Laura James
Co-director, Open Knowledge Foundation
Dr Laura James - co-director of the Open Knowledge Foundation, and co-founder and director of Makespace, a non-profit community workshop in Cambridge. Previously Laura has worked in high tech R&D in Cambridge and Silicon Valley at AT&T Labs, and in the very different working environment of innovation in research and teaching technologies at the University of Cambridge.
Laura was the first employee and VP Engineering at AlertMe.com, a startup building consumer electronics for home monitoring and control (taking the technical side of the business from a back of the envelope concept to an operational service with a production line in China), and more recently was Head of Knowledge at True Knowledge the makers of Evi.com. Laura has a PhD and an MEng in Engineering from the University of Cambridge. She is an alumnus of the Royal Academy of Engineering Leadership Award scheme and was a NESTA Crucible fellow in 2007. She has been a Chartered Engineer since 2006.