The founding meeting of The Commons Conservancy took place on October 3rd 2016. The Commons Consernancy is registered at the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce nr. 67115918. It is a “stichting” according to the Netherlands law. The legal seat of residence is Science Park 400, 1098 XH Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Contact us.
The Commons Conservancy has a simple governing structure. According to its statutes it has a Board of Directors which consists of at least three and at most seven natural persons. A director is appointed for a period of three years. At the founding of The Commons Conservancy, the board was appointed for staggered terms.
Board of Directors
(in alphabetical order)
Guido Aben (secretary)
Guido Aben is a founding board member of [The Commons Conservancy]. In his day job he is Senior strategy officer at SUNET, the Swedish educational and research network. He holds an MSc in physics from Utrecht University. He joined SUNET in 2023, having previously had similar roles at AARNet and SURF.
Through his positions in the GEANT (tf-storage / sig-ciss) and CS3 communities, he was quite closely involved in the bid for and execution of the CS3mesh4EOSC project and the bid and execution of the eu’s EOSC pilot node.
Storage and collab systems aren’t his only gig; he finds fun in open source governance, data mobility, subsea cable systems and hurriedly learning Swedish as well.
Nicole Harris
Nicole Harris is a Project Development Officer at the Amsterdam office of the GEANT Association - formerly the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association, (TERENA). Nicole joined TERENA in March 2013 to support TERENA’s task forces and contribute to technical nprojects. She works primarily in the security and middleware areas.
Nicole is responsible for TF-CSIRT, the forum for Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs). She also works alongside Jim Buddin to support the successful TRANSITS training programme.
Since 2010, Nicole has been involved in REFEDS (Research and Education Federations) as joint coordinator with Licia Florio and continues that role as part of her current responsibilities. REFEDS is the voice that articulates the mutual needs of research and education identity federations worldwide, and provides a range of working groups, advisories and services to enhance interaction and interoperability between identity federations.
Michiel Leenaars (chairman)
Michiel Leenaars (1972, Netherlands) is the chairperson of [The Commons Conservancy]. In daily life he is Director of Strategy at NLnet Foundation. and director of Internet Society Netherlands, one of the more sizable Internet Society chapters in the world. He is also a W3C liason officer for the Benelux Office of the World Wide Web Consortium. He currently leads two of the four Research & Innovation Actions of the Next Generation Internet initiative, NGI Zero Discovery and NGI Zero PET.
He is active in a number of national and international organisations, such as OpenDoc Society (vice-chair), SIDN Fund (Board of Advisors), Accessibility.nl (Board of Supervisors), Digitale Infrastructuur Nederland, and Petities.nl foundation (treasurer). He is a member of the Netherlands committee for the UNESCO Information for All Programma.
Rogier Spoor
Rogier Spoor is manager middleware services at SURFnet, the National Research and Educational Network in the Netherlands. Rogier supports SURFnet’s security community (SCIRT) and develops new services in area of security and cloud computing (focus on IaaS, personal cloud storage, distributed storage).
Rogier is chair of the Dutch Honeynet project chapter: HoneyNED. He led the original development of the SURFIDS (distributed) intrusion detection system, and is currently actively involved in a number of open source efforts.
Rogier Spoor graduated in Bioprocess Engineering at the Wageningen University and Research Centre. He is one of the founding board members of [The Commons Conservancy].
Dave Täht
Dave Täht iniatiated the Bufferbloat project together with Jim Gettys. He is CTO of Teklibre. He is a former board member of ICEI.org. He describes himself as a ‘singer, pianist, guitarist, writer, experimenter, theorist, hacker, maker, faker - in no particular order, on any given day’. And he also writes code. He is one of the founding board members of The Commons Conservancy.