At the end of June 2015, I left the Government Digital Service (GDS), the organisation I'd helped form just over four years ago.
It's a strange feeling to be on the outside after 14 years working in government digital, in some ways liberating. The last time I made such a major career change was back in 2001 when I joined the Office of the e-Envoy, part of the Cabinet Office.
The goals will sound familiar to latter day GDS-watchers. Get all departments, government transactions, businesses and people online. So far, so ambitious and arguably we are still wrestling to hit these targets in 2015. If you want to understand the history of online government, start with this by Jerry Fishenden.
I, and several others, who'd fled the smoking ruins of London's dotcom scene found ourselves working in government. My first task was to lead the content migration to a new host and content management system (sound familiar?) for the then central government portal UK online.
In 2004, I took a break from government, vowing never to return. A man of my word, this lasted a few months and I came back to manage UK online's interactive TV service on Sky and cable which I'd help launch for them in 2003. This was back in the day when interactive TV was the future.
By 2005, I'd delivered the UK government's first bespoke mobile service, a version of Directgov on O2's imode network. Over the next few years, I developed this mobile version of Directgov to work on any device and by 2010 it was seeing 1.2 million visits a month. We rewrote the content for the small screen which was a handy vehicle to apply a proper, concise writing style for the web.
The work I did on mobile and TV taught me that we weren't simply in the business of building websites, we were creating digital services. In 2010, Russell Garner and I created a fully RESTful content API for Directgov through a process we called 'guerilla repurposing'. That's scraping to the uninitiated. APIs for Business Link and the Foreign Office followed.
It was this work that brought Tom Loosemore and I together for a fateful chat in a cafe in Lambeth. I received an email asking if I was available for a "very off the record conversation". Tom was looking to get a team together to build an alpha, paint a picture of what a single domain for government on the web could look like. I'd spent years trying to achieve this under the radar on the inside, finally it was going to happen.
Everyone knows what happened next, the alpha version of GOV.UK appeared and GDS came into being shortly afterwards. It went from 12 of us in a room in Lambeth to well over 600 in Holborn in the space of four short years. There is much still to be done. GDS is one part of a far wider movement using technology to make the world a better place for everyone.
What's next for me? I've joined a group of like-minded people at dxw and I plan to keep building technology in the public interest. There's more about that on their blog.