to Elizabeth I. The site on which the college sits was once a priory for Dominican mon ...

and from 2010-2013 he was a

Shuttleworth Foundation The Shuttleworth Foundation was established in January 2001 by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth as an experiment with the purpose of providing funding for people engaged in social change. While there have been various iterations of ...

fellow. In 2012 was appointed an Ashoka Fellow and remains an Associate of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge and continues to serve on the board of Open Knowledge International. Since leaving Open Knowledge International, his work has moved to focus more on broader issues of social transformation and in 2016 he co-founded a new non-profit "Life Itself". However, he has continued to work actively on the economics and politics of the information age, including publishing "The Open Revolution: Rewriting the Rules of the Information Age" in 2018. In addition to his academic work, whilst at Open Knowledge International he initiated a wide variety of projects, many of which continue to be active today. For example, in 2005 he created

The Open Definition The Open Definition is a document published by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) (previously Open Knowledge International) to define openness in relation to data and content. It specifies what licences for such material may and may not stipula ...

which provided the first formal definition of open content and

open data Open data is data that is openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shared by anyone for any purpose. Open data is licensed under an open license. The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "open(-source)" movements ...

, and which has remained the standard reference definition. In 2005–2006 he created the first version of

CKAN The Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) is an open-source open data portal for the storage and distribution of open data. Being initially inspired by the package management capabilities of Debian Linux, CKAN has developed into a powerfu ...

, open source software for finding and sharing datasets, especially open datasets. CKAN has continued to evolve and today is the leading open data platform software in the world used by governments including the US and UK to publish millions of public datasets. He also helped to lead or co-found several other organizations including

Open Rights Group The Open Rights Group (ORG) is a UK-based organisation that works to preserve digital rights and freedoms by campaigning on digital rights issues and by fostering a community of grassroots activists. It campaigns on numerous issues including ma ...

(2005, co-founder and board member),

Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) is a non-profit organisation based in Munich, Germany, dedicated to establishing a free market in information technology, by the removal of barriers to competition. The FFII played a ke ...

(2005-6, UK director),

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

UK, Datopian (founder) and Life Itself (co-founder).

Work

On 24 May 2004 Pollock founded in

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

, UK the ''

'' as a global non-profit network that promotes and shares open knowledge including open data and open content - information that is openly and freely available. In 2007 and 2009, Pollock published two important papers regarding the optimal

copyright term The copyright term is the length of time copyright subsists in a work before it passes into the public domain. In most of the world, this length of time is the life of the author plus either 50 or 70 years. Length of copyright Copyright subsists f ...

, where he proposed based on an economical model with empirically-estimable parameters an optimal duration of only 15 years, significantly shorter than any currently existing copyright term. He has held the Mead Research Fellowship in economics at Emmanuel College,

. In 2009, he was credited by web inventor

Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a profess ...

for starting the Raw Data Now

meme A meme ( ) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural i ...

. In 2010 he was appointed as one of the four founding members of the UK Government's

Public Sector Transparency Board The Public Sector Transparency Board was established by the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Cameron, in June 2010 to drive forward the UK Government's transparency agenda. In November 2015, its functions were taken over by thData Steeri ...

. In 2018 he published his first book The Open Revolution: Rewriting the Rules of the Information Age, making it openly available for download online.

Bibliography

The Open Revolution: Rewriting the Rules of the Information Age (2018)

Work

Bibliography

References

External links