Tim Davies

Biography

Tim Davies has spent the last 20 years working at the intersection of technology, participation, and governance as both a researcher and practitioner. His work has explored how shared social challenges call for participatory, collaborative, and collective responses, from piloting digital tools that bring youth voices into local decision-making, to developing data standards that enable public scrutiny of billions of dollars in government spending, to writing about the political dynamics of open data initiatives.

Tim led the World Wide Web Foundation’s Open Data in Developing Countries research network from 2013 to 2015 and directed the development of the Open Data Barometer. He was co-editor of The State of Open Data: Histories and Horizons in 2019 and founding director of the Global Data Barometer project. From 2015 to 2018, Tim was a co-founder and director of Open Data Services Co-operative, a worker-owned team that provided technical support to initiatives including 360Giving, the Open Contracting Data Standard, and OpenOwnership.

Tim is a former fellow of the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and a senior fellow of the Datasphere Initiative. He is a graduate of the Oxford Internet Institute, where he studied Social Science of the Internet, and Oriel College, Oxford, where he studied Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.