I’m happy to announce our newest addition here at the U.S. Open Data Institute: Casey Kuhlman. He’s our newest open data evangelist, and will be doing a bit of everything here—writing software, assisting our partners in government and the private sector, giving talks, working with vendors, and helping to chart our collective path to a better open data ecosystem.
Casey is a graduate of Vanderbilt University Law School in the United States and is a member of the Tennessee Bar Association. He was the founder of Watershed Legal Services, a full-service law firm headquartered in Hargeisa, Somaliland. His practice focused on advising foreign entities in compliance areas. Casey was also an infantry officer in the United States Marine Corps. His experiences in the Marines led him to write a New York Times best-selling book, Shooter, with Jack Coughlin. After going to Vanderbilt, Casey worked with the prosecutor’s office of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, where he worked on The Prosecutor v. Charles Taylor. He also worked with the Public International Law & Policy Group as the Chief of Party for Somaliland Project, which focused on developing the capacity of the Somaliland Parliament, as well as providing expert international legal advice to the Parliament. An avid software engineer and free and open source advocate, Casey has worked on open source projects at the intersection of legal practice and legislative development. In his free time, Casey has been working on systems of smart contracts with a particular focus on automating regulatory compliance in contractual instruments.
He has a rare collection of unrelated experiences: working with government, developing software, and working with open data. Casey’s background is anything but traditional for somebody in the open data sector, which is exactly what we’d hoped for.
Follow Casey on Twitter or on GitHub to keep up with his work.