The last two weeks have been both amazing and bittersweet, but mainly amazing, exhilaratingly amazing. I’ve been to Toronto, San Francisco and Washington talking about the Open Platform and the launch that’s just happened. The bittersweet part is that I’ve been carrying with me the secret that I’m leaving The Guardian. You might think it’d be hard to talk passionately about something you’re leaving, but it’s felt very easy been and totally natural, as it’s such a wonderful project and is totally the right thing for The Guardian to be doing. Having my last public appearance as a Guardian person be my presence on a panel at Gov2.0 Expo about UK public data with Sir Tim Berners-Lee was possibly the best way imaginable to bow out.

So why am I leaving? Well, for the best of reasons. It’s just time to hand over what I’ve been doing to full time staff there. I’ve done what was set out for me to do and what I wanted to achieve there. When I joined, Matt McAlister tasked me with building up a developer outreach program from scratch. Part of this whole program was to weave, into the perception of other internet properties, the message that The Guardian was not just there as a passive content provider, but that it was a technology force to be reckoned with. That it was much, much more than a newspaper. I think the image below, captured from the Google Code site the day after Google I/O shows that this has truly started to happen. 

I’ll write more later about the year or so that’s just passed and the project. It’s something I haven’t written about much here as I’ve been doing all of the talking about it at conferences, at hackdays and on The Guardian’s Open Platform blog, but it’s an interesting story. The long trip away from home has given me plenty of time to think through all the different facets of a monumental and exceptionally busy year. It amazes me how much we as a team have achieved and I’m currently I’m wondering how I managed to fit in all that I did. On average I was at The Guardian just under 3 days exceptionally busy days per week. 

When I joined in late October of 2008 I saw a vision at The Guardian which was breathtaking. They’re a long way there and more amazing things to come, and the launch now puts the commercial team in a position of strength to take the Open Platform forward. I’m lucky and happy to say that I’ll hopefully be involved going forward as an ad hoc consultant, time permitting. The team there is exceptional and I’ll miss them all. 

It’s been a fascinating time to be at a newspaper. The structural pressure in the industry has been incredible and while others have been throwing up paywalls, The Guardian’s thinking about the long term future and how to not try and control or just accept the changes in the industry, but to embrace and enable them is exceptional and brave, but is also the only sane thing to do. 

So what’s next? Well that’s a secret for now. I’ll be finishing off work at The Guardian and doing some other smaller projects in June.

I think part of the difficulty I’ve had about what next is that I hope what comes next will be as game changing commercially and societally as the work at The Guardian has been, but that’s a big ask. For now I’ll just wish all my colleagues at The Guardian the very best.