Owen Blacker

Current

• Head of server-side development at Iris Digital
• Advisory Council member at Open Rights Group
• Director and Trustee at mySociety Limited

• Volunteer / Co-ordinator at Stand.org.uk

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Past

• Technical manager and board member at NO2ID
• Senior Developer at uSwitch.com
• Senior Developer at Wheel; pres.co; The Presentation Company

• Production Assistant at Eastern Counties Networks
• Co-Editor at shOUT magazine
• Volunteer at Norwich Gay Men's Health Project
• Production Assistant at Eastern Counties Newspapers
• Production Assistant at Anglia AutoTrader

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5 more...

Education

• University of East Anglia

Recommended

12 people have recommended Owen

Connections

500+ connections

Industry

Internet

Websites

• My Google profile
• mySociety
• Iris Digital (my employers)

Owen Blacker’s Summary

**IMPORTANT** I do not handle recruitment; we have a dedicated recruiter. Please do not contact me with helpful suggestions for recruitment for Iris Digital. Thank you.

I am a technical team lead at Iris Digital, the digital-media company within the Iris Nation, an experiential and marketing agency. I am an experienced and accomplished senior developer, running a team working mainly with Internet technologies, both on the client side and the server side for top tier, blue-chip clients.

When developing, I am generally a C# coder; I am also familiar with Java and big-build website development, particularly for e-commerce stores and content-managed websites and have maintained my enthusiasm for accessible client-side development, including Ajax and cross-browser scripting. I have particular interests in accessibility and information security and, finally, I’m bilingual in English and French, with lesser skills in Spanish and German.

Owen Blacker’s Specialties:

team lead, mentoring, C#, ASP.Net, IIS, control building, accessibility, usability, user experience, information security, code QA

Owen Blacker’s Experience

• Head of server-side development

  Iris Digital

  (Privately Held; Marketing and Advertising industry)

  April 2008 — Present (1 year 8 months)

  I lead — and mentor — a team of four other full-time developers and varying numbers of freelancers building the .Net back-end and Flash interoperability of website projects for major blue-chip clients.
  
  As well as helping co-ordinate our strategies in accessibility, usability and user experience, I provide the technical aspects of scope definition and I design the architecture of our solutions. I am also the technical lead for several of our key clients and assist my team with the clients for which they are technical leads.
  
  On a more strategic level, I work closely with our Technical Group Head and our CTO to help build a robust development infrastructure for a rapidly-growing digital agency.

• Advisory Council member

  Open Rights Group

  (Non-Profit; Non-Profit Organization Management industry)

  September 2005 — Present (4 years 3 months)

  The Open Rights Group (ORG) is a UK-based organisation that works to preserve digital rights and freedoms by campaigning on digital rights issues, acting as a media clearinghouse service putting journalists in touch with experts, and fostering a community of grassroots activists. It campaigns against digital rights management (DRM), the extension of the term of copyright protection afforded to sound recordings, e-voting, as well as numerous other issues.
  
  As a member of the Advisory Council and founder member of the organisation itself, I feed into ORG policy and how we should implement those policies, as well as more concrete work — mainly contributing to and proof-reading responses to government and parliamentary consultations.

• Director and Trustee

  mySociety Limited

  (Internet industry)

  September 2001 — Present (8 years 3 months)

  mySociety has two missions. The first is to be a charitable project which builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. The second is to teach the public and voluntary sectors, through demonstration, how to most efficiently use the internet to improve lives.
  
  Over the last few years, we have build several award-winning websites, such as TheyWorkForYou, WriteToThem, PledgeBank, HearFromYourMP, FixMyStreet and the Number 10 e-petitions system. We have also built a handful of "back of the envelope" sites, such as HassleMe, Downing Street Says and Placeopedia. In addition, we are currently running a campaign to try to persuade Parliament to change the way Bills are published, to allow modern technology to further empower our political system.

