Meta Data is a series of interviews with the fascinating people behind open data. As long-form transcripts, they are best enjoyed in a quiet hour with your favorite hot beverage. If you consider this project worthwhile, why not share it with a friend ;).
Oleg Lavrovsky is an advocate for open data based in Switzerland. He has been involved in Opendata.ch, Switzerland’s chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation and is running hackathons. Oleg helped to start the now defunct Oxford Hackerspace, runs the local TTN Bern community and worked for years as IT engineer in the industry before starting a freelance consultancy (Datalets). He is a devoted husband and parent of 2.
Oleg: I see myself as a resident of the world, alive for something like 40 years. Hard to keep track at this point “over the horizon”, as they say. The fact is that life is short, and I’ve been in Switzerland for just over half my life so far. I came here as a student in 2002, and started working quite a few years before that. My career began twenty-five years ago, when I started my first company and got into the Internet business back in Canada.
I’m proud to be a Canadian citizen, thankful for the inherited legacy, and to the community was there for me as an immigrant. My parents moved around a lot, about seven times in the space of 10 years, they moved house. Yeah, that happens to people who are migrants. We can never settle down. We have a hard time planting roots. For me, it has also been a long process. I have lived in the western and central parts of Switzerland, but I’ve also lived in the UK, and worked a lot with US companies and teams in India, and in Eastern Europe, and just all over the place.