8 years at GS1

I first joined the W3C team in February 2009. That was a month or so before I set up the diary element of this website and it's how, for example, I was able to attend the 20th anniversary of the Web celebrations at CERN. More than 8 years later, in June 2017, my period at W3C came to an end. As I shared at the time, I was pretty devastated. Being on the W3C Team was a career-defining role. I'd seen other colleagues leave and enjoy their life afterwards but I didn't quite see how that would work for me. My last day at W3C was Friday 30th June 2017. The following Monday, 3 July, was my first day at GS1.

It's fair to say that it has worked out well.

I work with people I like and respect; I'm making what I believe is a real contribution to the organisation, its members and their interests; and I am optimistic about the years ahead. I'm best known for my work developing and promoting GS1 Digital Link, part of our global migration to 2D barcodes. I've provided countless documents and presentations on the topic and made a number of videos covering things like the business case and how the technology layers work together. Although I consider it out of date, that last one seems to have the most impact with at least one household name retailer adjusting their plans to make use of the ideas I talk about in that video, plans that were well advanced at the time.

The concept of a single identifier being the starting point for multiple typed links to different sources of information is gaining traction across GS1. Links to basic product information, instructions, information for patients, certificates of conformance and digital product passports are all now seen as critical parts of the GS1 offer. Call it a knowledge graph if you like, or food for artificial intelligence, but those are just different terms and minor variations on the theme of Linked Open Data that many of us have been talking about for years. I didn't invent the GS1 Digital Link URI syntax - that was Mark Harrison et al 3 years before I joined GS1 in 2014 as part of developing what is now the GS1 Web Vocabulary. However, I can claim to be the person who brought the ideas of HATEOAS and resolvers into the story. For the avoidance of doubt, I didn't invent any of that either, all I did was apply other people's work to the GS1 context.

The GS1 Digital Link topic will never leave me but future work is more focused on Verifiable Credentials. The identification of people, products, places and facilities with relevant crytographic proofs is recognised as a critical part of the data infrastrcture for civil society, global trade and more. Verifiable Credentials are how that can be achieved at scale.

If I look back at that sob-story post from 8 years ago, I notice the final paragraph includes this:

… working in public, copying everything to mailing lists, persistent Web pages, file-extension-free URLs, an employer who trusts you to put documents on the Web site, immutable versions …

Those aspects remain important to me. The thing I've done at GS1 in which I take the greatest pride isn't the work I'm best known for. It's that Digital Link was the first GS1 standard to be open to public review prior to ratification; it's the growing collection of open source software on GitHub and the persistent repository at ref.gs1.org. Neither of those existed 8 years ago.

I was at W3C for 8 years, roughly the same length of time I'd been in my previous online safety job. Next week I begin year 9 at GS1. And I'm still enthusiastic about that.