Team

Karl-Filip Coenegrachts is OASC’s Chair of the Board of Directors. He represents Imec as a senior project leader and head of the data and cities team at the Free University of Brussels (imec-SMIT-VUB).
He is the liaison for the OASC team and the Board of Directors and brings in over 24 years of experience as a government official, both at the federal and local level.
Areas of work contain smart city strategy, digital transformation, citizen engagement and representation in IT and EU networks.

Michael Mulquin is OASC’s MIMs ambassador, setting the stage for Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms and working with the UN’s International standard organization ro formalise the MIMs. 
He has spent nearly 30 years partnering with cities, rural areas and industry on how technology can help them work better. 
He is technical author of two British Standards Institution publications and is an associate of the UK government’s Innovation Agency Catapult.

Martin Brynskov, is OASC’s founding member, former OASC Chair of the Board of Directors and current leader of the OASC Tech crew. Dr. Brynskov leads a portfolio of large-scale research, innovation and deployment actions at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU).
He brings in extensive experience in the field of smart and sustainable communities, computer science and semiotics and coined the term MIMs. 

Jaime Ventura is the Head of Urban Platform, Data analysis and Digital Services at Porto Digital. For the last four years, his team has been working on the implementation of Porto’s urban data platform, along with a set of applications used by the municipality services, towards the digital transformation of the city. Previously, he worked as a Site Reliability Engineer and also as an Infrastructure Automation Engineer for Paddy Power Betfair PLC (a place full of challenges, where high performance and innovative systems are pushed to the limit) and as System Administrator for the IPP – Polytechnic Institute of Porto (a 15k student higher learning Portuguese institution), managing systems supporting management, communications, authentication, etc. He also worked as a manager for projects ranging communications, software development and system design, for the electronic industry and education. Jaime has a Degree in Computer Science from the School of Engineering of the Polytechnic Institute of Porto (ISEP).His main interests are IoT, automation, performance and security.

Rick Schager is member of the OASC tech team and business architect for the city of Eindhoven, 
He has more than 20 years of experience with strategic & innovative digital projects in the Rotterdam harbour,  Rick is co-author of the Eindhoven Open Data Principles, the Smart Society IoT Charter and the practice guidelines for open urban platforms.
On behalf of OASC, he participates in several EU funded projects on smart cities.  .

Thimo Thoeye is a technology advisor for OASC in various projects. He brings in experience in interoperability and linked data.
Thimo is a driving force behind Open Knowledge Belgium and works for the ICT agency of the city of Ghent.

Vincent Demortier is an Entrepreneur, Creative Technologist and IT architect. He has multiple professional experiences in developing and deploying digital solutions: originally in industrial logistics within the automotive industry and in the food & beverage industry, then as consultant for a wide variety of SMEs and finally as entrepreneur involved in the creation of new businesses. In order to contribute to the development of its regional innovative ecosystem to support the digital transition and innovation, Vincent co-founded the Digital Innovation Hub Faubourg Numérique, of which he is chairman and he initiated the local OASC chapter in France. With this entrepreneurial impulse, Faubourg Numérique is committed to the FIWARE initiative as an Innovation Hub (FIWARE iHub). Vincent is an evangelist of the MIMs, a certified FIWARE expert, i4Trust LEBD, and Living-in.eu contributor.

Margarida Campolargo is the community and project coordinator at OASC. She takes care of our members & partners community and coordinates the network’s project management. She has over 10 years of experience in the field of smart cities working and social innovation, amongst others as a consultant for municipalities and international projects. 

Sophie Meszaros is an OASC project manager, taking care of the initiative ‘European Data Space for Smart and Sustainable Cities and Communities’ (DS4SSCC). As a researcher, Sophie focuses on trust in data-sharing for dataspaces at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (imec-SMIT-VUB) and brings in expertise on European innovation, inclusion and policy development in the European Parliament.

Judith Stiekema is an OASC project manager in charge of the Omega X project. Next to that, she is DIH Faubourg Numérique’s business development manager, a digital innovation hub in France which also initiated the French OASC chapter.

Judith is an all-round international marketing professional with over 20 years experience in business support, innovation, change management, strategy and European projects in multiple domains,such as tech, smart city, smart industry, automotive and the building sector.

Josephine Di Pino is the OASC project manager of CommuniCity and brings in over 10 years of experience in EU funded project management for municipalities and local authorities. 
For more than 10 years, Josephine worked as a business development manager and sales director in the telecom industry. 

Virginie Verstraete is OASC’s  communications, networking and partnerships coordinator. She is the go-to person for the external stakeholders and will guide you to the right info, people and projects. Together with Saara, she takes care of the strategic planning and the operational tasks on the OASC communications. Virginie brings in over 15 years of experience in senior management roles in a city, focussing on EU networks, policy development and EU funded projects.

Seppo Haataja, Msc, Senior advisor of OASC Operations, acting as Director of OASC from 2015 to 2017 and a member of board of directors from 2017 to 2021. Haataja has ten years’ experience for Director of Smart City Development at Business Tampere. He headed the economic development programs “Smart Tampere” and “Open Tampere” of the Finnish City of Tampere.

Prior to this, he worked 17 years for Nokia Oyj and Nokia Mobile Phones (NMP) in Senior Manager R&D roles in various business units. He managed the European WLAN development project (WAND), where global WiFi alliance and interoperable mechanism was developed.  He has established and managed R&D organisations for the Nokia Group as well as EU-level framework program consortia. 

He also worked abroad, two years in Cambridge, UK as a R&D site manager, and a year in Toronto, Canada as a visiting researcher. Before he engaged with Nokia, Haataja was Senior Research Scientist over 11 years at the Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT).

Saara Valtasaari oversees the communication and administrative tasks of OASC. She is currently finishing her Master’s in administrative sciences at Tampere University. She majors in environmental politics which she brings into her work at OASC.