Citizen Agency

The Citizen Agency is pleased to announce that Ben Metcalfe will be joining co-founders Tara Hunt and Chris Messina as the third member of the Citizen Agency.

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.

Ben has a track record in this field, having co-founded and ran the award winning and highly regarded backstage.bbc.co.uk developer network for the BBC. He has also advised the BBC on matters ranging from blogging and social software through to RSS/web services and standards compliant web development.

During a total of six years at the BBC, Ben has worked on numerous high-profile websites including the relaunch of the BBC News Website, the BBC News and Sport AV Player and the BBC Blog Network.

Ben will be initially working out of London but transferring to San Francisco by the end of the summer.