Christian Knebel
CEO at publicplan GmbH
Dusseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolChristian Knebel is an independent strategist and advisor specializing in public-sector digitalization, open source and digital sovereignty, with over 25 years of hands‑on experience across procurement, implementation and ecosystem building. He helps federal, state and municipal leaders make architecture, procurement and migration decisions that avoid vendor lock‑in and protect public value—always as an independent voice that neither sells code nor takes vendor commissions. Former founder and long‑time CEO of publicplan, ex‑procurement lead at cosinex and chair of reflact’s supervisory board, he combines practical delivery experience (200+ e‑government projects) with academic rigor—holding a doctorate in economics and having taught E‑Government. A frequent keynote speaker and author, he led early efforts to create a public code ecosystem in NRW, a precursor to today’s openCode initiatives. Unusually, he positions sovereignty as a project‑level discipline (“decisions made on Tuesday in the project plan”), offering discrete audits, reviews and migration oversight with clear scopes and no conflict‑laden delivery interests.
10 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Promotion Dr. rer. pol., Promotion Dr. rer. pol. at Paderborn UniversityDiplom Wirtschaftswissenschaften, Diplom Wirtschaftswissenschaften at Universität Witten/HerdeckeBachelor's degree Economics and Business Administration, Bachelor's degree Economics and Business Administration at Regent's University London
German, English, Russian, Spanish
Github Skills (15)
discoverability10
periodic9
metadata6
visualization5
data-visualization4
metadata-management3
drupal2
php2
planning1
backend1
mongodb1
shift1
docker1
nodejs1
react1
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
cknebel/publiccode.yml
Apr 2021 - Jun 2021
a metadata standard for public software
Contributions:12 PRs, 11 pushes, 1 branch in 2 months
metadata-standardmetadata-managementmetadata
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