Draft:Daniel Pocock

Daniel Pocock is an Irish Australian software engineer who is involved in the development and promotion of Free Software. He was a contributor to the book Monitoring with Ganglia.. . He has published numerous packages in the Debian and Fedora distributions of Linux. Pocock is a candidate for the district of Midlands-North-West in the 2024 European Parliament election.

Education
Pocock began high school at Catholic College Bendigo. In 1993 he completed the amateur radio exam and acquired the callsign VK3TQR. His callsign is logged in the NASA SAREX mission STS-59. Pocock was subsequently one of 20 high school students selected by the Royal Australian Air Force for the Spring Engineering School at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra. Pocock completed his final year at Xavier College in Melbourne where he participated in the debating team, rowing, cross country and athletics. Pocock earned a degree Bachelor of Computer Science from University of Melbourne in 2002. He completed the MicroMasters in Data, Economics and Development Policy from MITx in 2020.

Community service
In 1997, Pocock began applying his Linux skills as a volunteer system administrator for the Virtual Moreland Community Network in the region of Moreland in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. Pocock's project successfully hosted web sites for many early social causes, including the campaign to defend the Wik decision of 1996. Pocock immediately attracted support from Australia's opposition leader, Kim Beazley and one of Australia's first doxing attacks from the far right media. As a consequence of this work, Pocock was nominated for the web page competition in the Loud Festival, a prominent national event organized by the Australia Council Pocock began developing a Content Management System in PHP and used it to assist hundreds of local groups to go online in the early days of the Internet. He offered the same solution as open source for the community users and business clients. In 1998, Pocock, as an undergraduate and Peter Eckersley as a postgraduate were selected to represent the interests of the Melbourne University Student Union on the University of Melbourne oversight committees for information technology. During 1999, he was elected to the post of Environment Officer in the Victorian branch of the National Union of Students (Australia). When the Australian woman Schapelle Corby was arrested in Bali in 2005, Mr Pocock created the site Don't Shoot Schapelle (now defunct) opposing the death penalty . In 2017, the Fellowship community associated with the Free Software Foundation Europe elected Pocock as the Fellowship representative. . November 2018, Pocock attended the UN Forum on Business and Human Rights. In the session on Safeguarding Human Rights Defenders, Pocock made a brief intervention about the risks of trusting companies like Facebook and Twitter with data about friends that may eventually fall into the wrong hands. . Shortly after attending the forum, on 7 January 2019, Pocock published a blog about the membership status and membership rights of volunteers contributing to free software projects. The same day, Pocock's blog was removed from the Planet Mozilla blog syndication service, no explanation was given at that time In 2020, Pocock published a number of emails from the debian-private mailing list revealing why he felt the claims against Jacob Appelbaum were falsified.

Career
Pocock founded his first consultancy business, SkySoft Pty Ltd as a student in 1997. His clients included Work Solutions Group, a winner of the Telstra Business Awards and his content management system hosted the first web sites of several leading political figures including Lynne Kosky and Lindsay Tanner. He eventually dropped support for the content management system as Drupal and Wordpress became the dominant tools in that space.

After graduating, Pocock moved to Europe where he has worked for Barclays Capital in Canary Wharf, Thomson Reuters in Paris and UBS in Zurich.

Pocock founded the Software Freedom Institute in 2021.

Codes of Conduct phenomena
In 2020, Pocock argued that the Outreachy program, where he has several years of experience as a mentor, was effectively paying women not to be too outspoken in the open source world. .

In 2021, David Arroyo Menéndez, a researcher from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and author of the Damegender software posted statistics about diversity on the debian-women mailing list. Steve McIntyre, a former Debian Project Leader, sent a public reply threatening to censor Arroyo Menéndez if he published any more statistics. In defiance, Pocock published a blog suggesting that the statistics could be analyzed using a Regression discontinuity design to see if the rate at which women joined Debian was increasing or decreasing after the Code of Conduct was introduced. Pocock's initial summary of the data showed that fewer women were actually joining Debian after the Code of Conduct and Outreachy mentoring programs were introduced.

In comments reported by The Register, Pocock explained that the Code of Conduct phenomena in open source organizations was a form of kangaroo court being used to deter and deflect questions about accountability.

On 21 March 2022 Pocock published an open letter asking the Association for Computing Machinery and other professional bodies to consider whether the Codes of Conduct in the open source software workplace are effectively impersonating the Code of Ethics of a professional body.

Toastmasters
Pocock participates in the Toastmasters International organization. Upon finding there were no active clubs in Kosovo, Pocock took the initiative to establish a club at the Innovation Center Kosovo

Red Hat, Inc and Fedora
In March 2021, Pocock wrote about his concerns at the risk of modern slavery in the open source supply chain. The blog post was syndicated on Fedora Planet. In January 2022, Red Hat, an IBM subsidiary since 2019, began proceedings against Pocock and the Software Freedom Institute to prevent them using the domain name WeMakeFedora.org. Red Hat's claim was denied by the panel and Red Hat was cited for harassment and abuse of the administrative procedure.

Expulsion from Debian project
Pocock was expelled from the Debian project in 2018 after accusations of harassment.

Involvement in FSFE data breach
In 2019 Pocock was accused by the Free Software Foundation Europe of inappropriate use of user data and misrepresenting himself as an FSFE representative.

Banning from FOSDEM
Pocock was banned from FOSDEM in 2022 "due to abuse of privileges and other complaints".

Bad faith registration of domain
In 2022, WIPO concluded that Pocock's registration of the debian.community domain was in bad faith and the domain should be transferred to the Debian project

Further domain name disputes
In 2024, an additional WIPO case was filed regarding multiple additional domain names associated with the Debian project and registered by Pocock. The decision was that the domains had been registered in bad faith and were ordered to be transferred to Debian

= References =

Category:Copyright activists Category:Free software people Category:Free software programmers Category:GNU people Category:University of Melbourne alumni Category:Internet activists Category:Linux people Category:Living people Category:Privacy activists