Irina Bolychevsky (born 1986) is a British activist and data specialist, focused on

Open Data Open data are data that are openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shareable by anyone for any purpose. Open data are generally licensed under an open license. The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "open(-so ...

, decentralized technologies, and

technical standard A technical standard is an established Social norm, norm or requirement for a repeatable technical task which is applied to a common and repeated use of rules, conditions, guidelines or characteristics for products or related processes and producti ...

s. She is currently director of standards and interoperability at the

NHSX NHSX was a United Kingdom Government unit from early 2019 to early 2022, with responsibility for setting national policy and developing best practice for National Health Service (NHS) technology, digital and data, including data sharing and trans ...

of the

United Kingdom Government His Majesty's Government, abbreviated to HM Government or otherwise UK Government, is the central executive authority of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

. She has been part of large organizations in those fields, including the

Open Knowledge Foundation Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a global, non-profit network that promotes and shares information at no charge, including both content and data. It was founded by Rufus Pollock on 20 May 2004 in Cambridge, England. It is incorporated in Engla ...

, the

World Wide Web Consortium The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...

, and the

Open Data Institute The Open Data Institute (ODI) is a non-profit private company limited by guarantee, based in the United Kingdom. Founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Nigel Shadbolt in 2012, the ODI's mission is to connect, equip and inspire people around the ...

, and worked for the UK,

Dubai Dubai (Help:IPA/English, /duːˈbaɪ/ Help:Pronunciation respelling key, ''doo-BYE''; Modern Standard Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic: ; Emirati Arabic, Emirati Arabic: , Romanization of Arabic, romanized: Help:IPA/English, /diˈbej/) is the Lis ...

and

UAE The United Arab Emirates (UAE), or simply the Emirates, is a country in West Asia, in the Middle East, at the eastern end of the Arabian Peninsula. It is a federal elective monarchy made up of seven emirates, with Abu Dhabi serving as i ...

government administrations. She co-founded Redecentralize.org, an

advocacy group Advocacy groups, also known as lobby groups, interest groups, special interest groups, pressure groups, or public associations, use various forms of advocacy or lobbying to influence public opinion and ultimately public policy. They play an impor ...

promoting decentralized technologies.

Work

She was the

product owner Scrum is an agile team collaboration framework commonly used in software development and other industries. Scrum prescribes for teams to break work into goals to be completed within time-boxed iterations, called ''sprints''. Each sprint ...

of the open-source open data portal

CKAN The Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) is an open-source open data portal for the storage and distribution of open data. Initially inspired by the package management capabilities of Debian Linux, CKAN has developed into a powerful da ...

from 2011 to 2014, the period in which it was redesigned in a 2.0 version and where she piloted the transition from a mostly national use in 2011, to international adoption. In this period, she managed its adoption by and relaunch of

data.gov Data.gov is a U.S. Government website launched in late May 2009 by the Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the United States, Vivek Kundra. Data.gov aims to improve public access to high value, machine-readable datasets generated by th ...

. Her work with CKAN allowed her to win the Open Data Individual Champion Award by the

. Bolychevsky was W3C staff from July 2015 till December 2016. During this period, she was part of the W3C Social Web working group. She actively participated in EU-funded research projects in which the W3C was part of, working on open standards for decentralized technologies developed within the D-Cent project, and on the challenges around open standards within the

Big Data Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data processing, data-processing application software, software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with ...

Europe project. Since then, according to her profile by the

British Computer Society image:Maurice Vincent Wilkes 1980 (3).jpg, Sir Maurice Wilkes served as the first President of BCS in 1957. The British Computer Society (BCS), branded BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, since 2009, is a professional body and a learned ...

, she "developed the personal data infrastructure programme within the UK's

Government Digital Service The Government Digital Service is a unit of the Government of the United Kingdom's Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, tasked with transforming the provision of online public services. It was formed in April 2011 by David Camero ...

", "developed Smart Dubai's and UAE federal policy, regulatory, commercial and technical frameworks for data exchange" and "ran one of the first UK data trust pilots and researched digital identity for the Open Data Institute".

Activism

The group Redecentralize.org, which she co-founded, claims to be "a movement of people pioneering technologies and governance models to redecentralize the web". According to

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...

