Ian Cuddy

This will probably come as a bit of a surprise to many, but after four enjoyable, amazing years as Chief Editor of Public Sector Forums, I've decided to go self-employed.  Though I'll no longer be officially employed by PSF, I'll still be contributing on a regular basis - there's zero animosity involved and I'm still great friends with everyone there.

While it's always sad to leave a job you love, I'm also excited. It means I'll now be able to pursue a whole load of Web 2.0 projects and ventures which I've been itching to do for some time.

So what now? I'll be continuing the Public Sector Data Breach log (soon to be revamped – watch this space) which, I have to admit, surprisingly, far from being a source of embarrassment has actually become something of a huge hit with the public sector readership. I've lost count of the  enquiries I've had from government departments and councils wanting to re-use this to promote information security to staff - the thing even gets circulated around HMRC senior management and 22,000 of their staff, so I want to do this justice.  And it'll be open data.

With PSF's blessing, I'm also taking over and building up the UKGovOSS.org open source government social network I set up in August, and running this as an independent project. Though it's now got around 130 members, I need to reinvigorate this community, bring on more of what you could call stakeholders and ensure it's sustainable for the long-term, both financially and user-wise. The reason I set up UKGovOSS was never commercial - it was to act, basically, as a way to help PSF's public sector members just to talk to each other about using open source and meet those who could help them (though, for the record, it turned a profit from Day One and is a great case study of how social media can be readily monetized).  I feel I still haven't even scratched the surface of what I want to do with UKGovOSS and what it's capable of.

As for the other stuff I'm working on, more on that to come - I'll be calling for beta testers for these babies very soon. If you're interested in working with me, ping me at me@iancuddy.com or @iancuddy. Here goes.