About this event

OpenUK has been reporting on open-source software since 2021 and encouraging a collaborative approach across the global research community, leading this with bi-monthly events.

Each meeting is free to attend and anyone is welcome to join and learn more about what research is being undertaken and the reporting coming down the line.

Show and Tell sessions are set for March 15, May 17, July 12, Sep 20, and Dec 06.

Attendance at this event is subject to the following OpenUK policies:-

• Code of Respect
• Competition Policy

If you would like to hear more about OpenUK, please sign up for our newsletter by clicking here.

Resources

• Columbia Convening Overview: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/ai/introducing-columbia-convening-openness-and-ai/
• Towards a Framework for Openness in Foundation Models, one of the documents associated with the Columbia Convening: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.15802
• Dataset Convening Overview: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/dataset-convening/
• Open GenAI: LLMs (simplified table) https://opening-up-chatgpt.github.io/figure.html
• Show and Tell July 2024 (Including Dr Jennifer Barth’s reporting)

Speakers

Amanda Brock, CEO, OpenUK

Amanda is the UK organisation for the business of Open Technology: open source software, open hardware, open data, open innovation, open standards and open access AI – with the purpose of UK Leadership and Global Collaboration in Open Technology. She is also the Executive Producer of State of Open Con 25 taking place 4 – 5 February 2025 in London and has produced 2023 and 24 events. Appointed member of the Cabinet Office’s Open Standards Board; and both UKRI’s UK Exascale Science and Industry Advisory Board and Digital Research Infrastructure Advisory Board, she is a commercial Advisory Board Member at California Cyber Security company Mimoto and at the Scottish Geo Spatial Data company Space Aye. She is also an Advisory Board Member of KDE and a European Representative of the Open Invention Network.

Amanda is a judge in the IDG Foundry CIO 100 in 2023 and 2024, having been a Judge in the We Are Tech Women Rising Star Awards in 2020-22. Listed as the 37th Most Influential Woman in UK Tech by Computer Weekly in 2023 and in Computing’s IT Leaders 100 2023, and the INvolve HERoes list of 100 global women executives driving change by example in 2022 -23. She was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award in the Women, Influence & Power in Law Awards UK in 2022.

A regular contributor to the tech press, she is the editor of Open Source Law, Policy and Practice (2nd edition) published by Oxford University Press in October 2022, with open access thanks to the Vietsch Foundation https://amandabrock.com/books

Dr Jennifer Barth, Founder and Research Director, Symmetry and Research Director OpenUK

Jenn has more than 15 years of experience leading independent research on the intersections of emerging technologies and socioeconomic change. She provides companies with independent thought leadership and media engagement opportunities on global issues impacting and shaping our current and future technical-social lives.

Her work spans the digital through to social and economic change. She has looked at sustainability, workforce skills and organisational competitiveness strategies through and beyond the pandemic with Microsoft and many other big and small organisations and works as the Chief Research Office researching the role of Open Source Software and its potential to fuel the circular economy with OpenUK. She has experience working on the human impact of artificial intelligence (AI) through fieldwork experiments with IBM Watson, Microsoft and other providers. She is skilled at blending research methods and working with people to bring to life the stories behind numbers. Dr Barth earned her DPhil in Geography from the University of Oxford.

Aviya Skowron, Head of Policy and Ethics, Eleuther AI

Aviya is the Head of Policy and Ethics at EleutherAI, where they focus on policy for openly available AI models. They translate EleutherAI’s expertise in machine learning into policy recommendations informed by the latest LLM research and promote best practices among open source and “open-ish” AI developers. In addition to open source advocacy, Aviya works on data documentation and licensing for generative AI.

Andreas Lisenfeld, Associate Professor, Radboud University, Nijmegen

Andreas Liesenfeld is an Assistant Professor at Radboud University where he researches the societal and regulatory implications of emerging language technologies. His current work focuses on technology assessment, open source generative AI, and comparative AI regulation. At the Centre for Language Studies (CLS), Andreas Liesenfeld is a member of the language technology expertise group and, in collaboration with the Netherlands eScience center, develops open source research software for computational linguistics and natural language processing.

Mark Dingemanse, Associate Professor, Radboud University, Nijmegen

Mark Dingemanse is Associate Professor in Language and Communication at Radboud University Nijmegen. He is a PI of Futures of Language, a transdisciplinary research programme that looks at artisanal and artificial ways of languaging. The research in his group is funded by generous talent grants from the Dutch Research Council NWO and is strongly collaborative in nature. His work on generative AI is aimed at fostering critical AI literacy among researchers and the general public.