Author Archives: bl00

Bonus Joy : Little Free Library!

Posted on by
Reply

I love stories. I love that someone distilled “enough” of an idea into a concrete, knowable object that can be indefinitely shared. I love the documentation, the legacy. I love that others will build on that object in their own ways.

I love libraries. I love a collection of knowledge, well sorted and cared for, to share with others for free. I love how meta a card catalog is, I love information science, I love the smell of so many books in one place.

And I love Little Free Libraries. I love a small curation of “here are books we loved and want to pass on to others” in an accessible way smattered through a neighborhood. They make my little robot heart sing.

So for our anniversary in November 2023, Reed got me a LFL kit. I got SO excited! I immediately made a list of books to stock it with and got as many as possible from Marcus Books in Oakland. Would they all fit? They did not, I had to trim down the list. I matched the neutral tone to the house and the accent color to some flowers in our front yard. Jenbot even made a book plate design for it so I could include why I thought each book was worth reading.

And then it mostly sat for over a year. I would make headway on it every once in awhile (thanks in large part to the same stand up group we’ve had going on and off for like 10-15 years), but I’m not particularly handy with physical things and so it sort of became an albatross sitting in my office. Something that could bring me joy but I just couldn’t get over the finish line.

But I’ve been taking a short term leave from work to figure out some brain fog things, and I made it through my backlog of easier tasks. Reed and I suddenly had an entire afternoon off together with Locke in preschool. After starting to wax some bike chains, we turned our attention to the LFL and managed to finish it up! We borrowed a post hole digger from a neighbor and put it in the ground in our front garden. And the local lab/golden mix Mango came by to say hi while we were doing it!

Willow grins broadly in front of the empty little free library. Their purple shirt matches the purple accent on the library. The library has a tilted roof and one shelf, and is placed in the front yard that has a recently greening Japanese Maple and lots of native plans, along with a bench.
Exceedingly proud we finally got it in the ground

Some books have already been picked up! Reed and I have been having a long conversation about my desire to keep the LFL stocked with the same set of books no matter how many times they get picked up — I want to send a consistent message, he wants to provide variety to the neighborhood as it’ll be a lot of the same people walking by regularly. We’ve settled on about half the books being consistent and the other half being ones we’re going through in the house + neighbors leaving books.

Another angle of the library, this time with books on the shelves. You can see the steps going up to the Idlewild yard and some flowers through a gate int eh background.

March Joy : Goats!

Posted on by
Reply

Uncle Tilde took us on an adventure to Goatlandia in the North Bay to feed some baby goats and meet some older goats. So cute! So soft! So invested in being high up! And their wagging tails while they drank milk! Oh my goodness.

Reed in a green jacket and pink hat has a goat under one arm while another puts its front legs on Reed's leg to smell his hand. The back legs are on a hay bale that Willow sits on, petting another goat. Locke watches on from the fence.
Image by Uncle Tilde

Goatlandia is a goat and other animal rescue. We met some ducks, an alpaca, and many many goats. We even scared up a wild hare! The tour guide was delightful — invested in animal well being without being preachy about veganism. The baby goats get fed about 5 times a day at their current ages. While many of the kids (lol) will get adopted out, the adult goats we met are there as their forever home.

Image from Reed

It was so nice to just be out in a rural area with animals. The requests were simple and easy to fill with our trusty guide. I felt like I was in my body.

Then we all went for delicious bread at Wildflour. I’ve only been there once before – on the Freestone Bread Run 200k I failed out of a few years ago. It’s worth going out of your way a fair amount for, and we were in the neighborhood! Each thing we got there was amazing.

Tilde wearing a THICCC hat gets chewed on by a baby goat.
Selfie from Uncle Tilde, trusty adventure-inducer and driver

While Tilde’s car charged on the way home, we spent about an hour playing with LEGOs and exploring toys at Fundemonium. Locke fell asleep on the car ride home and we all got some quiet time to recover from an intense and fun day.

February Joy : A Day with Family

Posted on by
Reply

Reed and my family haven’t been getting on particularly well, so for the family meetup in NYC in February, Locke and I went on our own. This is both stressful and not — Locke is a champ at traveling at this point, but also my family and I have been in a non-child groove of hanging out for 25 years and introducing a 3 year old into the mix has proven difficult. My family really likes winging things and having epic meals together, neither of which work particularly well for a kid who wants to play with LEGOs and has a strict sleep schedule. So I was nervous.

The first two days were a mess. Folks wanted to wander around Manhattan (Locke wants to play in the snow while everyone else wants to walk somewhere; Locke wants to touch everything in stores or gets tremendously bored and destructive while folks are shopping) and have late lunches (beginning right after he should be down for his nap). We did get to go see the Jim Henson exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image! We were jet lagged. No one else knows his routine and I had to be along for the ride even when folks did want to help. A (mostly) bad scene. Because of that and other stressors in my life, I actually cried to my mom and brother at the end of the second night, telling them I wasn’t sure I could do a trip like this again. We are not a crying family.

