Ian Forrester heads up the BBC's Backstage, a developer/designer network like no other. His role as head of BBC Backstage includes working with internal and external developers/designers to express their creativity through BBC feeds and APIs. Backstage makes available as much BBC data as possible for any member of the public to republish, remix and mash-up under a non-commercial license.

Ian is also well known for geek social events, including London Geekdinners, BarCampLondon, Hackday, Edinburgh TV Un-Festival and recently Over the Air. He's currently master minding plans for the Edinburgh TV Festival, a series of Backstage university outreach events and is a founder of the dataportability.org group. Somehow, Ian finds time to blog online regularly at his personal blog cubicgarden.com