Reflecting on 10+ Years of Building the Community

As a part of the recent reorganization of Curity, my role in Nordic APIs has also been altered: I am no longer either company’s CEO, and will soon move on entirely. All of this change has made me pensive, contemplating my mission and that of this community. My personal change has naturally caused me to consider the purpose of this group and my place in it. In this reflective post, I would like to tell the history of Nordic APIs, why I worked with other pioneers to start it, and the purpose it gave me and continues to give.

Travis Spencer at the first Platform Summit in 2013

I founded Nordic APIs with Andreas Krohn in 2013. Andreas was a well-known personality in the API space in Sweden at the time, running a website and blog called mashup.se. In 2012, he went down to France for the inaugural APIdays event in the City of Lights. After returning, I persuaded him to work with me to launch a similar event in Sweden, where I had relocated a few years prior. Initially, we ran a short, half-day event in the spring of 2013 and a multi-day conference in the fall of that year. It was a big success because it connected us with others who were active in the API space and with organizations that were seeking to expose data and services via APIs.

In the coming years, we expanded the events to other parts of the world. We did a couple of tours, first around the Nordics and then halfway around the world. The tours were tough. We would arrange and produce them with a tiny team, travel to each venue with all the equipment and materials, hold our talks, entertain people after the event, and then travel to the next location and do it all again. This would go on for a week or so. We were totally bootstrapped and lean, so there was no money for extras like taxis and pre-shipped materials, let alone an advanced team to stage things in each location. In addition to touring around to build the community, we joined other events, running co-located shows with conferences like Internetdagarna, Øredev and APIdays. This helped us get the word out in the Nordics, elsewhere in Europe, and America.

Rhys Fisher joined in 2014 to help us promote the second Platform Summit, which we were preparing to run in the fall of that year. He pushed me to broaden the message’s reach by launching this blog to publish insightful articles. We wanted every article to be thoughtful and “evergreen,” ensuring they were useful years after initial publication. To write such blog posts, we recruited thoughtful contributors like Mark Boyd and Bruno Pedro. This strategy helped, and the 2014 edition of the Platform Summit was a great success even though it came with Andreas’ announcement that he would not be involved in Nordic APIs any longer. Like a wonderful consolation, however, Bill Doerrfeld joined in early 2015 as the Editor in Chief of the blog. This really saved it and maybe even Nordic APIs because my other duties were becoming too much for me to remain engaged. Those activities were all around the launch of Curity, a digital identity and API access management company. I’ve told the story of that launch a couple of times, so I won’t repeat it here.

Suffice it to say that the creation and growth of Curity enabled Nordic APIs to continue publishing blog posts and hosting events despite it having so few resources. Curity’s contributions allowed the blog to remain ad-free and ungated. It also allowed Nordic APIs to expand with an annual event in Austin, Texas. Throughout the pandemic, Curity propped up Nordic APIs, and has been pushing to reignite it afterward with a bigger cast of API practitioners. I don’t know how many of you realize how significant Curity’s contributions have been to this community, but it should not be understated or undervalued. There really would be no Nordic APIs without Curity, so its role in the community is as vital as my own, Andreas’, Bill’s or any other’s.

Travis Spencer emcees at Platform Summit 2023. The company he founded, Curity, has played a core role in growing Nordic APIs.

Two other key success factors have been all the great sponsors and speakers who have joined us over the years. There are too many to list, but the ones that believed in me and the fledgling community early on were essential. Ping Identity, Twilio, CA Technologies, Apigee, and Axway spring to mind as companies that got the vision and sowed into Nordic APIs when it was little more than a promise. When I look back, I also think of repeat speakers who gave great talks year after year, like Ronnie Mitra, Adam DuVander, Jason Harmon, Arnaud “API Handyman” Lauret, James Higginbotham, and Kin Lane, for example. There have been many other great sponsors and speakers, and I sincerely thank you all for joining the effort!

This really was not an easy journey, and I’ve naturally been wondering lately why I did all this. The answer is simple: I believe in the mission of making smarter tech decisions using APIs. I think that hyperconnectivity is ultimately good for society, and it strengthens democracies. It creates a level of transparency that helps avoid corruption. Connectivity begets information, and governments, companies, and individuals are more accountable and trustworthy as a result. Consequently, people are more knowledgeable, wealthy, and happy as we increasingly connect with one another (using APIs as the underpinning). Ultimately, the result will hopefully be a more peaceful and prosperous society, which I want for all of us.

I am not naive, though, and I realize that hyperconnectivity also brings many challenges and negative effects. As a foremost expert in the areas of APIs and digital identity, I’ve been trying my best to apply my skills and experience to this dilemma. Nordic APIs is part of that mission, and has an ongoing role to play in helping society tap into the favorable outcomes of connectivity. In light of new advancements in AI, the significance of the API community is paramount because AI has the potential to remove transparency from the system. If we allow this, bad actors will be able to utilize opaque, large language models for corrupt and nefarious purposes. This will be a tremendous step backward and have many negative consequences.

Regardless of my changing place in this community, I sincerely hope that this group will continue to teach more people about APIs and how to safely use them in our ever-changing world. Thank you all for a great journey so far. I look forward to seeing you next month when I’ll host the Platform Summit for the last time.