New Member Introductions

Before I start with mine, we can use this topic as the main one and give the choice for new members to start a new one or just post here. If we do this, can this be pined? Thanks.

I’m Svetlana Belkin and I’m a part of the Open Science working group. I’m a biology major with a focus on molecular and cellular biology (at Unv. of Cincinnati, we are required to have a focus before we graduate with our BS). I’m here to help to build a community around Open Science, mainly a Meta community that acts like a hub.

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Great to have you involved. Re your point about pinning - do you mean that for the front page or to have this pinned here?

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Pinned in the catergory not the fornt page of the forums for those who don’t want to make a new topic.

Afterthought: You think it might be better if there was just one topic for the new introductions rather than having a whole catergory. I don’t know why Bill Mills of the Mozilla Science Lab decided to create a “new member introductions” catergory.

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Hello, I’m an Android and PHP Developer based up in Scotland. My practical focus in Open Data at the moment is all on Event data, due to my Open Source community calendar project - http://ican.openacalendar.org/ Also regular attendee of OKFN meetings in Scotland.

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I’m kind of the let’s build an enterprise platform for a distributed economy and see how far we get / M.S. in an engineering field guy. http://adistributedeconomy.blogspot.com/ Jenny Malloy, I am not done with the slideshow just yet, but there are a few slides that will be included in some form at the link.

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Welcome @bshambaugh!

My turn now!

My name is Gustavo, I am 22 years old and I am reaching you from Portugal! I found out about OKFN from a friend who is actively participating in one of OKFN’s work groups.
I, myself, have a degree in Bank and Insurance Management and I am also finishing a master degree in Industrial and Firms Economics. Thus, I felt very excited to collaborate with the Open Economics section.

If there is anything else that I may help, feel free to let me know :smile:

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welcome @gsilvapt - great to meet you and we welcome your contributions!

Thanks @rufuspollock! Great to meet you all :slight_smile:

Altough I have already introduced myself in today’s hangout, this is my official greeting to the forum.
My name is Rodrigo Parra, I am an Informatics Engineer (that’s the local career name) working with Open Data from Asunción Paraguay. I program for the Governance and Democracy Program from USAID/CEAMSO, working together with government institutions. So, I’m mainly a hacker :smile:

Just wanted to share some of the work we’ve been doing so far (hope I’m not out of line here):

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Great to have your participation @rparra

Hi All,
This is Hasive Chowdhury Ambassador of OK Bangladesh. Currently works as the Social Media Interaction Expert & Assignment Reporter of The Daily Prothom-Alo (the highest circulated Bengali newspaper). In addition to this, I involved with Bengali Wikipedia as Administrator and Director of Wikimedia Bangladesh. I involve with Wikipedia since 2008. I am also the Asst. General Secretary & Coordinator (PR) of Bangladesh Open Source Network (BdOSN), Task Force Member of Mozilla Bangladesh Community, Central Team MOVers of BangladeshMathematical Olympiad Committee (BdMOC) & Core Team member & Coordinator (PR) of Society for the Popularization of Science, Bangladesh (SPSB). As a writer, I writes about Open Source, Wikipedia, and Open Knowledge regularly. As author my five books in Bengali about Open Source Software, Bengali Wikipedia, Mobile Apps & Computer helpline which were published at the National Book Fair. I loves to work for open source & open knowledge & he has been involved with this type of work since 2006.

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Greetings all,
My name is Dhanaraj Thakur and I am the research manager at the Alliance for Affordable Internet. We are part of the Web Foundation and so have I have a lot of interest in many of the issues being discussed here. Looking forward to sharing.

take care,
Dhanaraj

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Hi all,

Just a quick message to introduce myself on this forum, although I’ve met many of you here over the last 7-8 years around open data or making.
My name is Ton, and been involved in open data across Europe with my own company and outside of Europe for the World Bank, since early 2008. Also involved in making/fablabs since 2007 or so.

Currently mostly working on using open data as a policy instrument for government bodies to create impact in new ways.

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Hi All,

I am Nikesh Balami from Nepal and I had been working with Open Knowledge Nepal since 2012 and currently I am lead of Open Government Data and Open Development working lead for Nepal. I help our Local community to mange all its program and projects.

Regards,
Nikesh

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Greetings to all,

I’m Andreas from Berlin, Germany, currently working on a dissertation in social/political philosophy which is partly about open knowledge, open data, open government as well as open/libre/free software, the access to knowledge movement, the commons movement and commons based peer-production. [The main focus is on a contemporary theory of the public sphere which takes the digital structural transformation into account. It is based on the approach of the American philosopher John Dewey.]

In 2014, I was a volunteer at the Open Knowledge Festival. And I participated in the open data day in 2014 and 2015 in Berlin. I am working as an IT administrator and database programmer, too, and I have experience in web development and publishing.

I am looking forward to inspiring discussions and exchange here!

Take care!
Andreas

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Hi all,

My name is James G. Kim. I am new to here, and just became a local organiser. I have been working with Web technologies for more than a decade, and have developed a strong belief that innovation can be cultivated through openness and collaboration while witnessing how the Web has evolved over time. I am currently working on my Ph.D. in Medical Informatics, serving a role as an innovator and researcher at a company based in Seoul, Korea.

I am thrilled to be a member of this community, and looking forward to exciting discussions.

Cheers,
James

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Hi all,

I’m Greg Kempe and I work for Code for South Africa. We advocate for open data in South Africa and do a bunch of other work around using technology and data to support informed decision-making to drive social change.

We’re about to launch the South African City open data census at http://za-city.census.okfn.org.

Cheers,
Greg

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Hi all,

Nice to be here. My name is Offray Luna, and I’m from Colombia (South America). I came here motivated by the Small Data blog post and then I discovered a lot of common quests and complementary approaches with projects like government spendings, datahub.io and others. For example I’m also interested in small frictionless data, but I’m using “pocket/off-line infrastructures” which are better for the conditions of connectivity and autonomy we have/need in places of the Global South.

(The next part had a lot of links but because of current rules on new members amount of links I left only 2. The ones with “” are not working and are there just for reference. If someone is interested I can share them later, two at the time :slight_smile: )

My main interest on data is “data activism”. I’m working in a small and new project called grafoscopio, a moldable tool which has an Iceberg metaphor for writing and data visualization and we have been building and using it at HackBo, our local hackerspace, for some experiments like Visualizing politicians/political discourses on Twitter and what I call “Silence Maps” (draft example). We’re making workshops, like the “data week” to teach people how to use and adapt grafoscopio to suit their needs, using small data examples (like the one referred on the Silence Maps).

I and others would like to connect initiatives and efforts and I think that having our conversations in this place is a good start for that. So here comes my question: How can I create a new “category” for discussing local open data projects in Spanish?

Thanks,

Offray

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I saw your request on the Meta category, no need to flag a post to catch our attention.