Chris Taggart

Co-Founder & CEO

OpenCorporates

Chris Taggart is the Co-Founder & CEO of OpenCorporates, the largest open database of companies in the world, with data on over 175 million companies in 130+ jurisdictions.

OpenCorporates’ primary mission is to open up and connect company data from across the globe, making it more useful, usable and understandable for the public benefit and is a critical tool for investigative journalists, NGOs, academics, due diligence professionals, law enforcement and government agencies from across the globe.

OpenCorporates is a social enterprise and has also been the leading force behind the push to make company registers open data for access to all – with numerous successes. Its mission is supported by an innovative virtuous-circle, public-benefit business model, whereby the free public access is subsidized by commercial users who paid for data in bulk, having confidence in its quality due to the intrinsic many-eyes feedback loop. Commercial users include Mastercard, Capital One, Factset, Transferwise and PWC.

Chris was originally a magazine journalist, but has been working in the field of open data for over 10 years, and is considered a world expert on official company data.

Sessions

Open compute, open source, open data, and the battle for digital sovereignty

06/11/2019 13.30 - 14.10

ExpertBlack stageBreakout session

The Open Source movement promised free, open, editable software. But that movement didn’t anticipate the rise of for-profit services built atop such free tools. Today, you’re more likely to use open source code as part of a paid service than you are to use open source products on your own machines.
That’s a problem. Because when you lose the right to edit code, you give up...

Circlesquare

06/11/2019 15.20 - 17.00

CirclesquareGreen stageInteractive session

We surveyed people to find the critical technologies and departments. And we chose these to create four concurrent half-hour discussions, four times over. It’s a choreographed dance of experts, ideas, and disruption.