The most experienced team in publishing.
We’ve built over a dozen highly successful publishing platforms – making us the most experienced folks in publishing.
Leadership
Adam Hyde
Founder & Principal Architect
Adam brings publishing and technical leadership as well as pioneering insights into publishing workflows and technologies. Adam is also technical advisor for the OA Switchboard project, holds a seat on the Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) Management Board, and co-founder of the Coalition for Open Access Publishing Infrastructure in Africa project. Drop Adam a note at adam@coko.foundation
Lara Bowen
Strategic Partnerships
A seasoned leader in creative services and digital transformation, Lara has spent her career working with brands around the world to unlock value and drive growth. From start ups to global multinationals, Lara has helped build teams and lead strategic partnerships for organisations with purpose. Lara is excited to be part of Coko’s journey. Drop Lara a note at lara@coko.foundation
Dione Mentis
COO and Senior Architect
Until Joining Coko Dione was an independent publishing consultant with over 10 years experience in the industry. Her expertise lies in educational content production, particularly digital-first, multi-format books, with a keen interest in optimising open-access production workflows and content development. Initally Dione joined Coko as our Technical Manager and is now our Chief Operating Officer. Drop Dione a note at dione@coko.foundation
Yannis Barlas
Lead Developer and Senior Architect
Yannis has many years experience developing full stack applications and has been part of building almost every platform to come out of Coko. Yannis was one of the first developers to join Coko and has increasingly expanded his role to his current position as our Lead Developer (effectively our CTO).
Coko Advisory Board
As part of our commitment to being community-driven, we have a board of advisors that help inform Coko’s current and future directions. The board is convened at least once annually.
Tim O’Reilly
Founder and CEO, O’Reilly Media
Tim O'Reilly is well known within publishing and tech circles. Tim has been very generous with his time providing great feedback on Cokos' strategic direction.
Bhuvana Meenakshi Koteeswaran
DEWI Founder
Bhuvana is a Socio Tech researcher and joins us to help start the Coko-WITc Software Academy.
Bob Young
Founder of RedHat and Lulu.com
Bob Young, co-founder of Red Hat, The Linux Journal, The Center for Public Domain, and Lulu.com joined the advisory board for Coko to further his enthusiasm for our mission.
Charlie Ablett
Senior Backend Engineer, GitLab
Charlie used to work as lead dev on the INK project which we started in 2016 and completed in 2018. We feel extremely proud Charlie has agreed to return and lend her vast experience as a developer to the Coko thinking.
John Chodacki
Director, University of California Curation Center (UC3) at California Digital Library
John was there at the beginning of Coko and helped shaped the original idea. We are happy he stays with us!
Charles Henri Schulz
Technologist and Open Standards Advocate
Charles- H Schulz is a French technologist, free software and open standards advocate. Charles is a long time contributor to the OpenOffice.org project, he also contributed to the development and adoption of the OpenDocument Format standard and is a former director of the OASIS Consortium and the Document Foundation (home of the LibreOffice project).
Karien Bezuidenhout
Director, Shuttleworth Foundation
Long time friend of Coko, the Shuttleworth Foundation provided the first seed funding for Coko based on Founder Adam Hyde's Fellowship.
Peter Brantley
Director of Online Strategy, University of California Davis Library
Peter Brantley is well known in publishing as the founder of the very important Books in Browsers conference series and the Read2.0 list.
Tony Wasserman
Professor of Software Management Practice, Carnegie Mellon, Silicon Valley, & Executive Director, Center for Open Source Investigation
Tony has been involved in so many interesting and foundational open source projects, and we are honored to have his voice added to the Coko Advisory Board.
Alison McGonagle-O'Connell
Consultant
Alison worked for Coko until recently and now joins both our Advisory Board and the Ketty Advisory Group. We are delighted to be working with Alison in this capacity going forward.
Evan Henshaw-Plath (Rabble)
Entrepreneur
Rabble is a technologist who explores the intersection of product, engineering, and the political systems in which they exist. His passion is in the space of new emerging start-ups and making the world a better place through civic technology projects. Evan is has helped found and grow a vast number of interesting organisations and technologies including indymedia, Crafted Code, Twitter, Neo, Affinity.works, and Planetary.