, it is an "advocacy group that provides support for projects that aim to make the Web less centralized". It has also been defined as a "research policy institute". The group maintains a directory of decentralized web projects which seems to be recognized as the reference list in the field by bloggers and several sites in the field. The group has organized two conferences on the topic, with Bolychevsky as main organizer: in 2015 hosted by ThoughtWorks, and in 2019. These two events hosted speakers such as

Open Rights Group The Open Rights Group (ORG) is a UK-based organisation that works to preserve digital rights and freedoms by campaigning on digital rights issues and by fostering a community of grassroots activists. It campaigns on numerous issues including ma ...

Kevin Marks Kevin Marks is on the Advisory Council of the Open Rights Group, a UK-based Digital Rights campaigning organization and is an Open Web Advocate. He is one of the founders of Microformats. Marks was listed at #13 in ''The Daily Telegraph'' ...

Mozilla Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...

Tantek Çelik Tantek Çelik is a Turkish-American computer scientist, currently the Web standards lead at Mozilla Corporation. Çelik was previously the chief technologist at Technorati. He worked on microformats and is one of the principal editors of seve ...

Ethereum Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether (abbreviation: ETH) is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. Among cryptocurrencies, ether is second only to bitcoin in market capitalization. It is open-s ...

Gavin Wood Gavin James Wood is an English computer scientist, a co-founder of Ethereum, and creator of Polkadot and Kusama. Early life Wood was born in Lancaster, England, United Kingdom. He attended the Lancaster Royal Grammar School. He graduated from ...

OAuth OAuth (short for open authorization) is an open standard for access delegation, commonly used as a way for internet users to grant websites or applications access to their information on other websites but without giving them the passwords. Th ...

's Blaine Cook,

Francis Irving Francis Irving (born 1974) is a British software engineer, freedom of information activist and former CEO of ScraperWiki. Education Irving studied A-levels in Biology, Mathematics, Further Mathematics, Physics and General Studies at high sc ...

, and representatives from Matrix.org, IPFS,

Solid Solid is a state of matter where molecules are closely packed and can not slide past each other. Solids resist compression, expansion, or external forces that would alter its shape, with the degree to which they are resisted dependent upon the ...

and

Secure Scuttlebutt Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) is a peer-to peer communication protocol, mesh network, and self-hosted social media ecosystem. Each user hosts their own content and the content of the peers they follow, which provides fault tolerance and eventua ...

. The group has also hosted smaller meetups, one featuring

BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...

's Bill Thompson, and virtual public meetings, one within the frame of W3C. She was fellow of the London college for political technologists Newspeak House and co-founder of the Coffee House Club. She is currently co-organizor of the Citizen Beta civic tech meetups, and director/trustee of not-for-profit Eco Soul hostel.

International recognition

In 2014, she was awarded with the Open Data Individual Champion Award for her work with CKAN, as part of the first Open Data awards by the Open Data Institute. Since 2018, she sits on the Board of Directors of the Open Knowledge Foundation, where she was previously Commercial Director. She has been featured by the New Yorker and twice in the BBC. She was highlighted by the British Computer Society in their "Women in Open Source" series. She has been keynote speaker in several conferences including:

Rest REST (Representational State Transfer) is a software architectural style that was created to describe the design and guide the development of the architecture for the World Wide Web. REST defines a set of constraints for how the architecture of ...

Fest, the II Brazilian National Conference on Open Data, MozFest and EmpoderaLive. She has been guest author in the sites of the P2P Foundation, the

Sunlight Foundation The Sunlight Foundation was an American 501(c)(3) nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that advocated for open government. The organization was founded in April 2006 with the goal of increasing transparency and accountability in the United States ...

, the Open Data Institute, the UK

online newspaper An online newspaper (or electronic news or electronic news publication) is the electronic publishing, online version of a newspaper, either as a stand-alone publication or as the online version of a printed periodical literature, periodical. Goin ...

New Socialist, UK's open data portal data.gov.uk, and US's open data portal data.gov.

References

External links

Personal website

Redecentralize website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bolychevsky, Irina 1986 births Living people Internet activists Open data Alumni of the University of Oxford

Work

Activism

International recognition

See also

References

External links