DIGIWHIST - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Project Manager and Analyst at Government Transparency Institute
Role in the project: data mapping, indicator development and validation
Biography: Agnes Czibik works as project manager and analyst at Government Transparency Institute. She has been coordinating field-work in public procurement and corruption related research projects since 2012. She has been a member of a research team which collects Hungarian public procurement data and develops corruption risk indicators.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
Role in the project: Aram Khaghaghordyan will coordinate DIGIWHIST's work at the Hertie School and assist with collecting data for the database of legal and regulatory norms.
Biography: Aram Khaghaghordyan is a PhD candidate and a Research Associate at the Hertie School of Governance. He works for the EU FP7 ANTICORRP and Horizon 2020 DIGIWHIST projects. Aram is also the coordinator of European Research Center for Anti-Corruption and State-Building (ERCAS) at the Hertie School. He is a law faculty graduate of the Russian-Armenian (Slavonic) State University and holds degrees in international humanitarian law (LL.M.) from the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights and public policy (MPP) from the Hertie School of Governance. Aram worked as a consultant for Pact Inc., USAID-supported UNITER Project, conducting independent integrity assessment of the CHESNO movement (campaign to enhance transparency and fairness of the parliamentary election in Ukraine). He also worked as a consultant for Democracy Reporting International on projects ‘Strengthening International Law to Support Genuine Elections and Democratic Governance' and ‘Support to Democratisation in Egypt'. His current research is related to the state compliance with international anti-corruption norms with a focus on the Group of States Against Corruption (GRECO) evaluation rounds with an aim of creating Anti-corruption Compliance Index (ACCI).
Job Titles:
- Expert in the Domain of Freedom of Information
Role in the project: Arne Semsrott is interim lead of DIGIWHIST at the Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland.
Biography: Arne Semsrott is an expert in the domain of Freedom of Information (FOI). With a background in political science, he engages with other NGOs in topics related to transparency and lobbyism, e.g. for Transparency International and the Whistleblower Network.
Role in the project: Bence Tóth is a Research Assistant in the Department of Sociology.
Biography: Shortly after finishing his studies at Central European University (Economic Policy) Bence started working at Corruption Research Centre Budapest. His tasks were focusing on public procurement data analysis. Bence had also technical duties related to the Hungarian PP database, and also worked extensively on a collusion indicator toolkit for PP markets.
Role in the project: Daniel Dietrich provides DIGIWHIST with his expert knowledge on open data.
Biography: Daniel Dietrich is a digital rights and freedom of speech enthusiast and an open data evangelist. He is a researcher, activist, author and curator at the intersection of media, technology and society. He works as an independent researcher and consultant on open government, open data, transparency and citizen engagement and is the chairman of the board at the Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland. He is interested in empowering people through open knowledge and use technology to help make the world a little bit better.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Social
Role in the project: Francesco will contribute to the development of indicators based on network analysis and to the creation of a risk assessment software.
Biography: Francesco has been an assistant professor at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan since 2011. He has been a researcher at Transcrime (Joint Research Centre on Transnational Crime) since 2005. His areas of interest are organized crime, organized crime legislation, reforms of criminal procedure, crime proofing and social network analysis.
Role in the project: Dr Mihály Fazekas will be the main project coordinator, coordinating the scientific activities across all Work Packages. He will also lead on indicator development (Work Package 3)
Biography: Dr Fazekas has been pioneering the use of ‘Big Data' for social sciences research, especially for measuring and analysing corruption and administrative quality across Europe. He uses mixed research methods while working in interdisciplinary teams of IT specialists, practitioners, and social scientists in order to collect, structure, and clean large administrative datasets generated by governments. One of his primary areas of work is public procurement and high-level corruption.
Role in the project: Luciana will contribute to the compilation of DIGIWHIST's comparative procurement database, transparency indicators and data analysis; as well as the monitoring of procurement laws and regulations.
