Christopher Thorpe Email & Phone Number

Oxford, Gb

Oxford, Gb

Hinxton And Oxford

As an ARISE fellow, I will be developing research infrastructure for immunologists. This will comprise tools and datasets.

Remote And Oxford

I've been self-employed for over a decade, working as a freelance consultant with work which ranged from helping to set up and run developer programmes, to digital change strategies, to making products. I did things as diverse as making social games for festivals, helping Martha Lane Fox and the UK government understand how to make better public services and open data and assisting JustGiving to increase donations through social software and Facebook Connect.I've taken permanent roles where I've admired the mission and the team.

Remote

CAST helps realise the opportunities and implications of technology, so charities can continue to champion and support the most vulnerable and so funders can build stronger tech for good programmes and support grantees with practical training in user-centred, digital service design. We've just launched The Catalyst, a new initiative to scale up the work of CAST using a network of partners, funders and charities.

Oxford, United Kingdom

Oxford Nanoimaging is a spin out from Oxford University with an incredibly interesting high resolution microscope.

Oxford

I was looking after the very smart, talented technical teams at White October and developing a technical strategy which will help them deliver the very best solutions for their clients. - Moving 80% of clients into the cloud in first 9 months- Empowering a restructured technical team leading to productivity gains- Working on a talent development programme- Driving a strategy to move towards being a digital product studio and work with clients on big data, AI, healthcare/pharma and API first projects

Oxford

I Can Make was a startup education company, aimed at helping teacher and students learn using 3D printers in the classroom. - Finalist in Pitch to Rich 2014 (Virgin) and Pitch at Palace 2015- Created an award winning STEM/coding learning programme with the education team at Tower Bridge, where children use 3D printed model bridge parts and electronics to simulate the lifting of the bridge which is now in its third year of delivery.https://www.towerbridge.org.uk/learning/workshop/raise-tower-bridge-on-site

London

DACS is the preeminent artists’ rights organisation in the UK. Working directly with the Chief Executive and sitting on the management team, I helped DACS become a digital first organisation with a culture of internal research and development.- Created a Digital Strategy and transformation plan for the organisation- Facilitated workshops between DACS and artists to explore digital publishing and new business models for artists

London

I helped at the inception of the Government Digital Service, prior in fact to its naming, to form collaboratively the vision, operating principles and operating model for the service. Working closely with Mike Bracken, Executive Director, Digital at Cabinet Office, I was responsible for pulling together the views and thoughts of the staff of DirectGov, the team building AlphaGov and beta.gov.uk and the Senior Management team that was being formed for GDS, into a cohesive set of views.The output of this work was a set of presentations tailored for audiences within government including the Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude, the existing staff and leading civil servants, cabinet members including the Prime Minister and influencers within Government. The vision and operating principles of the unit have now been presented at many conferences around the world and are present in graphics on the walls of lobby to the GDS offices as a reminder to the all who go there to work or for meetings.- Created the vision and mission with input from senior management and stakeholders within DirectGov and BusinessLink- Helped define the operating models and digital principles for GDS- Created a series of strategy documents and videos for major stakeholders including senior members of the cabinet

Artfinder was a technology startup hoping to create a social experience of art. It had an ambitious scale, encompassing a curated encyclopedia, an image recognition phone application and a platform for creating “coffee table book” style iPad applications. - Architected and managed the platform for creating iPad applications- Managed the publication over 20 apps for a variety of galleries/exhibitions including the V&A, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Bold Tendencies and the John Moores Painting Prize- Helped promote the aims of Artfinder by giving talks and interviews at events including Culture Hackday, the Bonnier Symposium, Museums and the Web and an event run by BBC/Arts Council.

