George Oates (birth name Georgina Oates, born 1973) is an Australian-born designer and entrepreneur, best known for being the first designer of the photo-sharing website

Flickr Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and profession ...

and for creating the

Flickr Commons Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and professional ...

program. Since 2007 she has worked in the cultural heritage sector and is regarded as "increasingly a go-to expert on digital archives". She has also written a book called "If Only The Grimms Had Known Alice", a retelling of the Grimm brothers' fairy tales to include female characters.

Early life

Oates was born in

Adelaide Adelaide ( ) is the capital city of South Australia, the state's largest city and the fifth-most populous city in Australia. "Adelaide" may refer to either Greater Adelaide (including the Adelaide Hills) or the Adelaide city centre. The dem ...

, Australia, to an Australian father and a British mother, and is the youngest of three siblings.

Career

In 1996, Oates was in the first group of employees at th
Ngapartji Multimedia Centre
in Adelaide, where she taught the general public how to use the internet and went on to teach courses in HTML and web design. After working in the web industry there for the next seven years, she left Australia in 2003 to start work at Ludicorp, the company that went on to make

. After four years responsible for Flickr's design, Oates invented the

program, designed to make public photography collections available on Flickr with no known copyright restrictions. The first partner for the program was the

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library ...

, and it launched in January 2008. Oates was laid off by Yahoo at the end of 2008. In 2009, she started work as director of the

Open Library Open Library is an online project intended to create "one web page for every book ever published". Created by Aaron Swartz, Brewster Kahle, Alexis Rossi, Anand Chitipothu, and Rebecca Malamud, Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive, ...

project at the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

. In her time there she also designed new interfaces for th
Book Reader
the

Wayback Machine The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows the user to go "back in time" and see ...

, and th
9/11 Archive
From 2011 to 2014, Oates was art director at

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

data visualization studio Stamen Design. While in San Francisco, she was a judge for the 2013 Information is Beautiful Awards. In 2014 she launched her own company calle
Good, Form & Spectacle
which has completed projects for institutions like

The British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docume ...

The Victoria and Albert Museum The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and nam ...

and

Wellcome Library The Wellcome Library is founded on the collection formed by Sir Henry Wellcome (1853–1936), whose personal wealth allowed him to create one of the most ambitious collections of the 20th century. Henry Wellcome's interest was the history of me ...

. Oates has spoken publicly about her work around the world since 2005, including at keynote speeches at Smithsonian 2.0, OCLC Futurecast, and Europeana Tech 2015, and is a public advocate for open cultural data and content. Oates returned to Flickr Commons in 2021, with a plan to revitalize the program.

Appointments and honours

In 2011, Oates was appointed a

Research Associate Research associates are researchers (scholars and professionals) that usually have an advanced degree beyond a Master's degree. In some universities/research institutes, such as Harvard/Harvard Medical School/Harvard School of Public Health, th ...

Smithsonian Libraries Smithsonian Libraries and Archives is an institutional archives and library system comprising 21 branch libraries serving the various Smithsonian Institution museums and research centers. The Libraries and Archives serve Smithsonian Institutio ...

. She is also a non-executive director of Postal Heritage Services, a subsidiary of

The Postal Museum The Postal Museum (formerly the British Postal Museum & Archive) is a postal museum run by the Postal Heritage Trust. It began in 2004 as The British Postal Museum & Archive and opened in Central London as The Postal Museum on 28 July 2017. Si ...

, and is on the advisory board of the

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British ...

br>Labs
initiative, a

Mellon Foundation The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York City in the United States, simply known as Mellon Foundation, is a private foundation with five core areas of interest, and endowed with wealth accumulated by Andrew Mellon of the Mellon family of Pitt ...

-funded program to increase access to the library's collections.

Bibliography

*''If Only the Grimms Had Known Alice'', George Oates, 2014,

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Oates, George Living people People from Adelaide Australian women computer scientists Australian women company founders Australian company founders 1973 births