In a few weeks time (October 12th) I’m going to be leaving Open Data Services Co-op and starting a short career-break of sorts: returning to my research roots, spending some time exploring possible areas of future focus, and generally taking a bit of time out.
I’ll be leaving projects in capable hands, with colleagues at Open Data Services continuing to work on Open Contracting, Beneficial Ownership, 360 Giving, Org-id.guide IATI and Social Economy data standards projects. One of the great advantages of the worker co-operative model we’ve been developing over the last three and a half years is that, instead of now needing to seek new leaders for the technical work on these projects, we’ve been developing shared leadership of these projects from day one.
I first got involved in the development of open data standards out of research interest: curious about how these elements of data infrastructure were created and maintained, and about the politics embedded within, or expressed through, them. Over the last five years my work has increasingly focussed on supporting open data standard adoption, generating tons of learning – but with little time to process it or write it up. So – at least for a while – I’ll be stepping back from day-to-day work on specific standards and data infrastructure, and hopefully next year will find ways to distill the last few years learning in some useful form.
Between now and the end of 2018, I’ll be working on editing the State of Open Data collection of essays for the OD4D network. Then in early 2019, I’m planning for a bit of time off completely, before starting to explore new projects from April onwards.
I’m imensely proud of what we’ve done with Open Data Services Co-op over the last 3.5 years, and grateful to colleague for co-creating something that both supports world-changing data projects, but that also supports team members in their own journeys. If you ever need support with an open data project, do not hesitate to drop them a line.