Biography: Luciana Cingolani, PhD is a postdoctoral researcher at the Hertie School of Governance for the DIGIWHIST project. She obtained her PhD on Development and Public Policy Analysis from Maastricht University in 2014. Previously she obtained an MPhil from San Andres University in Buenos Aires, funded by the Argentine Research Council. Her research revolves around the impacts of institutions in development, and the role of governance, state capacity and transparency. She has collaborated with several development organizations including the United Nations University, the United Nations Development Programme and the French Development Agency.
Role in the project: Fiona Harrison is the Project Manager for the consortium, responsible for managing coordinating the activities of all partners, ensuring that the terms of the EC Grant Agreement are complied with and collecting and analysing data.
Biography: Fiona Harrison has an LLM in International Human Rights Law and has run a number of large EC-funded projects within the international NGO sector, primarily in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states. Her main areas of interest are access to information, transparency of media ownership and freedom of expression /media freedom. She is particularly interested in the identification of practical and legal obstacles to the implementation of human rights compliant laws.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
Francesca Recanatini has worked on governance, institution building and corruption since the beginning of her career working at the Center of Institutional Reforms and Informal Sector (IRIS) in College Park. Throughout her career she has focused on integrating issues of governance and integrity in institutional development and growth. Ms. Recanatini joined the World Bank in 1998 and has supported the design and implementation of governance and capacity building initiatives in Africa, Latin America, and the countries of the Former Soviet Union. She currently works in the Middle Eastern Region and selected European countries, providing guidance on governance issues and strengthening integrity institutions. She manages the Actionable Governance Indicators work and the Anti-Corruption Authorities Initiative to promote capacity and effectiveness around the world. She also coordinates the work on governance and anti-corruption diagnostic tools in several countries in Latin America and Africa, having completed more than half dozen reports that have translated in country-specific strategies. Recently she has begun focusing on the design and the implementation of anti-corruption programs focused on learning and prevention through the strengthening of public sector agencies in high income countries (ex.
She has published several papers on corruption and poor governance, contributing recently to the Global Handbook on Research and Practice in Corruption, Adam Graycar, editor (January 2012); and to the International Handbook on the Economics of Corruption, Susan Rose-Akerman and Tina Soreide, eds. (December 2011). She is currently a Member of the EU Group of Experts on Corruption and holds a Ph.D in Economics from the University of Maryland at College Park.
Role in the project: Geraldine is the DIGIWHIST Communication Officer and will curate and promote the DIGIWHIST website. She also supports internal communication amongst the consortium members and works to strengthen the network of civil society practitioners, journalists.
Biography: Geraldine Endrizzi is Faculty Assistant to Prof. Alina Mungiu-Pippidi at the Hertie School of Governance and has previously worked as Project Associate for the EU FP7 ANTICORRP project. She obtained her Master Degree in Public Policy at the Humboldt-Viadrina School of Governance and holds a Diploma in Art Therapy and Pedagogy from the Hochschue für Künste im Sozialen (University of Applied Sciences and Arts) Ottersberg, Germany. Before joining Hertie, Geraldine served as the Human Resources Manager at a large international school in Berlin which inspired her Master thesis on the facilitation of intercultural competence at international schools. Mrs. Geraldine Endrizzi also works as a freelance consultant and project manager for a Berlin based NGO where she is responsible for the development of new projects and the implementation of a new quality management system.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
Goran Klemenčič completed a master's degree at Harvard Law School after graduating from both Faculty of Law and Faculty of Computer Science at University of Ljubljana. He continued with post-graduate studies at the National University of Ireland.
He worked as a consultant at The European Committee on Crime Problems of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris. He also participated in the preparation of the legal bases of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. For two years he was also a member of the OECD anti-corruption management committee.
In 2010, he became a Chief Commissioner of the Commission for the Prevention of Corruption of the Republic of Slovenia. In 2013, the Commission's 2012-2013 Investigation Report on the parliamentary parties' leaders revealed that Janez Janša, PM, and Zoran Janković, the head of the opposition, systematically and repeatedly violated the law by failing to properly report their assets. On February 18 2015, the Supreme Court of Slovenia ruled that all sections regarding Janez Janša must be removed from this report because the Commission for the Prevention of Corruption failed to send the draft of the report to Janša for submission of his comments, and thus seriously violated Janša's rights, granted by the article 22 of the Slovenian constitution. On May 29 2015, the Supreme Court of Slovenia additionally ruled that all sections regarding Zoran Janković must also be removed for exactly the same reason.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
Gustavo Piga, Ph. D. in Economics at Columbia University, is Full Professor of Economics and Vice Rector for International Affairs at the University of Rome Tor Vergata.
