This week’s blog post gives an informal insight into two of OO’s most recent members of staff: Agustina De Luca, the new Data Engagement Manager, and Stephen Abbott Pugh, the new Data and Technology Manager. Learn where they came from, why they are passionate about what they do, and what challenges they are looking forward to in the rest of 2021.
Open Ownership · Jul 2021
10 minutes with Agustina De Luca and Stephen Abbott Pugh.
“I was born in Buenos Aires, but moved to the suburbs when I was really young, about three or four. Both of my parents worked in the city, so whenever I had school holidays I went in with one of them, into a government office. So I learnt about public service from an early age. My father is a public prosecutor and my mother is a social worker working with minority groups.”
“At some point the role of the state in ensuring a safe society for everyone became very important to me. At High School I was involved in the student council, representing my classmates when making points to the school authorities. And I suppose that being in politics, public service, is now always part of my internal discussions.”
“Worldwide, politicians have to make so many concessions to be part of parliament. The level of conversation can be low-quality, with party colours dominating, and parties undoing what the previous government has done. They spread fake news to win, but don’t care about the people. So since I started college I’ve been involved in public service. I feel I’ve found my place in CSOs [civil society organisations], which believe in public service delivery and advocate for change. I first worked at Directorio Legislativo – that’s a Latin American organisation which promotes open parliament and strengthening democracy in the region. I learnt a lot about transparency, open data and citizen participation, and after eight years I moved to the Open Data Charter. There it was great to be able to build a community of over 150 governments and organisations from around the world who were opening up data.
Although my heart is with CSOs, I also wanted to contribute to institutions in my own country. So in 2020 I started to support Argentina’s House of Deputies with their innovation and transparency reforms, particularly updating the open data portal, and co-creating the first ever Argentinian Open Parliament Action Plan with the Open Government Partnership. For me, this was very worthwhile work.”
“In the next six months I’m most looking forward to identifying what people want or need from governments to strengthen governance of natural resources in terms of BOT [beneficial ownership transparency]. What do CSOs or journalists struggle with? Have their demands been met? I wonder what sort of research they wanted to do, but couldn’t, because they didn’t have the data?
Community building will bring OO closer to them, and I think that our network of government implementers will become more connected to local stakeholders through this work. To be local enablers means working with all stakeholders, so this is what I hope to do.”
“I went to the University of Leeds and studied Geography, but then I realised that I wasn’t that interested in geography, but I was interested in the student newspaper! I ended up working there during my time at university and afterwards, and stayed on and did a post-grad in newspaper journalism.
I was dead-set on being a journalist, so I came back to London where I was born, and worked for a few years on a local newspaper covering the borough of Hounslow. But the job didn’t pay at all well, so I got a night job from 8pm to 1am (after working 9-5 pm at the newspaper). The night job was at The Guardian newspaper, starting as an uploader for online content, when the concept of an online newspaper was really new. I stayed on as they offered me a job as Central Production Manager. I also did reporting and project management, particularly for news and culture events like the Glastonbury Festival. Some of this led to interesting areas, like creating a page for every single album or film that had ever been produced, so that the public could review them!”
“The Guardian ran campaigns. I worked on the US Embassy Cables project where we partnered with WikiLeaks - working in a small room that had to be locked every time I left it. The Guardian had also launched a data blog and it was an exciting time for data visualisation. Quite a few people from the Guardian went into public service, joining the Government Digital Service. I left to go to the UK Parliament, as I was interested in the work of people like mySociety, and the use of data for transparency’s sake. I became Head of the Web and Intranet Service there.”
“As my wife works for the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office overseas, we moved to Rwanda, and using my experience I set up a local access to information service, which is still the only one in Rwanda. Then I got involved with Code for Africa and afterwards the Open Knowledge Foundation. I really enjoy setting up experimental open data projects and getting people to use them, people like journalists.”
“Well, we’ve been working with governments for a year to make them see the worth of good data. So in the next six months I want to see that data, use it, and analyse it. There’s a whole bunch of opportunities for looking at this high quality data which I’m really excited about. We have moved from advocating for data release to seeing its release, and now it’s coming out, we can look at it, learn from it and build on it.”