Mentors & Jury Members

Mentors

Tony Bowden
Tony is My Society International agitator. In recent years he has been connected with Eastern Europe and many different events. My Society  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 use the internet most efficiently to improve lives. For example My society has started: WhatDoTheyKnow.com, TheyWorkForYou.com, FixMyStreet.com


Hannes Kiivet - Head of Department of Development in Estonian Informatics Centre (EIC, RIA in Estonian) with day-to-day responsibility to overlook IT-developments (excluding IT-infrastructure) outsourced by EIC. Other tasks include coordination of other statewide IT-developments to retain the state's and the citizens-entrepreneurs' interest and implement the solutions already proven in practice. As the IT-services get more and more interconnected, there is chance of getting lost in the details, so Hannes is trying to hold the "big picture". 

Adam McGreggor is Rewired State’s geek wrangler. He is principally a technologist, who’s been fiddling with networks, and more recently internet backends, for about 15 years. During this time, he’s collaborated in producing possibly the first group-effort consultation response with Stand, later helping to keep FaxYourMP alive, keeping involved in mySociety; co-founding No2ID, and the Open Rights Group. Adam keeps trying to remember mod_perl is not how websites are written these days ;o).
In recent years Adam’s also been involved in the Internet and Parliament / Nominet Best Practice / Internet Governance Forum, amongst other things.
An infrequent blogger, Adam’s worked in quite a few places, both public and private sectors, not always in tech roles. Adam escapes from it all by causing trouble, going to gigs, drinking gin and beer, and doing “hippy stuff” in Nevada and Zaragosa

John Bevan is Rewired State’s sensible one. He is an organiser specialising in producing hackdays. John previously worked at the BBC to deliver events for BBC Backstage. The projects he worked on, Hackday London, Over The Air and Mashed08 did much to establish the hackday format in the UK. His Exec Producer at the time, Matthew Cashmore, stated that “[John’s] experience in creating an environment that allows creative developers to deliver amazing work, and then provide a stage for them to demonstrate that work is second to none”. John has also, amongst other things, managed an I.T. Academy, trained to teach R.E., worked in media monitoring, written E.S.L. textbooks and built fences/cut down trees for the National Trust.

Elina Kivinukk works as training manager in NENO (NEtwork of Estonian Non-profit Organizations www.ngo.ee), organizing and delivering numerous trainings covering project management, teamwork, public involvement, innocative solutions for public benefit, mainly for NGOs and public officials. NENO is an umbrella organization for 110 public benefit non-profits in Estonia and jas been involved with the public serie projects, such as MyEstonia public services and briefly with Community Tools. Also NENO has played an active role in Let's Do it My Estonia campaigns. Elina has been involved with many project development trainings having helped several project ideas in creative, user-friendly and humorous way.

Jury members

Tony Bowden
Tony is My Society International agitator. In recent years he has been connected with Eastern Europe and many different events. My Society  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 use the internet most efficiently to improve lives. For example My society has started: WhatDoTheyKnow.com, TheyWorkForYou.com, FixMyStreet.com

Sven Illing is passionate about helping entrepreneurs. Sven has been doing just that, spending the past 6 years serving in various roles at the Tartu Science Park, the oldest technology park in the Baltics. Currently there are about 60 high-technology companies in the science park. Your start-up can be the one, check out how on the website.
Sven co-founded his first IT start-up at the age of 22 while still studying. Sven thought a start-up was a good excuse to abandon his economics & management studies at the University of Bocconi. Later, Sven continued his studies at the Manchester Business School. Sven holds an MSc in Management of Technology and Innovation.
Sven is a HackFwd referrer. HackFwd invests up to €191k per team to enable to launch great ideas.  Sven also plays an active role with Seed Forum, Estonia, nominating companies who will participate in pitch training and present at the event. Sven has served repeatedly as an online jury member for the Ajujaht (Brainhunt) startup competition. He has also represented Tartu Science Park in the Estonian Venture Capital Association. Sven has also invested in an iPhone game Wristbreaker and other ventures.

Adam McGreggor is Rewired State’s geek wrangler. He is principally a technologist, who’s been fiddling with networks, and more recently internet backends, for about 15 years. During this time, he’s collaborated in producing possibly the first group-effort consultation response with Stand, later helping to keep FaxYourMP alive, keeping involved in mySociety; co-founding No2ID, and the Open Rights Group. Adam keeps trying to remember mod_perl is not how websites are written these days ;o).
In recent years Adam’s also been involved in the Internet and Parliament / Nominet Best Practice / Internet Governance Forum, amongst other things.
An infrequent blogger, Adam’s worked in quite a few places, both public and private sectors, not always in tech roles. Adam escapes from it all by causing trouble, going to gigs, drinking gin and beer, and doing “hippy stuff” in Nevada and Zaragosa

John Bevan is Rewired State’s sensible one. He is an organiser specialising in producing hackdays. John previously worked at the BBC to deliver events for BBC Backstage. The projects he worked on, Hackday London, Over The Air and Mashed08 did much to establish the hackday format in the UK. His Exec Producer at the time, Matthew Cashmore, stated that “[John’s] experience in creating an environment that allows creative developers to deliver amazing work, and then provide a stage for them to demonstrate that work is second to none”. John has also, amongst other things, managed an I.T. Academy, trained to teach R.E., worked in media monitoring, written E.S.L. textbooks and built fences/cut down trees for the National Trust. 

Daniel Vaarik is the former head of the Government Communications Office of Estonia, later he has headed the Tallinn office of Hill & Knowlton for five years. Currently he is working on his doctoral thesis on technological culture and advises several start-ups at Tehnopol, Tallinn. 

Mall Hellam
is executive director in Open Estonia Foundation, the main sponsor of Garage48 Public Service. She has been named as European of the Year 2010 by European Movement Estonia. She has helped to connect different layers of Estonian society to Europe.


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