Hello everyone! I am Viviane Vladimirschi, a doctoral candidate and OER researcher from São Paulo, Brazil. I study at Athabasca University, Alberta, Canada and my research study is geared towards undertaking an intervention in a Brazilian K-12 public school to plan, design, and implement a pilot OER Development Course (ODC) for the teachers who participate in the study, and measure its effectiveness in terms of awareness-raising strategies, content taught, and instructional approaches utilized so as to extract OER learning design principles. On May 19th I will undergo the candidacy exam and subsequently, if all goes well, I expect to initiate my study. It is a pleasure to be part of this community, learn with and from you all, and soon contribute to this community with my experience here in Brazil. I look very much forward to this rich intercultural collaborative open exchange. 
Greetings OKers!
I’m Jamison Miller, a PhD candidate in education at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, USA and a member of the Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN). I am interested in theoretical grounding in open education, open education practices, open access, and open policy. My work is informed by critical social theory, and I am most interested in the emancipatory potentials of open in education.
Happy to be posting right after Viviane, a fellow GO-GN member who I met at the Open Education Consortium meeting in Kraków last month–hi, Viviane! Very pleased to find this group, and looking forward to engaging with the OK International Network.
Hello everyone!
I am Riccardo, a software developer from Milano, Italy and close to finish my PhD in computer science. I work in the eCommerce domain, and interested in the publication, sharing and reuse of open data in such domain.
I am looking forward to contribute to the community!
Hello everyone, my name is Pinkie. I’m an open data advocate and practitioner based in Cambodia. I am currently supporting a regional open data scale-up to provide relevant, timely, and actionable information on development trends in the Mekong Region with Open Development Initiative.
Looking forward to connecting with and learning from the community.
Hello everyone. My name is Andy. I’m an open source software developer in Berlin, Germany.
I am currently a developer and project manager for Kiron.ngo, open higher education for refugees, in Germany. I have also spent a lot of time in community disaster relief as an open source programmer and working on the ground with relief efforts.
Looking forward to connecting more with OKFN and the community.
Hi Andy
This is Javiera from the Open Education Working Group, and I have been mentioned Kiron a couple of times in the last weeks and sounds really interesting , so it would be great if you can tell us more about it in the Open Education Projects section as I’m sure some of the members of the group will be happy to hear more. Also, if you want to write a post about Kiron for our blog please ping me 
Hi everyone, I’m Ben Meghreblian and I recently joined Open Knowledge as the Community Manager for OpenTrials, a project which aims to produce an open, easy-to-use, linked database of information about the world’s clinical trials.
I come from a background of psychology and IT, and previously worked on AllTrials, a related campaign calling for greater transparency in clinical trials. I’ve also been involved in research using FOI requests to reveal UK university spending on academic journal access (data + visualisation).
I have general interests in open-related topics, but particularly open science and open access. I’m also interested in issues relating to privacy, surveillance, and freedom of expression and information.
I live in London, work around the city, and attend the OK England meetups, so maybe I’ll bump into some of you fellow locals or those passing through!
Hi Javiera. Thanks for reaching out. I’ll message you about the blog now and write a post later day.
Hi All,
I’m the project lead of the Budgetpedia project of Civic Tech Toronto (Canada).
We have a prototype of a budget explorer, and are settling down to implement production version. So this is a good time to tap into standards and such. Looks like this is where the action is. Just looking things over, I have a ton of questions, but that will come in good time I’m sure!
Dear OKF Friends,
I am happy to be part of this forum. I am called Didier Demassosso, iIam from Cameroon. I am a school counsellor, mental health worker and clinical psychology student at the University of Yaounde I. Currently wanting to graduate with a masters in clinical psychology. I am very interested in information and data as a school counsellor and as a (mental) health educator. That is why been part of this group and the whole Open Data movement is very important to me. I should absolutely also say that I am member of the Open Data Community in Cameroon and I currently edit its facebook page.
