British economist Rufus Pollock, an expert in information policy and the digital economy, will give a talk titled “The Power of Open” tonight.

    Pollock is a Shuttleworth Foundation alumnus, an associate of the Center for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge and president of Open Knowledge which he co-founded (as the Open Knowledge Foundation) in 2004 and served as a board director until 2013.

    The Open Knowledge Foundation is a global nonprofit network that promotes and shares information at no charge, including both content and data. In 2007 and 2009, Pollock published two controversial papers regarding the optimal copyright term, where he proposed based on an economical model with empirically estimable parameters an optimal duration of only 15 years, significantly shorter than any currently existing copyright term.

    He has held the Mead Research Fellowship in economics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In 2009, he was credited by web-inventor Tim Berners-Lee for starting the Raw Data Now meme. In 2010 he was appointed as one of the four founding members of the U.K. Government’s Public Sector Transparency Board.

    Time: 6:30 p.m., Feb. 20

    Venue: C1-108, Graduate School at Shenzhen, Tsinghua University, Xili, Nanshan District (南山区西丽清华大学深圳研究生院C1-108)

    Metro: Line 5, University Town (大学城站), Exit C and then take a taxi(SD News)