Key Staff

Mark McGrath

Mark McGrath became the General Manager of the Social Change business in October 2007.

Mark McGrath is also a Social Marketing Consultant and Director of Social Change Media, specialising in providing social marketing services for public sector and non-profit organisations.

Before becoming a Director of Social Change Media in May 2003, Mark worked for company Social Change Online as a web consultant, specialising in developing web solutions for public sector and NGO's with a campaign focus.

Mark has guest lectured at several universities on social marketing and presented at national and international conferences on the issue of campaigning using the Internet. He has a degree in Media & Communications from the University of New South Wales is a Director of the Evatt Foundation.

Paul Smith

Paul Smith established Social Change Online London office in 2002 after a number years managing key union and local government projects. Specialises in Union and political campaigning work.

His professional expertise is in trade union communications strategy and social change campaigns. Recent projects include http://www.usdaw.org.uk, winner of the TUC's 2004 award for best website.

The key to the success of the project was not simply a matter of providing a great technological solution, but involved planning a strategy that connected the web to the unions organising and campaigns strategy.

Paul is involved in innovative work, (such as setting up the UK first virtual union branch site as a pilot for Unison), provides online organising consultancy for the TUC and was a keynote speaker at the 2005 Union Network International communicators' conference in Washington.

Sean Kidney

Sean has two decades experience working on public communications projects for Governments at all levels, for unions, and for not-for-profits.

He has worked closely with Government Ministers, with peak non-Government organisations (NGOs), and with local educators.

In 1988 he co-founded social marketing company, Social Change Media.

In 1996 he co-founded Social Change Online, dedicated to delivering web services to public interest organisations in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. He . in September 2007

Under the Social Change name Sean:

• Developed and ran a dozen major Australian public awareness strategies. He worked on topics ranging from justice and literacy to combating racism and parenting support.

• Designed dozens of local communications campaigns.

• Prepared half a dozen major organisational internet strategies.

• Oversaw development of hundreds of web sites for Government and NGOs.

• Established the Streetwize Youth Comics project in the mid 1980s. Over 20 years the project produced dozens of highly researched and targeted educational comics on survival and rights for disadvantaged young people across Australia.

• Set up Redfern Legal Centre Publishing, a legal educational publisher based in the Australian community legal centres movement.

• Was the proprietor for many years of Pluto Press Australia, a leading independent publisher on the left of politics. Pluto published hundreds of important books by authors ranging from Mark Latham to Ghassan Hage.

• Member of the Executive of the Australian Fabians .

• Member of the NSW Labor Party's Information Technology and Communications Policy Committee.

• Member of The Australia Institute Board.

• Member of the Greenpeace Australia Pacific Board.

• Member of the Advisory Committee of the National Association for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect.

• Board member of Cleardocs, an online legal documents company.

Rob Atkinson

Rob is a world leading authority on distributed data systems and webmapping. He is researcher and practitioner in the field of spatial and information community related interoperability standards and distributed systems architectures.

Rob has 20 years experience in information technology. He has previously been a lecturer in computing and a developer of mission-critical IT systems for industry.

Rob is also a Research Fellow at the University of Sydney, within the Dept of Geosciences and Institute of Marine Science, researching interoperability between traditional data exchange mechanisms (OpenDAP) and emerging mainstream distributed computing infrastructures.

Notable achievements for Rob include the overall concept, and leading a team during the design and implementation of a multi-agency "Spatial Data Infrastructure"; approach to sharing natural resources information in the Australia State of New South Wales (NSW). This predates and was a precursor of the OpenGIS Consortium (OGC) and ISO standards for spatial data access via Web protocols.

Other Web sites based on metadata management approaches pioneered by Rob are internationally recognised as "best of breed" and have successfully served growing communities of users over many years.

Practical experience in Australia has been followed up with active engagement in international standards communities. This includes

• Editor, Co-author or Revision Working group member of the OGC Web Map Server, Web Feature Server, Gazetteer, Geocoder and Catalog Services interoperability specifications and recommendation papers;

• Architecture lead for the MarineXML Consortium, a EU funded project under the auspices of UNESCO;

• Development of an implementation architecture and roadmap for the deployment of Exploration and Mining Markup Language (XMML) (on behalf of CSIRO and Geosciences Australia, May 2004).

Through the OGC's consultative process Rob has also been involved in a range of ISO standard development and review processes with the US government, including:

• ISO 19115 (Spatial metadata);

• ISO19119 (Spatial Services); and

• ISO 19112 (Geographic Referencing by Identifier);

• An exploration of implementation approaches for ISO 19110 (Feature Type Catalog).

Rob has presented papers and undertaken standards education workshops at many forums in Australia, UK, New Zealand, United States, Canada and South Korea.