Dr Carol Cosgrove-Sacks is the Senior Advisor on International Standards Policy to OASIS, the global information and communications technology {ICT} standards development consortium
www.oasis-open.orgAppointed in 2005, she leads on international advocacy and promotion of open standards for interoperability. She assists OASIS Technical Committees and the OASIS management regarding liaison with the European Union, the European Standards Organizations, and the Geneva-based international standards organizations, especially ISO, ITU and cooperation with ECMA International and W3C.
She has organized and moderated international meetings to advance open standards on E-Government, E-Commerce, Emergency Management and Alerting, ICT and Sustainability, and Smart Energy. She regularly contributed to the Standards Edge conferences in Europe and to the International Cloud Symposia on Interoperability, Portability and Security in the Cloud. She served from 2006-2009 on the EU ICT Standards Task Force, from 2009-2010 on the high level European Expert Panel for Reform of European Standardization [EXPRESS] and since its creation in 2012 she is a member of the EU high level Multi-Stakeholder Platform for ICT Standards [MSP], which advises the European Commission on referencing of ICT standards for the European market.
In 2013 she assisted The Innovation Board and ESADE Business School with a study on flexibility in European standardization to advance more dynamic and accessible standards. She also participated as a discussant on Services, Innovation and the Digital Economy in the WTO Public Forum.
From 1994 to 2005, she was a senior United Nations official: the Director of Trade, Standards & Regulatory Affairs in the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) in Geneva. In the UN, she was the focal point for cooperation with the European Union, the World Trade Organization, the High-Level UN Task Force on Information and Communication Technologies, and with ITU for the World Summits on the Information Society. She initiated the global eBusiness Standards MoU and worked to promote public-private cooperation and inter-governmental programmes regarding trade, regulatory issues and standards for e-commerce, customs cooperation, trade facilitation, sustainable development, and a wide range of trade and ICT issues.
In addition to her role in OASIS, Dr Cosgrove-Sacks is a Professor at the College of Europe, Bruges, and also teaches post-graduate courses at Basel University. She set up the global Ethics in Finance - Robin Cosgrove Prize in 2006 as a not-for-profit to encourage young finance professionals to reflect on the role of ethics, trust and integrity in banking and finance. [www.robincosgroveprize.org]
An experienced and respected economist, she was educated at the London School of Economics, and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics, a Masters in European Economic Studies and a Doctorate regarding trade relations with the European Union. Prior to joining the United Nations, Dr Cosgrove-Sacks worked as an international trade and business consultant. She has published more than twelve books, mainly focused on the EU, International Trade and the Information Economy.. She is a British national resident in Geneva.
