Tim McNamara is the Communities and Communications Programme Lead at the New Zealand eScience Infrastructure. His job is to connect researchers with supercomputers and other tools to help them accelerate their research.
Outside of work, he is a fairly big supporter of Python in New Zealand. He was the conference director for Kiwi Pycon 2011 and is on the organising committee of this year’s conference to be held in early September in Auckland. Closer to the software carpentry world, he has organised beginner programming workshops with a focus on adding to the diversity of the New Zealand Python community.
Tim is a self-taught programmer and GNU/Linux user. You can see his code contributions on GitHub, Bitbucket and other places. He has worked professionally as a programmer at Boost New Media (Rails), Dragonfly Science (Django) and the Open Knowledge Foundation (various).
He is also a member of Open New Zealand and is a strong proponent of open government data. At various times, he harbours naïve aspirations of solving the world’s problems through enhancing connectedness and diffusion of knowledge. Accordingly, Tim spends too much time lamenting the lack of widespread adoption of RDF and ubiquitous open linked data.