Last night I was at the Town Hall in Birmingham, feeling slightly uncomfortable in a suit and the rarefied atmosphere, to witness some of my colleges from The Big Picture pick up an Arts and Business award. The awards recognise partnerships between arts organisations (in this case Audiences Central who I was working for on the project) an businesses (particularity for us Jessops and the BBC, although we worked with a large number of organisations).

Awards in themselves are gratifying, we were also honoured by the Webbys, but it was also a very nice way to round off my close involvement with The Big Picture. After nearly nine months, the team can relax (with a World Record achieved and thousands of people involved) and ponder the success and the lessons that can be learned.

For myself I gained a lot of experience in the management of a very diverse online community, a lot of whom weren’t experienced internet users — and I now know more about the wiles of the Flickr API than any sane person should. No doubt I’ll have learnt a lot more that will become clearer as I get to apply it to other things.

It was great to be involved in a long-running project that thought big and attempted to do so many things at once — and it was great to have my faith in humanity confirmed, nearly 113,000 photos and I could count the number I had to actively moderate or remove on my fingers.