Team
Bethany Lyons
Financial Administrator
Bethany comes from the US but lives in Raglan, New Zealand. Bethany is part-owner and operator of the beautiful Koru Lodge and also teaches yoga.
Sidorela Uku
Lead QA Engineer
Sidorela is our talented QA engineer and really passionate about open source projects and open knowledge.
Ryan Dix-Peek
Kotahi Project Manager and Architect
Ryan joined Coko with 10 years experience in edtech, creating content and working with leaner management systems. Ryan leads the project management of Kotahi.
Christina Tromp
Ketty Project Manager
Christina is based in Cape Town, South Africa. She has a passion for using open-source publishing and educational technologies to develop and deliver accessible content to people all around the world. She has five years of experience managing complex, multi-format publishing projects and ecosystems.
Natasha Budd
Project Manager
Natasha is an experienced education professional with expertise in curriculum development, academic management, and instructional content design. Natasha has a keen interest in advancing online content creation in the educational domain.
Suela Palushi
Project Manager
Suela is a Product Manager with an entrepreneurial background and a long history of working with Open-Source organizations. She has more than five years of hands-on experience leading successful teams and digital initiatives.
Anne Erika Schmidt
Exec Assistant and Logistics
Anne has been the executive assistant of Coko founder Adam Hyde since 2018. Before she joined the team she was a research associate in the field of art history at Humboldt University Berlin.
Alexis Georgantas
Lead Ketty Developer
Alexis is a full stack engineer. Alexis is the lead developer on Ketty and leads the development on the community Feature Proposal process.
Giannis Kopanas
Lead Developer Client Projects
Giannis is a full stack engineer with more than ten years of experience in Web Applications. Giannis has been involved with building several of the platforms to come out of Coko.
Fred Chasen
Pagedjs Lead Developer
Fred is well known in this domain, having worked on publishing platforms and pagination for OReilly and Readium. Fred is also the founder of the popular epub.js. Fred is the main JavaScript developer for paged.js and lives in L.A.
Ben Whitmore
Lead Kotahi Developer
Ben joins us from the lovely town of Raglan, New Zealand. Ben is the lead dev for Kotahi and works closely with all collaborating organizations wanting to use and extend Kotahi.
Christos Kokosias
Lead Wax Developer
Christos has been building web based word processors using a number of different open source frameworks, for the last 3 years. He is currently rebuilding Wax 'the right way' making it infinitely more extensible and customisable. Christos lives in Athens, Greece.
Grigor Malo
Developer
Grigor is a javascript developer with several years of experience. His work is mainly around frontend technologies. He has a keen interest in web accessibility. In his free time, Grigor likes to study mathematics and indulge in the wonders of philosophy.
Paul Wababu
AI Engineer
Paul is a AI Engineer who is passionate about utilizing cutting-edge language models to enhance our product suite. He is always eager to apply his expertise to solve real-world challenges.
Vukile Langa
Developer
Vukile is a web developer keen to learn more about new developments in the tech field, and to apply this knowledge to solve problems in the real world.
Raewyn Whyte
Copy Editing
Raewyn is our copy editor. Raewyn Whyte is an editor, indexer, and dance critic who writes for web and print.
Julie Blanc
Pagedjs CSS Developer/Designer
Julie is a CSS guru and plays a vital role in interpretation of the PagedMedia CSS specs and testing if paged.js is compliant. Julie also does quite a bit of presenting about PagedMedia and how it works. Julie lives in Paris and is undergoing her PHD there at the University of Paris 8 (Paragraphe lab) and at EnsadLab-Paris. Julies work and research focuses on the implications of automated typesetting in design practices.
Henrik van Leeuwen
Branding and UX
Henrik is our UX expert. He is also something of a design guru from the Netherlands. Henrik is interested in hardware development and has extensive expertise in interaction and graphic design.
Harshna Haswani
Pagedjs CSS Developer/Designer in association with WITc, India
Harshna is a driven and aspirational full stack developer from India. Harshna is a detail-oriented problem solver with a strong aptitude for learning new technologies. She is committed to delivering efficient and user-friendly web solutions.
Julien Taquet
Pagedjs CSS Developer/Designer
Julien is a book production expert having honed his skills with CSS book production in rapid production environments like Book Sprints. Julien now is focused on building community around Paged.js and bringing his skills to educate the growing community fo designers wanting to migrate to CSS book design.