• Volunteer / Co-ordinator

  Stand.org.uk

  (Non-Profit; 1-10 employees; Political Organization industry)

  March 1998 — Present (11 years 9 months)

  Stand.org.uk was born out of a campaign to ensure the British Government's encryption policies were translated into rational, workable laws. We created a Web-to-fax gateway combined with a postcode lookup service to identify users' MPs — the technology subsequently relaunched as FaxYourMP.com — to help individuals lobby their MPs for changes to what became the Electronic Communications Act 2000 and the Regulation of Investigatory Power Act 2000. Since then, we have lobbied on various issues, to varying degrees of success, and were founder members of the NO2ID coalition.
  
  My main achievement at Stand.org.uk, as well as blogging about relevant "geek-politics" issues, was arguably one of the several responses sent to government and parliamentary consultations. At 69 pages, it is still considered one of the definitive analyses of the issues surrounding the UK identity card scheme and was wholly written and edited by myself.

• Technical manager and board member

  NO2ID

  (Political Organization industry)

  September 2003 — June 2008 (4 years 10 months)

  NO2ID are a single-issue group focused on the threat to liberty and privacy posed by the rapid growth of the database state, of which "ID cards" are the most visible part. They are entirely independent and do not endorse any party, nor campaign on any other topic.
  
  As coordinator of Stand.org.uk, I was a founder member of the coalition that became NO2ID and have been responsible for various areas of strategy, including writing and editing responses to several government and parliamentary consultations.
  
  From September 2003 until March 2008, I was the Technical Manager for the campaign. In March 2008, I swapped rôles with the National Secretary, before leaving the Staff board a few months later, due to other commitments.

• Senior Developer

  uSwitch.com

  (Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Internet industry)

  April 2006 — April 2008 (2 years 1 month)

  At uSwitch.com I was both an accessibility champion, working closely with the user experience team, and responsible for building and maintaining the core control library in C# and .Net 2.0, creating accessible, reusable dumb components to generate valid XHTML for the rest of the dev team and providing QA feedback to developers who make their own edits to the library, against code standards I helped write.
  
  In addition, I was tech lead for both a traffic-generation initiative and the implementation of a CMS (Percussion Rhythmyx). I worked on some internal tools with an Ajax-heavy front-end, working against an SOA middle-tier. I architected some of the solutions (including an HttpModule for affiliate-tracking) and managed a team of four developers working for disparate parts of the business in an iterative Agile development methodology, liaising with Sales, Search & Product teams, reporting to a board-level steering group on progress and advising on workload prioritisation.

• Senior Developer

  Wheel; pres.co; The Presentation Company

  (Internet industry)

  December 1997 — April 2006 (8 years 5 months)

  At a leading digital media agency, my work included an award-winning site for Allied Domecq: a design-intensive accessible website with major C# / .Net customisations to MCMS; e-commerce sites customising Commerce Server with Ajax to enrich the UI; and asynchronous data-handling to the Java presentation layer for NS&I.
  
  I was tech lead (and technical PM during colleagues’ absence) for a luxury-goods site to meet the brand’s æsthetic needs whilst still WCAG AAA compliant. I led a major Code Cleanse to improve accessibility and SEO for M&S and affiliates schemes for M&S and FT.com. For a pitch, I wrote accessibility assessments & code reviews of competitor sites.
  
  As Senior Developer I guarded QA, accessibility and code integrity of work, ensuring common code was well maintained and used for new projects. I mentored 2 C# developers and a Java developer, and assisted the whole team with the security and integrity of solutions and the rate of exploitation of new standards and browsers.

• Production Assistant

  Eastern Counties Networks

  (Internet industry)

  August 1995 — March 1998 (2 years 8 months)

  After having worked at Eastern Counties Newspapers for a year, I also started working for their nascent electronic publishing department. Initially performing only the weekend maintenance and adding the football reports to the sites' Sports sections, I was later con­tra­c­t­ed to create the first official Norwich City FC and Ipswich Town FC websites.
  
