Laura Manley

Laura Manley is the Cofounder for the Center for Open Data Enterprise in Washington DC, where she leads partnerships and programs. At the Center, she oversees the Sustainable Development Goals National Reporting Initiative to support government reporting on the SDGs in over a dozen countries; the Open Data Impact Map, which is the first global mapping of open data use; and the Open Data Roundtables series in partnership with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Manley is also a Digital Entrepreneurship and Open Data Senior Consultant with the World Bank’s ICT and Transport and Trade and Competitiveness Global Practices. She specializes in utilizing government data for economic growth, working with low- and middle-income countries on their data policies. She is a lead author of the Open Data for Business Tool, which is the first assessment methodology for private sector use of government data.

Manley is an Adjunct Professor at the NYU Wagner School of Public Policy, where she teaches Data for Social Innovation, and is a Staff Associate at Columbia University School for Professional Studies, where she teaches Open Data in the Applied Analytics Program.

In addition to her work on open data, Manley has over a decade of strategic planning experience with multiple international agencies including the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs and Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, UNICEF, the National Endowment for Democracy, and MasterCard Foundation. She also serves on the Board of Advisors for Lha Charitable Trust and NYU Wagner’s Co-Lead Lab.