David Megginson, consultant
I am an independent consultant with 14 years' experience in the aid sector (11 of those with the UN), specialising in aid data and aid standards. Before that, I had decades of experience with standards, open data, open source, software development, and technology architecture.
Career highlights
- Co-founder of the University of Ottawa's Writing Centre (1992–95).
- Author of Structuring XML Documents (Prentice-Hall, 1998).
- Creator of the Simple API for XML (SAX), now integrated into many standard programming-language libraries (1998).
- Member of the W3C XML Working Group, 1998–2000.
- Chair of the W3C XML Core Working Group, 1999–2000.
- Recipient of the Java Technology Achievement Award For Outstanding Individual Contribution to the Java Community from Sun Microsystems (2000).
- Volunteer non-emergency medical pilot for Hope Air (2004–14).
- Chair of the international XML 2006 and XML 2007 conferences.
- Creator and maintainer of the OurAirports open-data community web site (2007–present).
- Architect of the Government of Canada procurement site BuyAndSell (2010–13).
- Creator of the original International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) schema (2010–12).
- Founding team member and initial technology architect for the UN's Humanitarian Data Exchange (2013–24).
- Maintainer of the UN's Humanitarian Exchange Language (HXL) for aid data interoperability (2013–24), presented to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon in 2016.
Contact
I no longer operate my consulting corporation Megginson Technologies Ltd, but still accept occasional personal consulting contracts. Feel free to reach out if you are interested in working together:
- contact@megginson.com
- davidmegginson
Archived site
The website for Megginson Technologies Ltd, with links to various resource pages (many of which are out of date), is still available as an archived copy for those interested.