  Sub­se­quent issues between ECN and Ipswich Town FC, however, meant that my work on their site never reached the Web. The Norwich City site has since been redesigned since and, unfort­u­na­tely, the Web Archive doesn’t go far enough back in time for that very early work still to be available online.

• Co-Editor

  shOUT magazine

  (Newspapers industry)

  August 1995 — March 1998 (2 years 8 months)

  shOUT was a free, community-based magazine for the Lesbian and Gay Community in Norwich, Norfolk and Waveney. A core group of four of us, with varying quantities of help from a half-dozen other volunteers, worked together to write, produce, proof, edit, lay out and print this magazine, entirely funded by advertising.

• Volunteer

  Norwich Gay Men's Health Project

  (Non-Profit; 1-10 employees; Health, Wellness and Fitness industry)

  March 1995 — September 1997 (2 years 7 months)

  Whilst at university, and after graduation, I was a volunteer for Norwich Gay Men's Health Project, an HIV prevention and health promotion organisation for Norwich, Norfolk and Waveney. Amongst other things, I helped with Web design for their site, including for a large questionnaire to help evaluate health promotion needs in the area.

• Production Assistant

  Eastern Counties Newspapers

  (Newspapers industry)

  August 1994 — September 1997 (3 years 2 months)

  For most of my degree, I worked at the local newspaper house, Eastern Counties Newspapers (now Archant), as a production assistant. Mainly working for the Pink ’Un, Norwich's Saturday evening football paper, but also on the Eastern Evening News and the Eastern Daily Press, I generally took telephone-dictation of articles from journalists at the matches, along with some copy typing, data entry and proof-reading.

• Production Assistant

  Anglia AutoTrader

  (Newspapers industry)

  September 1995 — March 1997 (1 year 7 months)

  Whilst at university, I worked one night-shift a week at Anglia Auto-Trader, doing DTP for adverts and whole pages, as well as proof reading and data entry.

Owen Blacker’s Education

• University of East Anglia

  BSc (Hons) , Molecular Biology and Genetics , 1993 — 1997

  Graduated with Honours in Molecular Biology and Genetics, with French Subsidiary Language. My three-year course (extended due to my intercalation for health reasons) included a full-time, half-year project, working at the John Innes Centre for Plant Science Research, leading to an undergraduate thesis entitled "Sequence requirements defining initiation of plus-strand DNA synthesis in Cauliflower Mosaic Virus".

  Activities and Societies:

  UEA RAG, UEA LGBT Soc, Vice-President of Student Forum

Additional Information

Owen Blacker’s Websites:

• My Google profile
• mySociety
• Iris Digital (my employers)

Owen Blacker’s Interests:

Information technology — especially the Internet, information security, new tech­nologies and how communities, and society in general, are adapting to exploit the advant­ages of the Net and free information. Also, current affairs, cinema and DVDs, music, reading, langua­ges, science, football.

Owen Blacker’s Groups:

mySociety, NO2ID, Open Rights Group, Make My Vote Count

•    Agile Alliance
•    .NET People
•    Linked.NET Users Group (LIDNUG)
•    Out in Tech
•    Social Media
•    The French Connection
•    Semantic Web
•    WSG
•    Digital Marketing
•    LGBT Professional Network - Global
•    User Experience
•    Social Media Mafia
•    Senior .NET Developers
•    Conspiracy to Change Advertising
•    Web Standards Design + Development
•    London Web Standards
•    Nominet Community
•    London .NET User Group
•    Open Rights Group
•    GLBT Professionals UK
•    Digital Lounge
•    University of East Anglia (UEA) Alumni
•    Marketers on twitter
•    Digital Media Group - UK and Ireland
•    London Digital Week

Owen Blacker’s Honors:

I've been involved in many award-winning websites, both in my previous day-job at Wheel (now LBi) and with mySociety. As an organisation, mySociety won Nominet's inaugural "Openness" Best Practice award in 2007 and was runner-up for their "Open Internet" award in 2008.

Owen Blacker’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• expertise requests
• reference requests
• getting back in touch