I’m proud and excited to announce that from the 1st September Leigh Dodds will be joining Talis as our Platform Programme Manager. His background, experience and skill makes him an ideal candidate to develop and advance our Platform ideas. Over the years Leigh has made many contributions to the development of the Semantic Web with a particular emphasis on the Web and REST. He has written extensively on these subjects for O’Reilly media and on his blog. In fact Leigh’s writings on REST were very influential in the design of our Platform APIs. I first collaborated with him back in 2000 as part of the RSS 1.0 working group when RDF was barely a year old. Shortly after that he developed the FOAF-a-matic which has probably done more to advance adoption of FOAF and RDF than any other application. Most people’s first introduction to FOAF has been via software created by Leigh. He has also been a regular face at XTech and other conferences presenting on topics such as SPARQL and connecting social content. We’re all eagerly anticipating learning from and working with Leigh. Welcome aboard!