A build-your-own muppet with many eyes, a green nose, grey hair, and purple shirt.

Apparently everyone had a meeting after we left to put Locke down to sleep, and rallied. The following days accounted for Locke needing to sleep at certain points, doing adventures that were kid compatible, and people taking Locke for adventures without my needing to be there. I felt loved and supported by my family.

So on our last night together, we put Locke down for his sleep and he fell asleep quickly. I then went to play cards and drink cider with my family nearby, without feeling any anger about how the day had gone. And that was nice.

Participating in nonhierarchical organizations

Posted on by
Reply

Network/nonhierarchical organizing is my preferred methodology over hierarchy (that was a joke where I put my preferences into a hierarchy). And while I’ve written a fair amount about organizational structures on this blog, I’ve never really talked about what I expect of participants in a network beyond defining governance models. So this is about that. 

Intrinsic Motivation

I learned this term from Debbie Chachra, and I love it. You can learn a whole lot more in this video and in this book, but the basics are this:

  1. Purpose – You gotta know why you want to do something. In networks, this is usually either the thing the network has decided is their collective purpose together, or people joining the network are signing up to the already-stated purpose. Purpose can shift over time, and it’s good to check in on, on occasion, without getting too navel-gazey. 
  2. Scaffolding – You gotta know if you’re on the right track towards your goals within that purpose, and are making progress against that track. In networks, we usually use documentation and skill shares from folks who have already tried it in this or another context. 
  3. Autonomy – With shared purpose guiding you and scaffolding pointing the way, you gotta be able to make decisions for yourself and move without someone else telling you what to do. Because in a network, people (generally) don’t tell each other what to do. There is coordination without control.

Do the work

If you’re present, you should be contributing towards the purpose. This of course includes caring for people doing more directly related work, mentoring, etc. But separate out the philosophical navel-gazing discussion time and people from the work at hand. It’s so much fun to have those philosophical discussions! It’s even important for the purpose of the group and how you communicate that to others. But if you’re not contributing, get out of the way of the people who are and just read their newsletter instead of distracting them. 

Self awareness and integrity

Because no one is telling you what to do, and no one is tracking your work, it is vital that you have enough self awareness to notice if something is going off the rails, or your ability to deliver has changed. You then need to communicate with others about how things are going, even if it’s bad news. Otherwise a competent person who is well resourced quietly working on their own looks the exact same from the outside as someone who is in over their head and can’t deliver. 

Communication

Here, I look for transparency and sharing space. Talking about what your part is in a way that opens up the space for others to weigh in as well is vital. And I’m always a big fan of the rule of N – speak 1/Nth of the time, whether that means taking up more or less space than you’re prone to!

It’s also important here to speak only for yourself. If someone is missing from the room, work to bring them into the room. But speaking for others is paternalistic and you often get it wrong, anyway. The number of productive conversations I’ve seen derailed because someone started concern-trolling about something they barely understood on someone else’s “behalf” is staggering. 

It’s also fun to look at the COINTELPRO guide to disrupting and delaying effective action, and to just avoid doing those things. 

Why I know what I’m talking about

I’ve done a lot of network organizing since I got started in 2009. First organizing hacker and makerspaces to share skills and a 501c3 umbrella for Jigsaw Renaissance and School Factory; then connecting disaster and humanitarian technology groups to each other and responses via Geeks Without Bounds and then UN OCHA’s Digital Humanitarian Network; and now with an art and music campout festival called Priceless. I even considered being an academic for awhile on this topic and how it overlaps with hierarchical orgs at the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Technology. Phew.

January Joy : our cats North and Holiday

Posted on by
Reply

I set out to write one blog post a month about something that brought me joy. This one is a few days late, but that’s ok, I’m not perfect.

After Reed and I had been living together for awhile, with the intention of feeling each other out before marriage (his idea) and kid(s) (my idea), I proposed we get cats. Reed wanted to think about it and research. Months passed. I said, no maybe you don’t understand, we are now getting cats. He acquiesced.

We spent all day at the animal shelter meeting pair bonded kitties. It was important to me to get a set of cats so they could keep each other company and be happier. Also, they have a harder time finding homes. I fell in love with a few, Reed didn’t really click with any. As the shelter was closing down, the staff said it was clear we weren’t done looking and recommended we go to a nearby Pet Food Express that hosted some shelter cats, as they were open for another hour or two. So we went. No pair bonded kitties. But Reed immediately noticed and fawned over a little white cat (not a kitten, but not fully a cat yet either) with heterochromia. Reed scooped the cat up. The cat purred a whole lot. Reed held him like a baby. He purred even more. I tried to pet him. He bit me. Reed pleaded with me to take home a single cat that didn’t like me. The staff were so excited to find him a home that they waived all fees. And that’s how we got North.

A white cat with one blue eye and one golden eye sits on a lap next to a pile of his hair.
North – smart, trainable, lots of shedding.

