Scott Wilson, Service Manager

Scott Wilson has worked in both the software industry and public sector, particularly in the areas of interoperability and open standards. Scott has a great deal of practical experience of open development; he is a committer on several projects at the Apache Software Foundation, and is chair of the Apache Wookie project. He is also co-chair of several W3C groups. Scott has also been involved with numerous European-funded collaborative ICT projects, leading work packages and developing proposals.

Rowan Wilson, Research Officer

Rowan Wilson (no relation to Scott) has worked in IT since 1996 and has been active in internet development since its early years. Working within the University Computing Services in Oxford since 2001 Rowan has worked in supporting academic research and development in the Arts and Humanities through the work of the Oxford Text Archive. More recently Rowan has become the licensing specialist within the JISC-funded free and open source software (FOSS) advisory service OSS Watch helping academic developers choose licensing and sustainability models for their works and unpicking problematic FOSS reuse issues where they occur. Rowan was also instrumental in creating the Creative Commons-licensed Open Educational Resources podcasting project at Oxford known as OpenSpires which has released over 1000 Oxford lectures for redistribution and reuse.

Mark Johnson, Development Manager

Mark Johnson comes from a web development background having worked in Further Education as a Moodle developer since 2009. His work has seen him contribute code to the open source VLE as well as starting his own open source projects. He also presents The Ubuntu Podcast and organises OggCamp, a free culture unconference. Mark joined OSS Watch in 2012 and uses the experience he’s gained to advise and support developers who want to contribute to the open source community.

OSS Watch is located within the Academic IT Services unit of the University of Oxford IT Services department (formerly Oxford University Computing Services).

OSS Watch Support

These staff dont work for OSS Watch full time, but are instrumental in supporting the service in its work.

Sebastian Rhatz, Director (Research Support)

Sebastian is the reason OSS Watch is OSS Watch. He wrote the original bid for what was initially a very small pilot advisory service funded by JISC. He had the vision for what OSS Watch might become in time and gathered the team that has helped bring that vision to fruition. Sebastian’s involvement with free and open source software goes back to the late 1980’s as a developer in the community around the TeX typesetting system on which he has published widely. He maintained an open source TeX distribution for ten years and a variety of TeX-related packages. He is now an active member of the XML and XSLT communities most importantly as one of the technical leads for the Text Encoding Initiative in which he serves on the Board of Directors and Technical Council. He is currently Director of Academic IT Services.

Judy McAuliffe, Group Administrator

Judy provides administrative support for the various groups within IT Services including OSS Watch. She has a degree from the University of Auckland New Zealand - majoring in Anthropology and Maori Studies. Her interests include archaeology travel and working on stained glass projects.

OSS Watch Alumni

Inevitably staff both join OSS Watch and eventually move on to further endeavours. You can read about those who have moved on here.