Staff
Jan Bierhoff (MA) - Director
Before joining ECDC and the International Institute of Infonomics, Jan Bierhoff served as director and director of research at the European Journalism Centre. In an earlier stage of his career he directed the international activities of the Dutch School of Journalism.
At this institute, he also lectured in media and communication theory. After graduation in Mass Communication at Nijmegen University, Bierhoff started his professional career as a journalist. For many years he was a reporter and editor of a variety of radio programmes, wrote for newspapers and magazines and worked as a media consultant. Publications from his hand include articles about media innovation trends and several textbooks on media structures and strategies.
Jan Bierhoff is founding member and former president of the European Journalism Training Association, and participates in various advisory boards of European media organisations.
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Hans Koolmees - Managing Director
After being director of a public library network in the Netherlands Hans Koolmees became lecturer information management at the University of Professional Education Maastricht (Hogeschool Maastricht).
During several years he was responsable for curriculum development information management. From 1992 till 2000 he was dean of the School for Information Services and Information Management at the University of Professional Education Zuyd (Hogeschool Zuyd).
In 2000 he joined the International Institute of Infonomics as managing director. Currently he combines his work for the ECDC with the coordination of a special interest group of the Hogeschool Zuyd. This special interest group covers the field of Knowledge Management.
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Sander Spek (M.Sc.) - Researcher
Sander joined EC/DC in 2007. He received an M.Sc. in Information Management from Tilburg University in 2002. His master thesis focussed on the transformation of business processes to web services. During his studies, he did various student-assistant jobs, both in education and in a third-money stream project.
After his graduation, Sander moved to Maastricht University, to work as a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for Knowledge and Agent Technology (IKAT), under professors Jaap van den Herik and Eric Postma. His early research focussed on knowledge management within a multinational company. In a later stage, Sander got the opportunity to work on one of his major interests: wikis in general, and self-organisation within Wikipedia in particular. His recent work analyses the self-management of the Wikipedia community, and the effects of this self-management on the actual encyclopedic content of Wikipedia. Currently, the dissertation is expected to be finished in 2008.
In Maastricht, Sander was also involved in education. He was been lecturer, tutor, and course-coordinator for two courses in knowledge management; one in the knowledge-engineering curriculum, and one at the Univeristy College Maastricht. He has been the thesis advisor of three knowledge-engineering master students, and one bachelor student at UCM.
At EC/DC, Sander works on various projects, related to, amongst others, e-publishing, videoconferencing, online collaboration, and ICT innovation in general.
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Anke Eyck (MSc, MTD) - Researcher
Before Anke Eyck started working at EC/DC she was a researcher at the University of Technology Eindhoven (TU/e). She was involved in a European project called CHIL (Computers in the Human Interaction Loop). The focus of this project was on developing all kind of technologies to support people in meetings. Her main responsibilities were setting up user tests to evaluate these technologies.
Before that she did a study at Vodafone about the differences between people concerning their learning behavior with their mobile phone and the implications of these differences for presenting new mobile services to the public. This research was conducted as a graduation project for the post-graduate User System Interaction Program (TU/e).
She has her masters in cognitive psychology, majoring in cognitive ergonomics. During her graduation she did research on the usability and usefulness of domotics which were installed in apartments for the elderly.
At EC/DC Anke works at MePaper. In this project new journalistic formats are developped. Her main responsibility in this project is to set up the user study.
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Herman Pijpers - Webmaster
Herman Pijpers joined the International Institute of Infonomics and ECDC in 2001. Before that he worked at the European Journalism Centre in Maastricht as project assistant, webmaster and editor of the Centre's daily e-zine 'Media News Digest'. Apart from webmastering the ECDC website, he maintains and develops several other websites, including those of the Maastricht Economic and Social Research and Training Institute on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT). He is also founder and editor of 'I&T Weekly', a free weekly e-zine covering Innovation & Technology related news, which is jointly offered by UNU-MERIT and ECDC.