Meet the co-chairs for OER17: Josie Fraser and Alek Tarkowski

Josie Fraser

Josie Fraser is a UK-based Social and Educational Technologist. She has worked with government, schools, further education providers and universities, promoting and developing the effective and innovative use of ICT and e-learning policy and practice in the UK and internationally. Working across the broad field of educational technology, she is primarily interested in digital literacy and open education, and in the ways in which social technologies can be used to support learning, organisational change and community development.

Since 2010, she has lead on technology for Leicester City Council’s £340million Building Schools for the Future (BSF) Programme. She is responsible for setting, promoting and delivering an agenda for educational transformation in relation to the use of technology within schools. She is a Trustee of Wikimedia UK, and is currently also producing the new Government Equalities Office funded national cyberbullying guidance, on behalf of Childnet International.

Alek Tarkowski

Alek Tarkowski is a sociologist and activist based in Warsaw, Poland. He is the chairman of Centrum Cyfrowe, a think-and-do-tank building a digital civic society in Poland. He has worked on developing policies and strategies in support of openness and digital literacy across the fields of education, culture and science – both in Poland and internationally. He is primarily interested in the development of policies that ensure openness of public resources, as raw materials for engagement and creativity.

Since 2004, he has been actively involved in the Creative Commons movement, as founder and Public Lead of CC Poland, and as European Policy Fellow since 2013. In 2008, he co-founded the Polish Coalition for Open Education, of which he is currently Vice-Chairman. He is also a member of the Administrative Council of Communia, a European association supporting the digital public domain, and of the Steering Committee of the Open Policy Network. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the Polish Academy of Science.