Tariq Rashid is an IT architect at the Home Office, with special responsibility for open source, open standards and information management. He works closely with the Cabinet Office to support wider Government progress in these domains.

He has worked with open source since 1995 in a range of sectors including energy, banking, media and high tech start-ups. His first taste of open source was of FORTRAN compilers and document preparation systems. Since then he has journeyed through open source VPN network stack development, search engines, enterprise support systems, numerical computing and now cloud platforms.

He is convinced that open computing is the only way to encourage innovation, enable reuse, drive competition, and empower the customer.