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The Team

MANAGEMENT

A/Prof Vanessa Teague

Chairperson & Founder

Vanessa is an Adjunct Associate Professor at ANU specialising in cryptographic protocols that support a free and democratic society. She works on openly available research and software for supporting democratic decision making and empowering ordinary people to make choices about their own data. Vanessa has researched security problems in e-voting and e-counting systems and has developed new tools and techniques for auditing complex elections (photo: Kristina D.C. Hoeppner, CC BY-SA 2.0).

Rosey Conway

Board Member & Communications

Rosey has 30 years experience as an educator, specialising in executive sales, marketing, branding, strategy, management and communications. Her BA in the humanities & social sciences has inspired a career that thrives on building creative solutions to achieve great outcomes. Rosey is passionate about improving democratic involvement and communication, and she hopes to inspire more Australians to become politically engage and have their voices heard.

Lillian McCann

Board Member & Technologist

Lilli grew up in Gippsland in regional Victoria. After completing a BA in politics & international studies and a Diploma in Computing, she fulfilled her desire to develop the skills to build technology to change the world for the better and began a career in software engineering. Passionate about the potential for e-democracy to improve democratic processes and representation, and concerned about poor cybersecurity and digital privacy, Lilli is committed to advancing democracy through her role in Democracy Developers.

Dr Michelle Blom

RAIRE Technical Specialist

Michelle is a Senior Research Fellow in the AI and Autonomy Lab of the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne. Michelle completed her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Melbourne in 2011. She has diverse research interests that include election integrity (with a focus on post-election audits), combinatorial optimization (with a focus on algorithms for solving large problems through decomposition, local search, and the use of mathematical programming), applications of reinforcement learning, and Explainable AI.

Mark Pinoli

General Manager & Company Secretary

Mark brings over two decades of experience in not-for-profit management, highlighted by ten years of delivering community empowerment projects in rural Nepal. His leadership roles include serving as a Board Member & International Services Director at Rotary Melbourne and Assistant Director of Research & Policy at the Academy of the Social Sciences. Mark has an extensive background as a consultant, where he partnered with numerous not-for-profits and universities to drive their mission forward. He also lends his expertise as a member of the ACNC Consultation Panel and RMIT’s Human Research Ethics Committee.

Dan Cameron

TECH & DESIGN

Andrew Conway

Chris Culnane

Chuanyuan Liu

Tim McCann

Volunteers

Our volunteers have been the lifeblood of Democracy Developers. Without their expertise and continuing determination and passion, we would not have been able to deliver our initiatives.

SPECIAL THANKS TO:
Charmaine Chew,  Matt Lefurge, Hanna Navissi, Dana McKay, Eleanor McMurtry, Pedro Rosas, Miguel Wood, and the Masters’ student teams at the University of Melbourne.

Our volunteers have:

  • Provided technical support and helped develop the framework for our app and website.
  • Provided marketing advice and graphic design services.
  • Provided trusted advice on cryptographic and secure software design methods.
  • Assisted in the development of resources and policies that are important to the management of our charity.
Photo of some of our founding volunteers.
Photo of some of Democracy Developer's founding volunteers