Dave Cole, the former senior advisor to the CIO of the Executive Office of the President, has just joined our team to help lead our push on open source product development. As I mentioned last week with the sale of Open Atrium and Managing News, Development Seed is focusing on building a new generation of open data and visualization tools. The organizations we work with need better tools to make data driven decisions, and that future is about speed and data services. This means we will only further step up our investments in mapping tools like TileMill and data driven web applications in node.js.

Dave will be fully integrated into our core operations. He will help run data heavy projects and facilitate partnerships with clients, elevate the thought space around open data and open source, and manage MapBox product development. He’ll provide critical integration between our traditional consulting work and our new MapBox work, which if we strike this balance right will be a key advantage for MapBox by ensuring our new web applications are built with cutting edge mapping tools and are validated in fast-paced, outcome oriented consulting work. Most importantly, Dave understands our goal of being positively disruptive.

For those who have not met Dave yet, he led the White House to go open source as part of the Obama-Biden transition team. While Dave will not be keynoting this year’s DrupalCon, he will be joining Alex, Jeff, and myself in Chicago next week where we’re excited to catch up with friends and share more details about our new projects and mapping work.