Today marks the last day at Global Integrity for Jonathan Eyler-Werve. This is a bittersweet moment that I wanted to commemorate.
As many readers of this blog know, Jonathan was employee #1 at Global Integrity and has played an instrumental role in the organization's growth during the past several years, particularly our embrace of technology and, eventually, the creation of the Indaba fieldwork platform. Jonathan's history with Global Integrity goes as far back as when the organization was still a project of the Center for Public Integrity. He and Marianne Camerer helped to run the first formal Global Integrity Report (published in 2004); when Global Integrity spun off from the Center in 2005 Jonathan was the first person we called when assembling our small start-up staff.
Over time, Jonathan helped to move Global Integrity towards cloud-based technology years before the term was popular; we have never owned and operated a single server and don't plan to thanks to his foresight. The creation of the MAGIC fieldwork platform in 2006 marked Jonathan's second attempt to improve upon the tools used for distributed data gathering. By 2009 he was already looking years into the future with a short thought paper that envisioned what would eventually be called Indaba. Three years later, we and a growing number of partner organizations use Indaba daily to manage thousands of contributors in 100-plus countries to gather best-of-breed data and reporting.
Jonathan has made huge contributions to Global Integrity, and his humor, good nature, and collaborative approach to solving problems will be missed. At the time same, we all take pride in knowing that Global Integrity and the Indaba platform won't miss a beat in the days and months ahead thanks to the organization's continued maturation. When a key team member departs in a way that doesn't fundamentally disrupt the organization, we know we're doing something right when it comes to coupling innovation with execution as the way we do business day in and day out.
You can keep up with Jonathan's next adventure over at eylerwerve.com.
— Nathaniel Heller