Bela Toci
QA Engineer
Bela is a Mechatronics Engineer graduate, from Albania. She is an open-source enthusiast, environmentalist, an avid reader, and very passionate about open knowledge.
Vignesh S
QA Engineer in association with WITc, India
Deeply Passionate software developer from Tamil Nadu, India with sharp rational and logical thinking skills . He is super enthusiastic about learning and working with web/cross-platform technologies . A keen player with a sustainability notion .
Vignesh Devendran
Developer
Developer with many years of experience in developing enterprise web applications. Vignesh currently work towards improving and extending features in Kotahi platform. He is a creative logical thinker with a great passion for technology and innovation. He is from Tamil Nadu, India.
Dan Visel
Developer
Dan Visel is a creative technologist. As part of the Institute for the Future of the Book, he wrote and spoke extensively about the changing nature of reading and writing. Besides working with Coko, he's currently busy building digital projects for the National University of Singapore Press and is half of Circumference Books, a press for poetry in translation.
Wendell Piez
Lead XSweet Developer
Wendell is a stone cold guru in the XML and XSLT worlds. Now working with National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST), Information Technology Laboratory (ITL), Wendell is also a long term friend of the XML Guild and has been deeply involved in Balisage for many years. Wendell lives in Maryland, USA.
Agathe Baëz
Designer
Agathe is a graphic designer passionate about books, paper and printing. She also likes to play with web languages to design digital and printed publications.
Abhishek Pokhriyal
Developer
Abhishek Pokhriyal is a Computer Science Engineer with 5+ years of experience in building and maintaining web and mobile applications. He has worked in various domains like eCommerce, health & fitness, food tech, and social sector/NGOs. He is a fan of Javascript and React and loves to build challenging UI with them.
Pankaj Kandpal
Developer
Pankaj is a Software Development Engineer at ColoredCow having experience in building scalable web and mobile applications. Pankaj has worked in MarTech, EduTech, and Social Sector domains. Being a believer in making things happen, has helped him collaborate in a team, be upfront, and take responsibility. He finds solving abstractions interesting. He also enjoys cooking and playing LAN games.
Rudresh Shrotriya
Developer
Rudresh is a seasoned lead engineer at ColoredCow, possessing nearly two decades of invaluable experience in designing and developing robust and scalable enterprise applications. He has a diverse range of expertise spanning across various domains such as fintech, healthcare, and the social sector. In addition to his technical prowess, Rudresh is a music enthusiast with a keen interest in audio gadgets. During his leisure time, he enjoys watching Tom Hanks movies.
Vaibhav Rathore
Developer
Vaibhav is a Software Engineer at ColoredCow, specializing in building robust tech foundations and implementing best practices. As a member of the Kotahi team, he's committed to enhancing system features and security for publishers. Vaibhav's passion for mentorship has led him to conduct over 20 coding boot camps for free, inspiring and educating aspiring tech professionals in the Himalayan hills.
Pankaj Agrawal
Developer
Pankaj is a senior software engineer with over 7 years of experience. He is dedicated to leveraging technology to design and implement effective systems, with a particular interest in open-source technologies. Throughout his career, Pankaj has worked on numerous enterprise web solutions across domains such as Healthcare, Social Sector, and EdTech. Currently, he is applying his expertise as a senior developer on the Kotahi platform at Coko.
Mathias Romeo
Developer
Mathias is a developer, graphic designer, and musician from Montevideo, Uruguay. He is deeply passionate about the symbiotic relationship between art and technology and how they can collaborate effectively. Particularly interested in the creative aspect of any subject or field. Mathias is constantly seeking new ways to bridge the gap between his imagination and what he can bring to life.
John Wanjohi
Developer
John is a seasoned full-stack developer. With a strong foundation in JavaScript and frameworks like React and Node, he has successfully delivered robust web applications. Passionate about open-source development, John actively contributes to the community by sharing his knowledge and collaborating on projects. His love for open-source drives his continuous learning and enables him to leverage the collective power of collaboration to create innovative solutions.
Duncan Bennett
Developer
Duncan has over 15 years experience as a web developer and is most at home working on server side code. He enjoys a challenge and is always up for learning something new.