Rules-as-Data Enablers
Principals and partners of The Opman Company conceptualized, designed and built Xalgorithms Foundation's award-winning 100% free/libre/open DWD RuleData method, and its RuleMaker, RuleReserve, and RuleTaker reference implementations. Not all of the people who have made core contributions to DWD are available for hire, because they work internally to other market leading firms. Those of us below are available to you directly.
Your procurement admin may tag us as 'consultants', but we're 'enablers'. We bring you a genuine ability. You get transparency. You get 'in house' comprehension of the logical steps. And you get 'in house' technical know-how derived from actual industry operations under the toughest performance demands.
Joseph Potvin
Managing Director
Joseph is the lead theorist and designer of the Data With Direction Specification (DWDS) for 'an Internet of Rules', the focus of his doctorate in Administration Sciences (departmental 'Best Thesis Award' in 2023; global award for Fintech/Regtech Innovation in 2024). He coordinates the Rules-as-Data business concept, systems design, operational planning, customer service orientation, and project management. The Opman Company provides Joseph's services as Executive Director to the not-for-profit Xalgorithms Foundation, which is the steward of both DWDS and its 100% free/libre/open source reference implementations (the RuleMaker app, the RuleReserve network service, the RuleTaker component).
Customer Service Role
Joseph assists clients directly through systems analysis (people, operations, and infrastructure) across all phases, to achieve and maintain measurable improvements in effectiveness and efficiency enabled through the DWD rules-as-data method. Joseph has worked as either a contractor or employee in more than two dozen countries, for companies ranging Fortune 500 scale to a few dozen employees, and for both national and multilateral public sector organizations. He has taught and served in mentorship roles with undergraduate, masters and doctoral students.
Internal Role
Joseph is responsible for conceptual coherence, end-to-end system design, technical performance and integrity, client service quality, and market positioning, while also operationally coordinating personnel and resources. His work is distinguished by attention to design factors that enable deep transformation, with a professional track record of initiatives that achieve 90% cost savings, and outcome longevity exceeding a decade. Contact Joseph at jpotvin@opman.ca.
Nhamo Mtetwa
Data Scientist
Nhamo connects applied business requirements with scientific rigor in the unusual conceptual space of the Data With Direction Specification. With a doctorate in Artificial Intelligence, and a professional background in applied neural networks in some of the world's largest fintech companies, he is very effective at communicating the DWD concepts, benefits, and system-level significance in operational business settings.
Customer Service Role
Nhamo assists the onboarding of technical and management personnel as independent users and community participants, through in-person and online workshops and seminars, and published materials. He can directly assist clients in highly specialized implementations of DWD, such as for regulatory conformance of high-frequency transaction systems (e.g. SEC and FINRA rules).
Internal Role
Nhamo serves as a friendly gate-keeper for the rigor of the team's work, with ongoing contributions to technological advancement. In a nutshell, he builds and runs tests on what we do, and suggests how to resolve issues and improve performance. Optimization of any high performance system requires managing trade-offs, and that requires the sort of experience judgement that Nhamo brings.
Jelle Begeyn
Legal Lead
Jelle combines trade rules and informatics methods, with an LLM in International Trade and Investment Law & Diploma of Advanced Studies in International Law and Economics at the World Trade Institute, and experience in digital trade methods and policy at the World Trade Organization.
Customer Service Role
Jelle works directly with clients to identify and analyze the legal and regulatory frameworks (trade agreements, customs regulations, compliance obligations) that an IoR/DWDS implementation must faithfully capture. He ensures DWD Rules-as-Data implementations are grounded in accurate legal analysis of the source law that they operationalize.
Internal Role
Jelle also supports legal accuracy and defensibility across Opman's portfolio. Drawing on his own prior experience building LLM-assisted rules-based systems, he ensures legal soundness and interpretive fidelity of results as the DWDS framework is applied to new regulatory domains.
Huda Hussain
Software Designer/Developer
Huda is the lead software developer of the RuleMaker reference implementation using the Svelte framework for JavaScript. She has a strong record of improving the design of what she's implementing.
Customer Service Role
Huda provides software technical support and issue response services to clients for the RuleMaker application, and is available for customization, enhancement, and set-up of client-hosted instances. She provides source code walk-throughs for technical personnel, and responds to ad hoc technical questions and requests.
Internal Role
Huda participates on the team with intuitive and responsive design, balancing usability with performance and scalability, as well as the optimization of data structures, algorithms, programming code, memory usage, latency, and overall system complexity.
Jacob Kelter
Complex Dynamic Systems Modeler
Jacob specializes in technology-assisted education, and holds a doctorate in Learning and Computational Sciences. Rules-as-Data enables novel complex system characteristics, which he (and his extensive network) can model using the NetLogo agent-based models platform, which is licensed free/libre/open source by the Netlogo Foundation, where he is Director, just as Xalgorithms Foundation's DWD reference implementations are.
Customer Service Role
Jacob can assist Opman's clients with anticipating the emergent effects of particular changes to rules, of entire rule sets, and of incremental proliferation of 'an Internet of Rules'.
Internal Role
Jacob is a thought-leader in applied agent-based modeling methods. His joint paper with Netlogo founder Uri Wilensky, and DWD designer Joseph Potvin, to model the "General-Purpose Economic Petri Dish" designed by Potvin, received the Best Paper Award at the 2022 Conference of the Computational Social Science Society of the Americas.