I am standing for election to the Open Rights Group (ORG) Board. I hope to offer experience, knowledge and commitment.
I work in the information technology business and came to ORG via the Open Source and Software Freedom campaigns. I submitted personal evidence to the Government consultation on peer to peer file sharing in 2009, started following the ORG shortly after.
I believe the campaigning priorities in the UK are to do what we can to stop ACTA, pass the Hargreaves Review recommendations and Repeal the Digital Economy Act. I have been writing here on this blog on a number of issues on the digital economy, copyright reform and digital citizenship rights. I believe we need a broader conversation with the people of this country and have tried to move beyond the Civil Liberty arguments, to understand and articulate the economics of scarcity, plenty and free and am now on a journey towards the privacy arguments. I don’t know about you, but I am a knowledge worker, and I “bill for time”; if I don’t work, I don’t get paid and I don’t see why others should! The privacy arguments are also important, and I suspect that, the argument that,
an English (wo)man’s home is their castle
will also have resonance. We shouldn’t criminalise our children, we shouldn’t privatise copyright law enforcement and we shouldn;t let industrial content break our privacy laws.
I am a Labour Party member and also a member of the GMB; although I am standing as an individual. I represent neither of these organisations. I just believe that without a conversation with the Trade Unions, their members, and the Labour Party, we, as digital liberty campaigners, are unlikely to win.
I have public policy experience, a long time ago I worked in the Civil Service, and more recently sat on the EU’s NESSI steering committee, an industry NGO advising the commission on the R&D budget and acting as an incubator for internet research projects.