Serv Wiemers (e-mail) is Open State’s executive director. Serv believes in a strong democracy through open communication and information. Previously he was, among other things, director of The Hague Institute for Global Justice and Transparency International NL. He also worked on strengthening democracy, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe through the OSCE. In the Netherlands, he was active for the Dutch Labour Party. Serv studied international law and international relations in Leiden, Paris and Connecticut.

Breyten Ernsting (e-mail) works as a developer at the Open State Foundation since 2011. Breyten is an Information Science alumnus. He loves to help make data open, as well as increasing the usefulness of open data by combining related data sets. He is mainly busy working on Open Spending, Open Municipal Information and Politwoops, the site that keeps track of the deleted tweets by politicians.

Sicco van Sas (e-mail) started as an intern at the Open State Foundation for his master thesis Artificial Intelligence in 2012. Since then he always stayed involved with the foundation. Together with his team he won the Public Broadcasting Hackathon in 2013 and he created the Dutch Budget Visualization in 2014. He works as a developer at OSF since 2015. Sicco loves to open an analyze data and has worked on numerous projects that contribute to this. He spoke on the main stage during May Contain Hackers 2022: Democracy: Eventually Digitally Transparent?

Tim Goedhart-Vos (e-mail) is senior projectmanager. Having worked at ProDemos and its predecessor the IPP, he has a background in promoting active citizenship. He supports the proposition that government is there for all of us and that the knowledge that is gained is of importance to everyone. Active citizenship starts with a government that is open by design. Tim likes to focus on strengthening the debate on transparency and open data, and on projects that make government data accessible and reusable.

Project assistant Veerle Fanoy (e-mail) is intrigued by the interactions between state and citizens. In her work at Open State she focuses primarily on how this relationship manifests itself in Freedom of Information and lobbying in the Netherlands. Veerle is currently pursuing a master’s in political science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, specialising in democracy, power and inequality. She also studied political science in Melbourne and Nijmegen.

Jan van der Burgt (e-mail) is project lead at Open State. After founding and building several tech companies, Jan is now at Open State to build a new suite of products for open data. Products that aim to make open data better accessible and searchable. His first project will be OpenOverheidsdata.

Charlotte Kroese (e-mail) joined Open State Foundation as a project officer in October 2023. Last year she obtained her master’s degree in Information Law at the University of Amsterdam, where she studied privacy and data protection law, algorithmic discrimination, and the right to (government) information and freedom of expression. Previously, Charlotte studied law and political science at Amsterdam University College and received her bachelor’s degree in law from the UvA. At Open State, she aims to contribute to government transparency in order to support (local) journalism, to research algorithmic discrimination and to promote open government data.