Ian has led the campaign for better open data in Scotland / UK for many years, initially within local government, and for the last 5 years from civic society. He has written extensively about open data. He co-founded a charity - Code The City - which uses tech and data for social good. It runs four hack events each year.He was for five years on the board of Democracy Club a UK CIC which uses government and crowd-sourced open data to improve access to democracy. He was on the steering group for Stirling University's Data Commons Scotland project. He is an ambassador for Open UK as well as for The Data Lab in Scotland. As part of the Open Government Partnership for Scotland he was the civic lead for commitment three - access to information and data.The development of the recent community-built and -maintained Open Data Scotland, portal to which he contributes, was initially based on his research in 2019-20. That portal is up for three awards at the 2022 Open UK awards. He is also a Wikimedia UK trainer specialising in training in Wikidata.