He chaired the Italian Procurement Agency for Goods and Services, Consip Ltd., between 2002 and 2005.
A macroeconomist and a blogger, besides several scientific papers he is the author of the renowned "Derivatives in Public Debt Management" and co-editor of a number of books, among which of the "Handbook of Procurement", Cambridge University Press, with Nicola Dimitri and Giancarlo Spagnolo and "Revisiting Keynes", MIT Press, with Lorenzo Pecchi.
His research interests are in macroeconomics, anticorruption and public procurement.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Founding Director of E - Governance Academy of Estonia
Ivar Tallo is the founding director of e-Governance Academy of Estonia. He has been a Member of Parliament of Estonia and Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. He has also worked as a Foreign Policy Advisor to the President of Estonia. He has been lecturing on public policy and public administration at Tartu University. Recently he returned to Estonia after finishing his contract as the manager for e-governance programme at UNITAR (United Nations Institute for Training and Research) in Geneva.
He was the author of the Basic Principles of Information Policy of Estonia, Code of Conduct for Civil Servants and co-authored Public Information Act. At Council of Europe, he was the raporteur for the Cybercrime Convention.
He was trained in logic at Leningrad University (1982-1990) and in political science at McGill University (1991-1995). He has been fellow at the Institute for European History in Mainz, Germany (1989, 1992) and at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Budapest (1995-1996).
Ivar has trained and advised e-governance leaders in more than 50 countries. His last engagements have been as a team leader for the EU "e-Armenia" project and change management team leader in electronic business registry project in Oman and team leader in G2C project in Bhutan. From September, he will be RTA for e-gov twinning in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Role in the project: Project Manager for Building Data Collection and Analysis System
Jan has more than 10 years of experience in software development that he gained on various projects as a PHP and Java programmer and project manager. Computers have always been his hobby since he got his first Commodore 64 approximately 25 years ago and it led him to the University of West Bohemia where he graduated in 2010 as a software engineer. He has been interested in public procurements for last 5 years. Since 2011 he participated in several projects related to publishing information about public tenders, checking a quality and validity of published data and improving standards for machine-readable interfaces.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
Role in the project: Mara Mendes leads the work on DIGIWHIST for the Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland.
Biography: Prior to this she worked with Transparency International (TI) Secretariat rolling out TI's campaigns and advising TI's chapters on their campaigning and advocacy strategies. In addition Mara has gained professional experience while working for smaller NGOs, universities and the European Commission. Mara holds an MSc in Media Communication and Development from the London School of Economics and a B.A. in Political Science and Sociology from the University of Siegen, Germany. She has focussed her academic research on participatory approaches and the use of ICT for sustainable development.
Role in the project: Junior Data Extraction
Biography: Marek graduated from Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, with specialization in Software Systems focussing on database systems. He has more than three years experience as C++ programmer and more than half a year experience as Junior .NET programmer. One of Marek's spheres of interest is transparency of public administration.
Role in the project: Martina will contribute to the collection of data for the database of legal and regulatory norms and she will contribute to the development of indicators based on network analysis.
Biography: Martina has been a researcher at Transcrime since 2013. In October 2013, she received a Master's degree in Applied Social Sciences, curriculum Crime Sciences and Security Technologies, from the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. Her fields of interest are organised crime, infiltration and corruption.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Founder, D4SC ( Design for Social Change )
D4SC creates collaborative systems that bring people and machines together to co-create smarter cities with their data, activity and intelligence. D4SC's award winning urban products Changify and CitizenCanvas has been featured in Wired, Ted City 2.0, BBC, and have been exhibited at the Smart City World Expo. D4SC contributes and co-authors industry standards for smart cities at the BSI and Cities Standards Institute.
