Welcome!

Hi, my name is Alexander (Alex) Voss and this is my website describing services I am offering as a freelance worker at the intersection of IT and the social sciences. My focus is on human-centric development practices and software engineering methods that follow the agile manifesto while steering clear of agile dogma, instead taking into account the development context.

My freelance activities are relatively recent as I started my career break from St Andrews University in May 2021. I have since left my job at St Andrews and am working on a portfolio of services I can offer as a freelancer. These include:

• Facilitating the adoption of agile methods to adapt agile methods to the circumstances of organisations, markets and development contexts.
• Corealisation - building uniquely adequate systems: by co-locating design with use and reducing feedback loops even more radically than agile methods tend to do. Let me help you establish corealisation practices.
• Participatory Design and Value-Oriented Design: to design systems that are closely aligned with the interests of multiple stakeholder groups and wider society.

For each of these, I am able to deliver consultancy and research services. I am also able to offer training in a range of topics as well as bespoke development services where required. I am currently mainly in the United States of America but at the moment am able to offer services only in the United Kingdom (I have settled status) as well as the Schengen states. I am a native speaker of German and have resided in English-speaking countries for about twenty years.

Please get in touch with me at info@corealisation if you would like to discuss how I might help your organisation.

Background

I studied computer science at the University of Erlangen-Nuremburg and hold a PhD in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh. After appointments at Edinburgh and Manchester, I joined the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews in 2009. From October 2010 to January 2022, I worked as a Lecturer in Software Engineering and taught software engineering and web development as well as other topics.

At the moment, I work as a freelancer and conduct research in my role as a Technology Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. In the past, I have held honorary appointments at the Universities of Edinburgh and Manchester. More recently, I have also been affiliated with the Department of Philosophy at Harvard and with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.