Viderum in 2019
Hello. I’m Paul Walsh and I am the new CEO of Viderum. I moved to Viderum after 5 years at Open Knowledge International, where I have been on the Senior Management Team as Chief Product Officer and interim co-CEO.
For the last 12 years I have been working with startups and nonprofits across product, marketing, and engineering roles, on products as diverse as AI-driven chatbots, immersive applications for K-12 math students, and platforms for data management and analysis.
For the last 7 years I’ve worked almost entirely on projects for open data using open source, designing solutions for government and civil society, and managing teams of technologists aligned by a mission to democratize and access to and use of data.
I am very excited to be working with an amazing team at Viderum to deliver exceptional results for our clients in all areas of data management.
Since we announced the ownership changes at Viderum, we’ve been hard at work forging the future for our organization, our partners, and our customers. In this post I want to give an introduction to our senior team members, and a brief overview of our vision - a topic we will return to in future posts.
Our senior team
First, I’d like to introduce you to our new senior team.
Rufus Pollock - President
Rufus founded the Open Knowledge Foundation, created CKAN, and is a pioneer of the open data movement. At Viderum, as well as being majority stakeholder, Rufus works with the management team on business strategy, organisational culture, and product development. Reach Rufus at [email protected].
Paul Walsh - CEO
Coming from the senior management team at Open Knowledge International, Paul brings a wealth of experience in open data strategy and technical implementation, and a strong track record of business development and service delivery for open source and open data projects. Reach Paul at [email protected].
Adam Kariv - CTO
Adam is an experienced technologist, with extensive experience at a range of Israeli startups, and an open data activist, as founder of The Public Knowledge Workshop. Adam is the primary author of the Fiscal Data Package specification, and previously was Engineering Lead at Open Knowledge International. Reach Adam at [email protected].
Esteban Ruseler - COO
Esteban is an experienced financial services project and product manager, with a strong commitment to creating a well and healthy work culture at Viderum. Reach Esteban at [email protected].
Joel Natividad - Solution Architect, US Lead
Joel is an experienced technologist, open source advocate, and entrepreneur, with deep roots in the CKAN community. Joel’s open data consultancy, Ontodia, was acquired by OpenGov in 2016, and Joel has personally overseen the installation of 50+ CKAN instances across the USA. Reach Joel at [email protected].
We are always looking for people who are a great fit for Viderum. Feel free to reach out at [email protected] if you are interested.
Our vision
Viderum was originally spun out of Open Knowledge International to provide professional CKAN services, and we intend to double down on this goal by expanding our CKAN managed hosting, developing specialised implementation offerings, and expanding into CKAN training. Collectively, our team has decades of commitment to, and experience with, CKAN, and we look forward to taking part in the community around CKAN with renewed energy.
We also plan to take Viderum beyond CKAN data portal services, and develop offerings for the entire data management stack based on the innovative “open architecture for data management” that we have been developing over the last decade.
This includes designing solutions around data processing, data governance, and data quality, as well as visualisation and analysis. Our approach to this is informed not only by our work on CKAN, but also our work on Frictionless Data and our use of other open source software for data science and data engineering.
Our goal is to support our clients, and the open source community, with solutions that address all aspects of the “data to insight” value chain.
Our partnerships
We are cultivating some powerful commercial partnerships that will help us shape the future of open source data management solutions.
With Civic Actions, we are working in partnership on sales, marketing, and delivery of “open data open source” solutions for the public sector in the USA.
We retain deep links with Open Knowledge International who not only remain an owner of Viderum but also are our collaborators in many projects, including Frictionless Data, and services work for the Gates Foundation and the World Bank.
We have more partnership news to come, so check back for additional announcements.
Reach out
I’m available to talk open data, open source, data management, and also of course to discuss Viderum’s offerings and how we can help your organization. Feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] or book a meeting directly here