Prakash enjoys creating new habits and behaviours with 14 years' product and design leadership experience, bringing together product teams from startups to corporates. She speaks at SXSW, O'Reilly ETech, IXDA and is a visiting tutor at UCL, RCA, LSE and Syracuse University.
Listed on 2014 TechCity Insider 100 for innovating smarter cities, Prakash is a RSA fellow with a MA in Computer Related Design from the Royal College of Art and holds patents for BBC iPlayer and Nokia Asha phones.
Job Titles:
- Team Leader of DIGIWHIST at the Hertie School of Governance
Role in the project: Prof. Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is the team leader of DIGIWHIST at the Hertie School of Governance.
Biography: Prof. Mungiu-Pippidi teaches Democratisation and Policy Analysis and chairs the European Research Centre for Anti-Corruption and State Building (ERCAS) at the Hertie School of Governance. Since 2004, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi has chaired several civil society anti-corruption coalitions in Romania, such as the Coalition for Clean Parliament, the Coalition for Clean Government, the Coalition for Clean Universities and the Alliance for Clean Romania. She acted as principal investigator for several large scale EU-funded projects: FP5 IBEU, FP6 JURISTRAS, FP7 ANTICORRP and MEDIADEM. She regularly serves as an adviser on issues of anti-corruption to the European Commission, UNDP, OECD, Freedom House, NORAD, DFID and the World Bank, among others.
Role in the project: Professor Ernesto Savona is the Director of TRANSCRIME.
Biography: Professor Savona is a professor of Criminology, with a research interest in organised crime and international money laundering. His research activity has focussed on the analysis of crime statistics, law and social change, effectiveness of legislation, organised/economic crime and criminal justice systems, crime and economics and corruption. He has worked as a consultant to the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the European Union and various national governments. Since 2012 he has been working as an expert for PricewaterhouseCoopers to produce the European Anti-Corruption Report in Italy and is a member of the EU Commission's expert groups on "Policy needs for data on crime and criminal justice".
Role in the project: Stephanie will oversee the creation and deployment of the EuroPAM database of legal and regulatory norms and contribute to the development of de facto measurements.
Stephanie E. Trapnell is a PhD candidate in sociology at George Mason University and previously served as a founding team member and research manager for the Public Accountability Mechanisms (PAM) Initiative and the Actionable Governance Indicators (AGI) Initiative, both at the World Bank. She is a specialist in open government, accountability, and measurement, and consults regularly for the United Nations and the World Bank, as well as with non-governmental organizations such as Global Integrity, Results for Development, and Transparency International. Her current research is focused on implementation processes and outcomes in right to information systems, including civil society engagement and government administration. She holds an MA in International Relations and International Economics from the Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies and an AB in Linguistics from Bryn Mawr College.
Job Titles:
- Junior Data Extraction Manager
Role in project: Junior Data Extraction Manager for Public Procurement Data
Tomáš graduated from the Department of Cybernetics at the University of West Bohemia in 2010. Already during his studies he became interested in web technologies and developing web applications. He has more than 4 years of working experience in this field, primarily in PHP, as well as significant experience in automated data processing and web scraping.
Role in the project: Senior Data Extraction
Tomáš received his masters degree in computer science from the Charles University in Prague. He started gaining 5+ years experience in the field of public procurement during research for his bachelor and master theses, followed by cooperating on several projects on procurement data publication, transparency and validation. Besides that Tomáš has advanced work experience in the entire software development process by working on projects for major Czech banks and insurance companies. Before joining the Digiwhist project, Tomáš worked as a corporate performance management consultant on financial planning and reporting projects.
Role in the project: Tori Dykes is a research associate for the DIGIWHIST project
Biography: She studied at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin where she recently obtained a Master of Public Policy. Originally from the U.S., Tori completed her B.A. in International Affairs and German at Marquette University in 2012. In 2013, a grant from the U.S. Fulbright Program brought her to Germany, where she has lived ever since. Her current academic interests are centered around digitalization and technology, particularly the transformation of government and civic participation as a result of digitalization.