Rufus Pollock


Rufus Pollock is an economist and founder of Open Knowledge International. He is a Shuttleworth Foundation alumnus,, an Ashoka Fellow, an Associate of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge and President of Open Knowledge International which he founded in 2004 and served as a board director until 2013. He continues to act as Board Secretary. 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 which provided the first formal definition of open content and open data, and which has remained the standard reference definition. In 2005–2006 he created the first version of CKAN, 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.

Work

On 24 May 2004 Pollock founded in Cambridge, UK the Open Knowledge Foundation 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, 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, Cambridge.
In 2009, he was credited by web inventor Tim Berners-Lee for starting the Raw Data Now meme.
In 2010 he was appointed as one of the four founding members of the UK Government's Public Sector Transparency Board.