For 15 years I was a volunteer for the groundbreaking Cass Sculpture Foundation (formerly Sculpture at Goodwood). My involvement included:- Building their first website in 1996 - Building their digital archive of images online- Delivering the digital part of the public consultation exercise which led to contemporary sculpture being placed on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square after the initial three sculptures- Managing in-gallery digital experiences for exhibitions at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, Pallant House in Chichester and Nordbrabants Museum in 's-Hertogenbosch

London

Whilst at The Guardian I helped to set up the Open Platform project and the Activate Summit and set up and ran the Guardian Developer Network. It was an exciting time for newspaper publishing in general, with a declining revenue base and an increase in traffic from social sharing. I was responsible for creating and delivering a set of presentations which laid out both The Guardian's offering to developers, but also the implications of how we were doing digital development within The Guardian and what mutualisation and openness meant to the applications and services. I was responsible for maintaining relationships between The Guardian and Twitter, Google and Facebook. This resulted in The Guardian being the only international launch partner for @anywhere, being featured by Facebook for our clippings service and being featured by Google on the Wave launch hackday and the Google Code blog for our use of AppEngine.In addition to these activities I helped write about OpenPlatform and APIs on The Guardian and worked closely with the technology team to tell stories. I was involved in running all of The Guardian hackdays during my time in the company and produced one hack about curating twitter streams from events that is still in production across the site. My approach was all about weaving The Guardian into relationships and this encompassed working with other publishers such as Bonnier in Sweden in addition to other developers. I was an invited guest at Bonnier Hackday.My time at The Guardian ended on a high, presenting alongside Sir Tim Berners-Lee at the O'Reilly Gov2Expo in Washington.http://www.slideshare.net/openplatform/a-year-in-public-data-a-view-from-within

London, United Kingdom

I helped on the launch of the developer preview of data.gov.uk. I worked closely with the team in the Cabinet Office on making sure that the launch was fit for purpose for developers and that the right data, license and messaging was in place.It was one of my proudest professional moments to be working in a team which included Sir Tim Berners Lee.

I ran the UK and European arm of the MySpace Developer Platform, working closely with local partners, the ad sales team, creative agencies, clients, developers, the two head offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco and with other parts of the Open Social partnership in Google and beyond.My role encompassed involving MySpace in the UK tech scene which they had previously been totally absent in. This manifested in sponsoring, attending and speaking at the Future of Web Design and literally parking the MySpace bus in the middle of ExCel's exhibition hall in Docklands. We used the bus to our advantage, getting prominent bloggers to take up residence and providing an ad hoc venue for a TechCrunch pitching competition.http://smartup.wordpress.com/2008/10/15/future-of-web-apps-butcher-plays-rrrrrr-runaround/Part of my role was to accompany the business development team to find solutions within the possibilities of the platform for clients. This encompassed helping clients to think about apps and social software and trying to steer the creative solutions to ones which were possible, would not deter users, had social mechanics in them, were most likely to succeed and were most likely to have maximal impact for budget spent. This was a new approach and was adopted across EMEA using training materials I provided before leaving. It rescued several difficult projects and relationships.

Mind Candy is a games/entertainment company, best known for Moshi Monsters. I joined the company after they had closed their Series A round in 2006 and the board felt they needed an experienced technical leader. My role included:- Leading and reforming the existing technical team to fix scalability problems on their first product Perplex City- Hiring and leading the design, technical, production and animation team which built Moshi Monsters- Reporting on progress of the development to the board- Assisting in the technical due diligence which led to Moshi Monsters being granted Safe Harbor for -Children's Online Privacy Protection Act in the USADuring my time at Mind Candy I oversaw the rearchitecture of Perplex City, their award winning ARG, and I led the team from the concept stage to the delivery and launch of Moshi Monsters, delivering a puzzle portal and an ARG for BBC's One Big Weekend along the way.I assembled a multi disciplinary team of Flash designers and architects, Java developers, sysadmins and visual designers who delivered elegant solutions to complex problems of child safety, playful interaction design, social world economy design, scalable web services, templated animation control and complex media delivery to a complex Flash movie. Through a careful balance of what the functionality was and its impact on safety and scaleability we produced an architecture which is in use to today 50 million users later and achieved full compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. One example of a simple solution which enhanced gameplay was to bring the social elements into the monster's world, making the interaction with friends (through the friends tree) and messages (through the pinboard) part of the world while at the same time significantly reducing server load. Similar innovative approaches were used for in game analytics in partnership with CoreMetrics.

