Our Team

Kim is a community activist with over 15 years’ experience working with a wide range of campaign groups in Leeds, Manchester and Nottingham. They are an experienced web developer who has built dozens of websites and apps for a large range of community organisations over the last 20 years. They have a PhD in sociology, specialising in grounded theory qualitative research.

This extensive skillset and experience is what has enabled them to develop a multi-methods approach to software development, community activism, and engaged research. This led them to found their studio Geeks for Social Change in 2016, for whom PlaceCal is their flagship project.

Alfie believes that problems are best solved by giving those affected the tools and resources to do so for themselves. He has worked on building infrastructure that promotes community autonomy and resilience for many years. Previously physically and materially, currently digitally.

Emma is a graphic designer and illustrator with over a decade of experience working freelance and in-house across a wide variety of sectors, including education, charity/non-profit, and the arts. She is interested in collaborative and community-led design practice that is situated and informed by local circumstances and experiences. Her design MA focussed on the impact of public transit on the communities who live near and rely on it, and the past, present and future of public services and public spaces. At GFSC, Emma works on design, research, social media, project facilitation, copy writing and client support.

honor is an artist and writer based in Norwich, who researches and makes work exploring communication, power, language, community, alienation, and the internet. Through their art practice, they create work across mediums; exploring photography, performance, music, visual art, sculpture, poetry, community building, collaborating, improvising, and more. This varied practice creates a solid foundation for their work with GFSC, supporting them in the tricky business of wrangling words into an order that makes sense.

Ivan rather enjoys writing code. Currently he uses Ruby on Rails for his day-job but has had a bash at a fair number of other oddities including perl, labview, common lisp and unity. He’s also had stabs at javascript and python.

He rather enjoys working on socially minded projects like the ones at GFSC as he believes that there is scope to come up with technological solutions to societal problems.

Outside of programming he rather likes taking walks in his local park (and petting all the dogs), doing “art”, listening to music and learning about things on the internet.

Katja is a developer specialising in the design and implementation of digital services that aim to improve the reach of small charities and community organisations. She works iteratively with clients and users to get as close as possible to what people need. She is an advocate of Elm because it empowers her mission to make code reading accessible & code writing empathetic. She values a culture of collaboration, community, open source, transparency, integrity, generally sharing stuff and giving everyone a voice and a chance of meaningful participation. In her spare time, she runs Code Reading Club & makes hit and miss fermented veg. In a past life she produced independent films and is a believer that sharing stories makes the world a better place.

Rosie is a mostly front end developer with a background in illustration. She finds writing code immensely enjoyable, seeing it as more of a craft practice than a technical job, and likes to help demystify its processes wherever she can. She likes collaborative code, type safety, elegant loops and descriptive names.

Offline she is passionate about knitting, cooking, potato based snacks and things with eyes on them that should not have eyes on them.