This thread has been set up to provide a space for everyone to introduce themselves. As you find your way here and get settled in, we hope you’ll take a moment to say hi, let everyone know where you’re from, what you’re working on, and anything else you’d like to share.
I’ll start:
My name is Jamaica Jones - I work with Bob Gradeck (@rgradeck) at the University of Pittsburgh, where our team runs a CKAN portal providing access to open data shared by the City, the County, and other partners. I am currently funded through an NSF POSE Phase II award to support the CKAN ecosystem as a Community Coordinator.
I have worked in support of open knowledge initiatives for 20 years, getting my start in open science infrastructure before moving into federal policy work and then finding my way to open source community support, governance, and engagement. I have a particular interest in participatory and locally situated governance, and am also interested in the mutually-informing relationship between values and evaluation.
When I am not working, I enjoy soft-serve ice cream, public pools, and the overlooked, unsung, and yet nevertheless groundbreaking post-punk ingenuity of the B-52s.
As of right now (June 2026), I am one of the lead moderators of the CKAN category here in the OKFN forum. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out via DM or email (jaj160@pitt.edu).
I’m Joel, and I’ve been a member of the CKAN community since 2012!
We got into CKAN shortly after winning the NYCBigApps 3.0 in 2012 with NYCFacets, and we needed a system to store all the metadata/extrametadata we groomed, enriched and curated from NYC’s open data portal.
Since then, we’ve deployed close to 100 CKAN portals across the US!
When I’m not working, I maintain qsv (I don’t consider it work ), I collect Lego bust and helmet sets, and I contribute to several crates in the Rust ecosystem.
I’m Abdur Rahman, Data Engineer @ datHere and Product Owner for the CKAN Ecosystem Catalog.
Coincidentally, I first got connected to this community through the POSE Phase 1 workshop 3 years back, which is also where I met @patricio.delboca. Fast forward to Phase 2, and I’ve been working with the team at datHere alongside the folks at WPRDC to build out the Ecosystem Catalog. Pretty full-circle to now be here on this forum.
The Ecosystem Catalog brings CKAN-powered sites, extensions, tools, and organizations together in one searchable place. We currently have over 1,000 extensions and 740 sites indexed from around the globe, and the goal is to make it easy for anyone in the CKAN community to discover what’s out there and contribute their own.
Outside of work, I do calligraphy, brew coffee across as many methods as I can get my hands on, and have a growing interest in perfumes.
Hey Abdur Rahman! I hadn’t realized that it was a POSE Phase I workshop that first connected you - that is full-circle indeed! Thanks so much for all of your hard work behind the scenes of the Ecosystem Catalog, and for helping us get established here!
Hi all, I’m Ian and you’ll find me at our open developer meetings, on gitter and in the github issues and PRs.
I’ve been involved with the community since 2012 when I started working on open.canada.ca and I’ve been contributing to CKAN core and extension code since 2013.
Hi - I’m glad to be here - I’m Bob and work on the POSE initiative designed to strengthen the CKAN community. I’m at the University of Pittsburgh, where we’ve been using CKAN to host open data for 11 years.
So glad you’re here @wardi. We’ll be looking forward to hearing from you and @jqnatividad about Open Source Week at the UN (and any stray World Cup excitement you might have stumbled across while in NY/NJ).
At the time of writing this post, I’m integrating a geospatial CKAN extension with the new configurable storages API in CKAN 2.12 and opt-in features with the Geoconnex knowledge graph. I’m also building a neat integration testing suite and hope to share it too when ready.
Aside from work, I enjoy traveling and sports with family and friends especially spikeball and pickleball. I’m also building courses such as a beginner-friendly Typst course others have found useful (might be interesting to make a CKAN-related course), self-hosting open-source software, and reading self-help and digital privacy books and articles.
Hope to build software that has beneficial generational impact here while engaging with the community.
Hey Mueez! Welcome, and thanks so much for joining us! I am the CKAN category mod, so let me know if I can help you get settled in. We’d love to learn more about your extension when it’s ready for show and tell.
I am Jesper Zedlitz. I am a computer scientist and I work for the government of Germany’s northernmost federal state Schleswig-Holstein. Since 2019 we are running our open data portal https://opendata.schleswig-holstein.de using CKAN.
We have developed all sorts of software to make our open data infrastructure compatible with the DCAT metadata model and to make the publication of data and metadata as automated as possible.
It seems we’re quite successful at what we do. For the second year running, we have been ranked number one in OKFN’s Open Data Ranking Germany.
On my personal blog (mostly in German), I write a bit about my work and news about open data in Schleswig-Holstein. https://open-north.de
Hi Jesper, and welcome! It’s great to have you here. Thank so much for introducing yourself, and congratulations to you and your colleagues on Schleswig-Holstein’s continued first-place ranking!
Thanks as well for sharing your blog - I really enjoyed paging through it, and suspect others here will as well.
As a small aside, I noticed that the CKAN Ecosystem Catalog (a community-maintained directory of CKAN-based sites, extensions, and tools) includes a few records from Schleswig-Holstein. If they’re relevant to your work, you’re very welcome to claim or update them whenever it’s convenient so that the information stays current. There’s some documentation available to help orient you - please feel free to reach out directly if you need additional help.
We’re so glad you’re here, and hope that you find this a valuable place to connect!
I am a metadata geek from way back - worked in NOAA, NASA, USGS and several other agencies, did some ISO standards development. Worked with Jamaica on NSF impact (https://doi.org/10.1177/18758789251336079) a couple of years (?) ago.
Recently been working mostly in DataCite. My blog at Metadata Game Changers ( Blog — Metadata Game Changers ) describes many of my projects and results. Recently been focusing on tools ( Metadata Game Changers — Metadata Tools ) for exploring repository completeness, connectivity, and history.
I am interested in how the CKAN Community interacts with DataCite and, specifically, how CKAN metadata are shared with DataCite. If you work in that nexus please let me know.
Welcome Ted! It’s so great to see you here. Folks, for those of you who are not committing each of my posts to memory, Metadata Game Changers (of which Ted is coFounder) is the group whose work I mentioned in my prior post about metadata quality. They are, in fact, the folks who helped me begin thinking more critically about that phrase, and what it may mean across contexts.
), I collect Lego bust and helmet sets, and I contribute to several crates in the Rust ecosystem.