Over the summer, I was thinking about my role in the Graph Data Council (GDC, formerly known as the Linked Data Benchmark Council, LDBC). I became a technical contributor to the GDC in early 2017 and, over the years, I joined its board of directors and helped overhaul the organization’s structure, finances, and IT infrastructure. As part of my research, I worked on the GDC’s benchmarks, reworked its auditing guidelines, and supervised more than a dozen database audits.

Then, exactly four weeks ago, I was part of the communications team that announced DuckLabs joining Amazon, a process that formally concluded by the end of August. While things for DuckLabs and the DuckDB project remain mostly the same, I expect a sharp increase in attention on the project and an even faster pace of development. I have already seen tremendous growth as Head of Developer Relations for the DuckDB project, and I have no doubt that this will continue over the coming years. So I realized that my role at DuckDB would require my full attention, and I started preparing to leave the GDC.

In early September, I attended VLDB in Boston, still wearing “two hats”. As a DuckLabs/AWS employee, I organized the DuckDB Boston Meetup, the first meetup since DuckLabs joined AWS. As a board member of the GDC, I organized its 21st Technical User Community meeting, where we also ran a working session to determine the future of the organization, which outlined some potential strategic directions.

Yesterday (September 22), I participated in the GDC Policy Council meeting, where I announced that I will be resigning from the board.

The book The Cathedral and the Bazaar says that upon leaving an open-source software project, “your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor”. I am happy that I could hand over the project to a very competent and enthusiastic leadership, who will continue running the organization. I wish them and the member organizations (including former member companies) all the best.

I am tremendously grateful to have worked with so many interesting and enthusiastic people in the graph space, and I hope to cross paths with many of them in the future!