Jed Sundwall

Jed Sundwall is the Executive Director of Radiant Earth, a nonprofit that supports community-led initiatives that make data easier to access and use. He has spent his career working to improve human cooperation on global challenges by combining expertise in data, product development, cloud computing, economics, and policy. He has developed methods of sharing data in the cloud that have been adopted by NASA, USGS, Google, Microsoft, Geosciences Australia and other institutions around the world.

Before joining Radiant Earth, he created various data sharing and sustainability initiatives at Amazon, including the Amazon Web Services Open Data Program which makes over 100 petabytes of data available for analysis in the cloud, including satellite imagery, genomic data, and the data used to train large language models such as ChatGPT and Llama. In 2010, he created Measured Voice, a web application used by USA.gov, the Swedish national government, the Egyptial national government, and Al Jazeera to manage their social media operations. In 2009, he founded Open San Diego, a volunteer civic technology advocacy group that was instrumental in the creation of San Diego’s open data policy.

He is a technical fellow at the Taylor Geospatial Engine and is a technical advisor to Flickr Foundation, PLACE, and the Center for Open Data Enterprise. He has a master’s degree in foreign policy from the University of California in San Diego where he studied the adoption of open source software by the Brazilian federal government. A proud student of the humanities, he uses his “spare time” to produce Techs on Texts, a podcast about the intersection of literature and technology. He is fluent in Spanish, pretty good at Portuguese, and can passably order food in German.