Hello! I am Dan Shearer, dan@shearer.org. I live in Scotland and practice in Europe, the US and Oceania. You can verify and email me securely .
I have organised my work and interests in two ways:
- Assorted Jottings,
- A list of Library Articles
- Deep Research
- A tag cloud of topics
In 2026 I am employed by the IT Innovation centre at the University of Southampton, England working on various aspects of causality - firstly in risk analysis and then in epidemiology. I continue with various open source projects, with occasional investment analysis and cybersecurity contract.
Persevere open source project
December 2025
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Present
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Present
University of Southampton
5 months
Rule Based Epidemiology Modelling group, using a rules based technique to
achieve similar results to traditional ordinary differential equations. Paper 1, Paper 2
November 2025
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Present
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Present
University of Southampton
2 years 6 months
Modelling Risk Assessment at the IT Innovation Centre. Considering open software used for risk assessment, working with privacy, AI assessment, and threat assessment of complex IT systems.
May 2023
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November 2025
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November 2025
LumoSQL Project
6 years 4 months
Project Lead. Open source project modifying SQLite to add technical enhancements for performance, security and measurement, in cooperation with the SQLite project. Funded by NLnet (Phase I and Phase II). Squashed by the pandemic, still highly relevant.
December 2019
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Present
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Present
Open Ocean Capital
5 years 11 months
CTO Advisor. Investigating and assessing B2B companies, mostly software startups, some growth stage and hardware crossover, including machine learning and pre-LLM AI. Portfolio involvement including board-level review and strategy changes including whole-company pivots. Based in Edinburgh and Helsinki.
March 2013
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February 2019
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February 2019
Zentyal
2 years 9 months
VP Special Projects. Representing Zentyal’s interest in large-scale commercial deployment of solutions based on Open Source. Working on Linux, Samba and especially OpenChange. Based in Zaragoza, Spain.
February 2013
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November 2015
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November 2015
Cybersecurity Consultancy
10 years 3 months
Privacy and Open Source Specialist. Developing tooling for GDPR, ISO27001 and CyberEssentials tooling using Records Management approaches. Implemented for cloud computing, earth sciences and logistics companies. Expert witness work in electronic microfabrication for the Scottish Court of Sessions (Ultratech Inc vs Stepper Technology Ltd), radiopharmacology software architecture (Erigal Ltd), manufacturing fault detection, warehouse product tracking, and legal technology advisory for Scottish and English legal practices on IP and Privacy.
January 2013
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April 2023
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April 2023
Continuous Practice
29 years 3 months
Privacy and Open Source Specialist (Self-employed, Scotland). Ongoing consulting since 1997 spanning privacy law, open source strategy, security implementation, and technology assessment. This thread runs parallel to all specific roles listed above.
January 1997
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Present
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Samba Project
24 years
Co-founder. Co-founded the Samba project, providing file and print services to SMB/CIFS clients. Technical background work for two decades including software development in C and system/infrastructure code. Technology assessment involving code reading and experimentation across IT infrastructure, servers, scaling approaches, and cloud stack design.
January 1992
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December 2015
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December 2015
Here are some miscellaneous things that emerged along the way:
- Code of Conduct — A concise code of conduct for open source projects after witnessing repeated serious incidents of aggression and intimidation. Started from the Mozilla Participation Guidelines, shrunk to the essentials for smaller projects.
- Security Standards and Certifications — How security standards (ISO27001/9001, GDPR, NIS, etc.) and certifications relate in practice for UK industry.
- Fossil — Git is ubiquitous but with some difficult‑to‑fix design flaws that hold back development for most projects. Fossil is very mature but needed to be easier to access, and to have a technical strategy for avoiding Git‑type lock‑in. I contributed to these improvements so my projects could abandon Git/GitHub for Fossil.
- Teaching Exercises — Exercises in the areas of CyberSecurity/CompSci and Technology.