People

Dr Matthew Landauer

Matthew Landauer is the Foundation’s co-founder, and remains on the board.

He has worked in the feature film industry as a software developer for digital visual effects in the UK, the USA and Australia since 1995, was a Director of Visual Appliance Ltd, a visual effects software company. He has a PhD in Physics from the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge University.

Katherine Szuminska

Katherine Szuminska co-founded the OpenAustralia Foundation, remains on the board and part of the team. She’s helped open up government for 10 years now, freeing information, through research, producing content, advocacy, design, production and facilitation.  She’s now focused on making it possible for people to have a more meaningful say in policies and programs, all the way through their lifecycle.

Kat worked with Civil Society and Government colleagues as part of the Federal Government’s first Open Government Forum. This group was set up specifically to help deliver more open, accountable and participatory Government for Australia.

James Polley

Supporter of the OpenAustralia Foundation and host of the very first OAF Hackfest, James Polley came to pitch in to help keep OpenAustralia programs going in 2016. We welcomed him to board a couple of years later in October 2018.

By day, James is the General Manager at the Australian Society of Archivists Inc

Previously

Donna Benjamin

Donna Benjamin rocked up to her first OpenAustralia hackfest back in 2009.

She brings strong leadership from her experience working with boards across the Australian Open Source community. She is also currently on the board of US non-profit, The Drupal Association.Donna’s background in marketing and theatre underpins her belief that ‘the show must go on

Henare Degan

Henare Degan became involved in the OpenAustralia Foundation after meeting Matthew at a Free Software conference.

Since building his first computer at age 12, Henare has had a passion for the possibilities that technology has to offer. In a decade-long career in the IT industry he worked for a diverse range of organisations from start-up companies to small business and large corporations. He has held equally diverse positions in these organisations, from technical roles such as systems administration, through to business analysis and project management.

He is a passionate advocate of Free and Open Source software and is excited by how these principles can be applied to open government and the civic space.

Luke Bacon

Luke Bacon joined the team in 2014 to design They Vote For You and make your MP’s record of votes in parliament clearer and more useful to you. He worked make things a little easier for people who want to improve their society as a designer, developer, and all-round hacker at the OpenAustralia Foundation until October 2017.

Luke also co-founded the independent journalism and archival project Detention Logs. The project was launched with The Guardian, New Matilda, and The Global Mail to publish thousands of pages of evidence of the conditions in Australia’s immigration detention facilities.