And then there were 3! Ben Metcalfe officially joins Citizen Agency

[Ben discusses Mashups at CHI2006 in Montreal by Anikarenina]

I've been dying to announce it officially, but wanted to wait until Ben returned to the UK and made the announcement himself. Chris and I couldn't be happier.

We just spent the past couple of weeks with Ben here in SF, discussing this possibility and what it would look like, how we are rolling out Citizen Agency (slowly...bootstrapped...with love), examining his own investment in it, working out how he could join us in SF and bring his lovely gf, Sofia, shaping where we are going, meeting with clients and potential clients, etc.

Ben holds a Canadian passport as well as a UK one, so he will be applying for a TN1 the same as me. We have contracts in place, offices, an official business with the official trappings of a business - and now we have one helluva team. If Chris and I were a fantastic team, the addition of dotBen makes us absolutely unstoppable.

Ben is a super accomplished, amazingly smart guy with drive and passion and wants all of the same things as we want in the world: a place where independents can prosper and individuals are empowered. He will be building our developers network...from Ben's blog:

I bring to the table a new dimension for the Citizen Agency with my technical and software engineering background, and my experience creating innovation platforms.

The Agency will now also be able to advise its clients on the execution of developer networks and similar strategies as grassroots channels for innovation, technical development and specialist marketing. I also will also be bolstering the Agency’s product development foundation and also advising on the technical implementation of our work.

And from the press release announcement on the Citizen Agency blog:

Ben, who until last month worked for the BBC in London, will be working in the position of “Grassroots Architect & CTO” (or as we refer to it, Citizen Technical Officer).

Ben will advise CA’s clients on the execution of developer networks and similar strategies as grassroots channels for innovation, technical development and specialist marketing. He will also offer general product development advice and create technical road-maps and implementation plans.

Additionally, Ben will also be creating the Citizen Agency Developer Network – a vendor-neutral platform that will provide several resources the mash-up community. These include a centralized, community maintained, repository of publicly available APIs, and collaboration tools to facilitate the remote development of projects between community members.

And...funny thing...this team originally bonded in Paris, in the backchannel at Les Blogs. Sigh. See the power of the backchannel? Brilliant. Absolutely bloody brilliant.

We are sooooo excited, Ben. We look forward to having you and Sofia here in SF with us.

Tags: citizenagency