A transition.
After a decade with Public Lab, I will be stepping down from my position as executive director. As both a co-founder and the executive director through the first decade of Public Lab, this has been an incredibly difficult decision, but one I make with confidence — both in my personal decision and for Public Lab. I’m excited about the opportunity to open space for new leadership in the organization and to provide the room for Public Lab to grow in new ways. I am working closely with the leadership of Public Lab to create a transition plan which will see the organization and community into our second decade. My last day will be May 1, 2020. As this decision is relatively recent there are still details and plans to sort through and I plan to write more about my decision and Public Lab’s plans later in March. For those of you that know me through one of my other roles as part of the Gathering for Open Science Hardware (GOSH) organizing team, I’ll also continue being a steward for work happening in this community.
As for my next chapter, although I will be departing an organization and role that I love dearly, I will continue to do the work that I find important and necessary, focusing on several challenges that have arisen around environmental monitoring and data collection, open hardware and community science. With great appreciation for the recognition that challenges I’ve identified are critical, I’m happy to announce that I have been awarded a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowship. I will broadly be working on building systems for environmental data and hardware interoperability, developing better structures for verification around environmental and scientific reporting from communities, and thinking through collaborative governance models that can better support the number of environmental monitoring and lowcost scientific hardware projects that have come into this space in the last half-decade. I’ll be writing a lot about these topics and what I’m working on over the next year and I’ll look forward to sharing with everyone as I go.
More soon…
