I’ve been kicking around the right way to announce a thing I announced to my colleagues a week ago. That thing being that I’m leaving Gotham Gazette. The reasons are both simple and complex, but the simplest is that the publication really, really needs someone to evaluate web analytics tools not someone to tackle the big, fun, challenging question of why New Yorkers aren’t more interested in public policy. Well, I think they do need the latter, but fundamental scarcity of resources means that the former is winning out.

These are good questions, though. The civic engagement ones, I mean. Is it because we think policy is impenetrable and our legislators are all bought? Is it because we don’t notice that land use decisions matter until developers are breaking ground on a sky rise across the street? That we think the game is won already? I’m not sure, but I think changing the way people think about local policy is a really interesting part of our project here.

There’s a whole lot of hullaballoo out there about the death of journalism, along with a lot of panicked debate about whether newspapers can be saved. Or at least a lot of snippy tweets alluding to a debate. I don’t know the answer but I think there are some pretty interesting questions about what it is that we need to thrive as a democracy. I don’t think it is exactly “newspapers.” I think we need transparency, and access to public information including reliable consistent access to raw data about almost everything going on in our governments. I think we need editors and journalists and the collaboration that goes into making decisions about what is worth covering. I’m pretty sure we don’t need to know whether Britney Spears has got love handles or whether fancy Reeboks will really give you firmer buns. You might want to know, but I don’t think that as a society we need to be tearing our hair out about how to make sure you’ll be able to find out if the newspapers all fold. Most of what is in there is hardly core to the demands of democracy (you know, that all of us take part in basic decisions and hold our elected leaders accountable). These are questions that I think matter a lot. And asking these questions and looking for answers to them … that isn’t my job. My core responsibility here is to keep the servers running, and some upcoming staffing shifts mean that I was going to have to take on a lot of HTML troubleshooting and similar bits and pieces of publishing Gotham Gazette. And when it comes down to the question of whether to consider what we might learn from an excellent report on how online local news publishers are and aren’t making it work or to figure out why URLs are getting munged in the text edition of our newsletters, it turns out that there are plenty of people around who are capable of doing the former while I’m the only one who knows the right questions to ask about the latter. And that isn’t any fun. I was a little reassured that I’m not nuts here when I explained the lay of the land to a friend who said simply “shit, I’d probably want to kill myself if that were my job.” Which is kind of overstating it but then what are friends for if not hyperbolic support of your every idle whim? I thought about sticking it out and going to grad school, but the program I’m most smitten with is not taking new students until 2011. And by then I hope to be up to my waist at least in a conversation that matters to me. Maybe not about this exact question. It turns out I’m interested in more than one thing — go figure.

But first, I’m leaving here. They actually need someone whose first priority is keeping servers afloat and they need to know that they’re looking for that person (nudge me if you want the job description when it comes out. I heard a rumor that there are people who seek this work). Leaving makes a lot more sense to me than fighting to set aside a corner of my time for questions that aren’t about how best to maintain our servers.

I feel like a little bit of a quitter: there aren’t enough women running servers and here I am insisting that I want to talk about ideas and quit with the command line. I swear it isn’t because I’m fed up with mysogeny in presos, though I’ve tried emacs and it doesn’t do it for me. Anyway, FSF is hosting a summit on Women in Free Software that is totally going to dismantle sexism in the Free World.

I’m sure I’ll keep my O’Reilly bookshelf dogeared. I just don’t want that to be all I do. I’m not sure what my next step is — maybe a combination of consulting or project management along with a self designed course of study in the potential uses of bootable sd cards for personal informatics or storytelling at the place where science and culture collide or the history of innovation in compost machinery design. I might get the opportunity to help shape important conversations about what access to information looks like in an internet age, who gets to own what we know. I’ve got a few irons in a few different fires and I’m looking forward to making some decisions about which is going to inspire me the very most.

Until then, I’m going to be wrapping up some projects here through the early fall and listening to good ideas.