Tobie Langel

Open ecosystem strategist

Hi and welcome to my little corner of the web.

My name is Tobie Langel. I live in Geneva, Switzerland.

I am the principal and founder of UnlockOpen, a boutique consulting firm that helps organizations build symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationships with open ecosystems.

I advise some of the biggest names in tech (Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Intel, Cisco), promising startups (Airtable, Coil), industry organizations (OpenJS Foundation, OASIS, W3C) and nonprofits (Organization for Ethical Source, Ushahidi, Omidyar Network), pro bono or through my consulting firm.

I am a voting member of the OpenJS Foundation Cross Project Council. I facilitate AMP’s Advisory Committee, sit on OASIS’s Open Projects Advisory Council and on Ushahidi’s Advisory Board, and advise the Omidyar Network’s Responsible Tech Initiative as a Senior Fellow. I also helped found the Organization for Ethical Source, and was the organization’s first treasurer.

Previously, I was on Facebook’s Open Source and Web Standards Team, Facebook’s Advisory Committee Representative at the W3C, a W3C Fellow supported by Facebook, and W3C’s Testing Lead, where I helped kickstart Web Platform Tests, a W3C-coordinated cross-browser testsuite for the web platform. I have edited various web standards, notably Web IDL, which specifies the language used to define web interfaces and its JavaScript bindings.

You can find out more about my past and present work on Linkedin.

I write, speak, tweet, and toot about open source and standards on a regular basis.

An avid open source contributor, I notably co-maintained the Prototype JavaScript Framework, and released various open source projects, including an automated build system for editing standards on GitHub (used by W3C, WICG, WHATWG, and ECMA), and a JavaScript dependency resolver which powered Facebook’s Pages iOS app.

A while back, I wrote Helvetictoc, a small web app that tells the time using words. Some people liked it so much it became a real clock in Durham, England.

In a previous life, I was a professional jazz drummer.

Want to get in touch? Shoot me an email or reach out on twitter.

Thanks for visiting.

--tobie