Mark Longair fundamentally understood what good looked like.
He had an acute and deeply considered conception of what good meant in a wide array of different domains, from cryptic crossword clues, to rock climbing, from version control systems to the treatment of other human beings.
He enjoyed seeking out the good, and would put enormous time and effort into establishing what was good. He once wrote to his friends to apologise for being a bit slow in doing something, and explained that the delay was because he had been going through “all the ~1000 open tabs in Chrome on my phone going back to July 2015 to see if anything was worth bookmarking”. He wasn’t going to let anything good slip by unconsidered.
He deployed considerable amounts of time in the pursuit of investigating, defining and documenting what was meant by good. He individually scored and reviewed every episode in at least two of his favourite TV series. He read widely and seriously about how the world should or should not be run. He provided so many detailed and helpful answers to questions about the Git version control system on the website StackOverflow that one of his colleagues once exclaimed, “I just found an answer to a Git question on StackOverflow, and it *wasn't* written by Mark Longair. Do I win a prize?”
But the most characteristic way that Mark understood ‘good’ was in terms of ethics. Mark was one of the most moral people I ever met, one of the people least likely to sweep something inconvenient under the carpet, or trample over the feelings of others to solve a problem quickly. Often when Anna and I would talk about an ethical dilemma in our own life we’d talk about what Mark Longair would do, because we knew he’d do the right thing, not the easy thing. He was literally our definition of a good person.
Of course really knowing what good looks like unfortunately means thinking and feeling deeply about the bad. He disliked the behaviour of mean, thoughtless, selfish people with an acute sensitivity, bordering on real pain. He once asked me if I thought there were any real upsides to the idea of masculinity - he saw mainly the bad things that went on in its name. And, so, sadly, he deplored living in an era defined by the politics of cruelty and hatred of difference. Also - and I think he’d want me to mention this - he really disliked Love Actually and had a favourite slashing critique which he claimed to enjoy re-reading regularly.
But just understanding what good and bad looks like might make a person nothing more than a talented critic. But Mark Longair was no mere critic: he was a prolific creator of amazing, useful things that made a difference to a lot of people. He is the person who added data about Scottish politicians to TheyWorkForYou and he is the creator of Democracy Club’s crowd-sourcing website - both huge projects he did as a volunteer. Later, as a colleague at mySociety he helped people in numerous countries to build websites to shed light on the activities of their own politicians, as well as contributing to a host of other projects.
Mark’s talents in building technologies went far beyond shipping elegant software. He was a talented and compassionate senior mentor to colleagues, to whom he was also gentle and kind even when he had instantly spotted 37 mistakes that he personally would never have made. His skillset was incredibly broad, so he thought deeply about licensing, he promoted usability and user focus, he cared about good security practices and he took endless care to make sure the people around him were working well and at ease. He wrote beautiful, thoughtful, clear emails and messages. He was the complete 21st century technologist, a living refutation of the depressing idea that a huge ego and lack of consideration for others is a required part of the package.
Prior to civic technology Mark had been a scientist, and had a neuroanatomy PhD that he - of course - never boasted about. I know less about this phase in his life, but I do know he was one of the key contributors to Fiji, a very powerful tool widely used by scientists for image analysis, which he once explained to me as I gawped with astonishment. The Nature Methods paper that explains Fiji has been cited 72,000 times - Mark is a co-author.
And all this took place long before Mark joined Flourish to help them build both software and a company that puts vital data before the eyes of countless millions of people a year. I look forward to hearing and reading the tributes from his colleagues there.
Mark Longair was, put simply, an unbelievably talented, unbelievably driven builder of tools that made the world a better place. When he wrote to me in 2011 to express an interest in working full time at mySociety I felt I’d won the lottery.
I am conscious that this tribute has focused mostly on Mark’s incredible talents and judgement. This is not, however, why I or most people will remember him. Most people will remember him because he was such a peerlessly lovely human being, so kind to friends and strangers alike, so thoughtful, so gentle, so interesting and just simply so very funny - when I think of his distinctive voice in my head it breaks into chuckles mid sentence, as he was so prone to do.
Here are just a couple of typically dry one liners I’ve extracted from the old mySociety chat logs.
It is sometimes said that what people running for election want to achieve is the mantle of being “The person you’d most want to go to the pub with”. I think that Mark was this person not just for me, but for dozens and dozens of people from all walks of life. Nearly everyone I’ve spoken to about Mark since his diagnosis and death has at some point said the same thing, “He was the last person you’d want this to happen to”. Whilst he would not even remotely have approved of the idea that you’d rank your friends by quality, I think most people know that Mark was always going to be towards the top of their lists. He was just too good to be anywhere else.
Mark Longair possessed more diverse and balanced virtues than anyone else I ever met. He offered a benchmark on how to live a good life. I will love and miss him for the rest of mine.
“I shall not look upon his like again.”