Our 2019 speakers

Jeni Tennison

Jeni Tennison is the CEO of the Open Data Institute. Jeni sits on the UK’s Open Standards Board; the Advisory Board for the Open Contracting Partnership; the Board of Ada, the UK’s National College for Digital Skills; the Co-operative’s Digital Advisory Board; and the Board of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data.

Mujib Rahman

Mujib is a Director of Teaching and Learning and a Senior Lecturer in Civil Engineering at Brunel University.

His research addresses issues within the theme of “resilient infrastructures”, especially the role of investigation, protection, maintenance and rehabilitation towards extending the life of pavements, bridges and heritage structures.

Tom Forth

Tom Forth is Head of Data at The Open Data Institute Leeds. He also helps to run two businesses collecting and working with data, The Data City and imactivate.

He is particularly interested in data as infrastructure, and the need to maintain the availability and quality of data in order to power efficient modern services in both the private and public sector.

Shannon Mattern

Shannon Mattern is a Professor at The New School in New York, where she researches and teaches about media architectures and infrastructures; you can find her at wordsinspace.net.

Chris Adams

Chris is an environmentally focussed tech generalist, spending the last ten years working in tech startups, blue chip companies and government, as a user researcher, product manager, developer, sysadmin and UX-er. He is an organiser of ClimateAction.tech, a community for technology professionals taking climate action, and a director of the Green Web Foundation.

Donna Young

Donna is the Curator of Herbarium at World Museum, National Museums Liverpool and a Trustee of NatSCA (Natural Sciences Collections Association).

She sometimes describes her job as “keeping dead things dead”, and in particular is interested in the preservation and maintenance of this valuable resource.

Ben Ward

Ben is a network architect and sensor herder at Love Hz. Designing networked devices for maintenance is a big part of his thinking and daily work. He’ll share some experiences from running a network of flood sensors, a fleet of automated guided vehicles and explore why the Internet of Things (IoT) is so difficult to maintain.

Juliet Davis

Dr. Juliet Davis is a Reader in Architecture and Urbanism at the Welsh School of Architecture at Cardiff University where she teaches urban design and is Director of Postgraduate Teaching.

She completed her Ph.D in the area of City Design and Social Science at the London School of Economics in 2011, which focused on the making of London’s Olympic legacy as an urban future. She initially trained as an architect, graduating from Cambridge University with a first-class degree in 1995, and practiced as an architect for ten years in London before entering academia in 2007.

Her research interests include designerly approaches to the future, notions of improvement and regeneration in processes of planned urban change, regeneration strategies and urban care ethics.

Tom van Deijnen

Tom of Holland is a self-taught mender who started the Visible Mending Programme to inspire people to repair their textiles to make them last longer and wear a darn as a badge of honour.

Mia Ridge

Dr Mia Ridge is a Digital Curator at the British Library, and will talk about the different narratives about ‘digital’ in cultural heritage organisations and how they can make maintenance harder or easier to support and resource. Mia is also part of the Library’s Digital Scholarship team.

Edward Saul

Edward Saul is a Chartered Engineer and Member of the Institution of Structural Engineers with a wide experience of bridge design and infrastructure management. Edward now lectures and undertakes research at Liverpool John Moores University and has an interest in Smart Structures, Structural Health Monitoring and Advanced Manufacturing Technology.

Indy Johar

Indy is a designer and architect, and co-founded multiple social ventures such as Impact Hub Birmingham, and Dark Matter, a field laboratory focused on radically redesigning the bureaucratic & institutional infrastructure of our cities, regions and towns for a more democratic and distributed future.