I am Ismael Peña-López.
I am a researcher and lecturer at the School of Law and Political Science of the Open University of Catalonia (2005-2018 and 2024 onwards).
Formerly, I have been Director of the School of Public Administration of Catalonia (2018-2024) and Director General of Citizen Participation and Electoral Processes at the Government of Catalonia (2018-2021) and professor.
I have also been senior researcher at Open Evidence and fellow director of Open Innovation at Fundació Jaume Bofill.
I hold a PhD in the Information and Knowledge Society and I work in the field of Public Policies for Development, with a special focus on ICT (so, ICT4D, digital divide and so) and quite a social sciences multidisciplinary approach: economics, sociology, political science, pedagogy… This site, that began as a blog, has become my personal research portal, and is intended to openly share information, scientific production and personal reflections on the preceding topics.
Works
Most of my work about these subjects has been uploaded onto this site (translated or in the original language). Hence, I invite you to browse the works section to see what I’ve written and said.
Other
In previous life I was a founding member and former Director of the Cooperation for Development Programme at the University, which is how this whole thing began.
Every now and then, I also write about ICTs and journalism in Reflexions sobre periodisme, comunicació i cultura [Catalan], blog of the Fundació ESCACC.
I am too the (so far) only developer of the free software project BibCiter, a PHP+MySQL based bibliographic manager. I’m not a developer, so the code is not pretty good… but, hey, it looks cute at work, doesn’t it?. I used to be part of the WordPress in catalan team.
I live near Barcelona, but I can usually be found here. My mother tongues are Catalan and Spanish, and I also speak English, French und ein bißchen German. I took a course and a half of Arabic, but had to leave it aside (not forever, I hope). I used to paraglide and play tenor sax — not at the same time (yet): now I raise two kids instead (a change for good ;), am involved in civic activism and do quite a lot of pro bono stuff in my field of expertise.
Of course, the contents on this site express my own opinion and not necessary my University’s.
Feel free to contact me if you feel like it.
