Jeni Tennison, Vice President and Chief Strategy Adviser, The Open Data Institute

What has been your path to power?

I trained as a psychologist, gaining a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Nottingham. I then worked as an independent consultant and practitioner, specialising in open data publishing and consumption. This included being the technical architect and lead developer for legislation.gov.uk, working on the early linked data work on data.gov.uk and helping to engineer new standards for the publication of statistics as linked data.

I have contributed to several international standards through the W3C and was appointed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee to serve on the W3C’s technical architecture group from 2011 to 2015, during which time I chaired the W3C’s HTML data task force. More recently, I co-chaired the W3C’s CSV on the web working group.

I joined the The ODI as technical director in 2012, was appointed CEO in 2016 and in 2020 moved role again to become its vice president and chief strategy adviser. I sit on a number of boards, including the advisory boards for the Open Contracting Partnership and the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data; the Department for Health and Social Care’s tech advisory board; and I also advise OpenUK. 

In 2020, I was appointed as the co-chair of the data governance working group within the Global Partnership for AI. I helped to design the open data board game, Datopolis, and was awarded an OBE for services to technology and open data in the 2014 New Year Honours.

What is the proudest achievement of your career to date?

The highlight of my career so far has to be the launch of legislation.gov.uk. It was brilliant to be involved in a project that could demonstrate how to publish data well on the web, both from a technical perspective and a licensing and policy perspective. It was also the start of a move towards a more collaborative way of maintaining that data through an expert participation programme, which has made a real impact on the quality and utility of legislation data in the UK and been a model elsewhere. I’m still proud to have been involved in that work, particularly seeing how important it has been in keeping people informed about the legal basis of the coronavirus restrictions and understanding the changes to our law as we go through Brexit.

Tell us about a career goal or a purpose for your organisation that you are pursuing?

I’m fortunate to work in a mission-driven organisation whose goals match my own, namely to ensure that data gets to people who need it, to give them insights and to help them make better decisions. Recently, we’ve been able to do some work around a number of issues that are important to me: how to improve the flow of data to help tackle the climate crisis; to examine alternative revenue models for data businesses and institutions that can help make them sustainable without compromising their sharing of data; and to look at how data can be used to understand and address inequalities.