Simon Phipps is a consultant providing insight and knowledge on open source, digital rights and the emerging meshed economy to businesses and governments worldwide, as the founding principal of Meshed Insights Ltd. His writing is regularly featured in a variety of global publications and he is a frequent keynote speaker. He is a delegate at various de jure standards bodies such as ETSI and ISO on behalf of OSI. He serves as a director of the AlmaLinux OS Foundation.
He was previously President of OSI, the Open Source Initiative (twice) — the non-profit organisation that acts steward of the canonical list of open source licenses and the Open Source Definition — and a director of The Document Foundation, creators of LibreOffice. He is featured in the “Faces Of Open Source” project.
He is the co-founder and executive director of Public Software CIC, which hosts small or new community activities in the free and open source community.
Before his current work, he was involved at a strategic level in some of the world’s leading technology companies. In addition to senior leadership positions he has worked in such hands-on roles as field engineer, programmer and systems analyst, as well as run a software publishing company. He worked with OSI standards in the eighties, on the first commercial collaborative conferencing software in the nineties, and helped introduce both Java and XML at IBM. He was a founding Director of the Open Mobile Alliance.
In mid-2000 he joined Sun Microsystems where he helped pioneer Sun’s employee blogging, social media and community engagement programmes. In 2005 he was appointed Chief Open Source Officer, coordinating Sun’s extensive participation in Free and Open Source software communities until he left in 2010. In that role he oversaw the conversion to Free software of the full Java platform, the Solaris UNIX operating system, the SPARC architecture and the rest of Sun’s broad software portfolio, all under OSI-approved Free licenses.
He holds a degree in electronic engineering and is a former Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the British Computer Society. His personal home page and blog is http://www.webmink.com.
FAQ
- Do you have any other web sites?
- Yes, loads! Visit the MinkHub to find them.
- Will you speak at our event?
- I’m always pleased to be invited to events. Please see the events page.
- Where did that name “Webmink” come from?
- It’s from an old Dilbert cartoon – I was sent a link to it a while back so you can see.
- The US FTC has rules about bloggers declaring sponsorship and interests. You seem to link to Amazon and stuff – anything to declare?
- Yes, I have actually created a declaration of interests because of this.
- Where can I find your résumé/curriculum vitae?
- I’ve not needed one since my first job in 1982, but if it’s really important try my LinkedIn Profile.
- Can I support your web site in some way?
- Thanks for asking! Yes, I have a page full of suggestions.
Contacting Me
Please use the form below to contact me. No press pitches please – go here. For a phone call about any commercial topic, please book through Clarity.
Want to tell someone about this web page? Its short URL is http://webmink.info
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