Meet the team

John Milner

John Milner leads the technical team at KoboToolbox, bringing decades of experience in public-service software development and systems administration. With a strong commitment to advancing open-source methods for the international non-profit sector, John has proven expertise in building globally-scalable solutions on platforms such as GCP, Azure, and AWS. His recent work includes developing advanced AI-driven voice-to-text and machine translation features at Kobo, allowing our partners to overcome resource constraints and conduct analyses that otherwise would have required unattainable amounts of manual labor.

Since arriving shortly after the public launch in 2014, John has overseen rapid growth in the platform’s user base, which has reached 250,000 active annual users, and dramatic increases in traffic handled by the infrastructure, which has now collected more than a billion submissions and surpassed 400 terabytes of stored data. John works closely with humanitarian organizations such as UN OCHA, UNHCR, and Save the Children to engineer, maintain, and support solutions that address specific circumstances as well as improve the overall set of data-collection tools available to all humanitarians. John has provided technical guidance on-site for peace-building work, assisting local staff with KoboToolbox implementation and enumerator training, and facilitates annual information management exercises during the Humanitarian Response Intensive Course conducted by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

Prior to joining KoboToolbox, John focused on providing affordable IT services, especially open-source software development, to non-profit organizations, including a network of secondary schools that serves exclusively low-income families. He has also consulted for large, commercial firms in the financial, creative, retail, and entertainment industries. His career has encompassed diverse roles throughout the software and information technology industries, including full-stack development; management of distributed, global, cloud-based systems; server, network, and database administration; performance optimization; requirements gathering, estimation, and budgeting; training, mentoring, and supervision; quality assurance; and end-user support. John holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Fordham University and, while completing an honors curriculum there, received the Department of Computer and Information Science’s highest award: the Herbert W. Bomzer Award for academic performance and service contribution.