Hello! I am Dan Shearer, dan@shearer.org. I live in Scotland and practice in Europe, the US and Oceania.
Me
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. The rest of this site has notes and results from my work in industry, academia and
rights-related passions. I work between policy and governance on the one hand, and the technical implications of computing and medical science on the other,
with computer engineering and law usually involved.
When a technology becomes really widespread, who gets to control it? This is more subtle these days than traditional black-and-white debates of Capitalist vs the People.
Issues of privacy, collectivism and efficiency get muddied by sovereignty, AI, and climate change. Venture funders and governments quite commonly want to
discuss collective IP protection in the face of unprecedentedly powerful tech companies. Those conversations would have been unthinkable twenty years ago, and
indicates a shift towards allowing people control of their own data and solutions.
I find this thread of “who controls it?” and “how can we make it our own?” running through all questions of AI alignment and ethics, the problems of tech giant monopolies, privacy law, health data and technical science details.
University of Southampton, Digital Health and Biomedical Engineering
2 years 6 months
Modelling Risk Assessment at the IT Innovation Centre within DHBE. Leading open software development used for risk assessment, applied to privacy, AI assessment, and threat assessment of complex IT systems.
December 2019 – Present
LumoSQL Project
6 years 5 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. Project is ongoing.
March 2013 – February 2019
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.
February 2013 – November 2015
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.
January 2013 – April 2023
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 1997 – Present
Continuous Practice
29 years 4 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 1992 – December 2015
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.