The Scientist was the third best read life-sciences magazine, coming in just behind Nature and Science. As CTO, I was responsible for the switch to digital first publication including:- Architecting new editorial and content workflows and content types- Creating a continuous publishing environment for the web including blogging, video, audio and news platforms- Devising and developing a new multimedia podcast product that led to $100k of sponsorship- Being part of a senior management team which turned the magazine round financially in the first two years of transformation

London, United Kingdom

The Science Navigation Group (formerly Current Science Group) is a group of science publishing ventures created by its chairman Vitek Tracz. For just under 7 years I worked closely with Vitek on projects which either created new business models and content types within publishing, or which led to the rejuvenation of existing businesses. The group had over 200 employees at the time it sold BioMed Central to Springer in 2008.

PeoplesArchive was an online video on-demand solution of Nobel prize winning scientists and renowned film-makers and artists talking about their lives. My work on the product included:- Developing a simple to use authoring system based on iMovie to bring on board editors who'd never edited video before- Architecting and developing an in-house distributed video compression system.- Technical architecture for a full text search engine for finding videos within several hundred hours of clips- Devising a subscription system which controlled access to the movies without the use of complex DRM- Liaising with Apple on our use of their technology leading to a case study PeoplesArchive was described at launch in 2004 by "The Sunday Times" as "Brilliant". In an article in the Online section James Knight went on to say "But this site seizes on the new possibilities afforded by high-speed internet access to line up a dream team of dazzling scientific minds, all filmed in pin-sharp video, talking about their lives and work."

London

BioMedCentral was one of the first Open Access science publishers in the world. My role encompassed: - Acting as the conduit between the editorial and technical teams- Defining content formats, information hierarchies, search query and datastore architecture, and navigation structures- Working closely with editorial and marketing to define the new business models for OpenAccess and hybrid access subscription journalsDuring my time at BioMed Central I represented the journal at the O'Reilly Bioinformatics Conference on a panel with participants from Nature and other journals in a debate about open and closed scientific journals.

London

Working with the editorial team and from a standing start we developed one of the first Open Access science journals and the first which was a hybrid of peer review content and commissioned review content. My role involved developing the initial code prototype, running the team which built the production site, developing the information structures and look and feel and working with the institutional and personal subscriptions team and the marketing team to deliver a product which had a paywall which was permeable to institutional subscribers whether at work or at home for the review parts of the journal which were subscription only. Part of the work was liaising with the team at NIH to deposit the open access scholarly articles within the emerging PubMed Central.

Worked with the core IT team at Taylor and Francis and the Marketing team to look at digital opportunities within the group.

I worked with the author teams of the bestselling Molecular Biology of the Cell and Essential Cell Biology to develop a novel CD-ROM accompaniment for the textbooks designed as an annual addition to help reduce the impact of the used book market. The project was deemed to be a success with an approximate 10% increase in the sales of new books.Also worked with the NCBI, part of NIH in Washington to deposit the previous edition of Molecular Biology of the Cell into the public domain as a freely searchable resource.

Worked on a variety of client projects including the web presence for UK and Europe for Tomorrow Never Dies (Bond 18), a corporate communications intranet for Unilever and web shows for MSN.

London, United Kingdom

Project managed the subscriber area of Which? Online up until launch and also coded systems for building the HTML for the editorial content. Also worked on parts of the projects to build the first web presences for Lufthansa, Alliance and Leicester and Jean Michel Jarre

Phd, Computational And Molecular Immunology

Part way through my PhD, my supervisor and I set up the first webserver in London at a time when the NCSA's Sites of the Day had so few.

Bsc, Chemistry

Activities and Societies: Served on entertainments committee. Graduation ball chairman in final year.