It is a matter of necessity having free access to data and information for it indeed contributes to all sorts of possible developement.
Thank you!
Didier
Hi all,
I’m Victor, from Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and I’m a developer, sysadmin and free software enthusiast.
I recently joined OKI as part of the OpenTrials team and I’m currently working on node.js issues we have open regarding the website and API, then probably moving towards the python/data side of things.
Previously I worked in compliance technology, doing transaction monitoring (python and php for the curious) for banks and other financial institutions as a day job, while having a handful of projects on the side. Probably the most notable one (still ongoing) is Elvis, where we take all the public procurements actors and place them in interactive networks so the spending patterns come out of their hiding. Why we do this? Because it’s our money they’re spending
Other than that, I’m a long time advocate for freedom of technology and information, been working with FSF/FSFE on various campaigns and served as the CTO & CEO of Fundația Ceata (sorry, website in Romanian). In Romania I had a few activities around open data, organising hackathons, working a bit with government officials to push forward the OGP platform and some other things I forgot.
Anyway, that’s too much of an introduction already, so I might reuse it for the profile here 
P.S.: Big kudos for whoever proposed and set up Discourse, it’s a platform one can only 
HI,
I’m Kate, from Poland. Working as Open Cities Program Coordinator in ePanstwo Foundation (we are running also Code For Poland teams in cities).
I cannot code. I’m using data, finding patterns, writing context, explaining data to the citizens I’m working with cities in Poland, Ukraine and (hope so!) Lithuania
Privately: I really keen on financial data (budget consultation) and transport data (who, where and when is using public transport and how to change it, how ticket prices are influencing on people using buses?)
Hi Henrik!
I am sure the Open Soending team would love to speak to you!
@pwalsh @adam @victoriavlad
Hi Kate!
Welcome on board!
Look at the OpenSpending category for more information about financial data!
Hello!
I am sure our Camerron ambassadors will be happy to speak with you! Do you know them?
Dear Mor,
I will be happy to speak with them!
Best Regards,
Didier
My name is Mehdi and I’m a software engineer actively involved in bringing state of the art data technologies to material science community. I’m interested in metadata, creating standard domain specific vocabulary to describe mainly physical models and data and applying machine learning techniques on data.
Hi Mor,
I was looking for a particular space for formal introduction or any format for that. perhaps this is the place only.
I am into the field of Agriculture research, Agriculture Economics to be specific. I have had done a feasibility study on trade opportunities of fruits and vegetables in bulk between SAARC countries and improving Socio-Economic life of common people. Now I am at very crucial stage of that an doing it practically. I would need help from almost anyone from that region in form of information and support. Though the international agency supporting the project is no more actively promoting it, but I have thought not to abandon it and carry it through with websites like this one and other social sites.
So I would need help and support of all and anyone from the concerned countries. From my words like help, support or assistance I never mean financial assistance nor I require it. Anyhow I am very positive to get it through and am already halfway through. All I expect is some soft help like getting some small info or address from other country, as sometimes its very difficult and un viable to visit a different place/country just to get some small piece of information.
And I would use this forum to post all the research information I have and breifs or the information I am looking for,
With Regards,
Dr. Gurpreet S
My name is Brandon Warner and i’m a resident of Jacksonville, FL. As part of a change in direction in the last year I’m committing more time to social and environmental projects and formed www.wujitechnology.com to help embody that. One or my initial projects is to complete the US City Open Data Census for Jacksonville Florida and form a community around open data and some of the potential solutions to some of the challenges our city faces. I look forward to this new adventure and communicating with you all!
Hello, I’m François Pelletier, from Lévis, Québec, Canada. I’m mainly involved with FACIL which is a NGO active in Québec advocating free software, commons, open data and privacy. I am an organizer for Open Data Day and Software Freedom Day in Quebec City. I work with all kind of data on my day job as a data scientist in an insurance company.