North proved to be highly trainable, and Reed is also excellent at training animals. He would come to where you tapped. He would do high fives. But we couldn’t get him to stop biting. Finally, one day, I suggested that he was unhappy and lonely and needed a friend. Also, I wanted a cat (Reed was by far North’s favorite. He would tolerate me when Reed wasn’t around, but I wasn’t getting the kitty cuddles I craved). Reed was willing to try, so back to the shelter we went. There were some cats that were pretty ok, but none that we were both clicking with.

Now here is a major difference between Reed and me. Reed has HUGE amplitudes of emotion. He gets SO excited about things, and he is SO disappointed if something doesn’t go according to plan. And after he feels things, he moves on. And I have lower amplitude of deep emotions that don’t get very big but still exist. In this circumstance, that meant that any cat I was lukewarm on was about as much as I was going to get into it, and Reed either LOVED the cat and would end up with two cats at home, or HATED the cat and didn’t want to take it home. When I noticed this mismatch and its consequences, we sat down in the lobby and discussed, and ended up taking home a small sickly kitten. Reed named him Doc Holiday for his dark brown coat.

A handsome dark grey cat with green eyes.
Holiday – alluring, either dumb or cryptid, so loud

We tried to keep them separated, but North immediately wanted to play (gently) with the little cat. He immediately stopped biting humans (he used to run into a room, jump to your hand to bite it, and then run back out. Now we see he was probably trying to get us to play with him). Holiday dealt with a series of health issues, some of which transferred to North. But we got through it, and they became good buddies. Holiday was a nervous wreck for the first 3ish years we had him, and then finally grew to trust a predictable food source and a solid play and care routine. Like, he used to get so anxious he’d form crystals in his bladder, get blockages, and have to go to the emergency vet. But he’s very charismatic in a long play kind of way.

Holiday sleeps on my bed, and North cuddles Reed in the mornings and evenings, and both cats love it when Reed and I share a bed. They’ve both turned into lap cats and begrudgingly share a lap when Reed and I are not both sitting down. They both come to say hi to visitors now, although they’re not the most gregarious with new folks. We play with them or take them outside (supervised!) 15 minutes before feeding them in puzzle balls every morning and evening, and it seems to work really well for their dispositions and health. We treat them with respect and care, and as more than ornamental fish in our house. And they meet us in kind with affection and play.

They both bring me so much joy, and I’m so grateful we get to help them have happy lives. I love that they have specific ways they like to get pet. I love that they suit us so well, and that we’re able to provide them happy lives.

2024 in review

Posted on by
1

This will be my tenth(!!) year in a row doing these, so you can also read about the years since 2015 if so desired. They are inspired by Tilde, who has taught me that it can be a Good Thing to remember what the last year has been like. Many of the headers in this post are based on my goals for 2024.

The word for this year was abundance. I struggled to bring this take to everything I do — I feel an immense amount of guilt around my privilege these days, and so while I still try to come at things from an abundance mindset, and bring abundance to others, I struggled to apply this across the board.

Continue reading →

Sniff test and teaming up with the formal sector

Posted on by
Reply

This is a draft for the zine, worked on with John Crowley. Reminder that we have a kickstarter up for not-quite-a-month still.

Determining if they’re collaborative

The vast majority of people in the formal sector when I was doing crisis response in 2010-2018 actually wanted to help the frontline population, and had a deep breadth of education and experience in doing so. One of the things about the formal sector is that they’re NOT starting from square one for each crisis. They are also stymied by bureaucracies. Those same bureaucracies also hold them accountable. It’s a mixed bag. 

Under Trump, they’ll be changing a lot. See more in the Trends article. This piece is to get a rough sniff test on whether or not someone in the formal sector is trustworthy and whether or not they can actually effect change to assist your efforts. 

  • You’ll want to be aware that most folks in the field come from a social work background, and most folks in the command center come from a command and control background. This doesn’t exclude either set from being worth collaborating with, but it will influence their approaches.
  • They should be focused on listening and responding, not telling you want to do or just listening without saying anything. 
  • You will spot them speaking to people of different backgrounds at the same time – you’ll see them facilitating a discussion between someone deployed via the military and someone whose house just got blown down. 
  • When you embark upon conversation, they’re focused on the actual problem and how to deliver support whether or not you collaborate, rather than getting territorial. 

If they’re worth collaborating with

Once you figure out someone CAN be collaborated with, you’ll want to determine if they have enough sway in their org to actually get some things done with you. Start small and work your way up. 

  • If they know who to ask and when their next checkpoint with that person is, they are probably effective. 
  • If they can deliver on concrete things (including preventing an interruption to your work), it’s a good sign. 
  • If they’re just hanging out to be seen or to gather intel, ask them to move on, assertively if need be. 
  • If they over promise and then hype up their role in what’s happening, you’re probably dealing with a problematic person and you should cut ties ASAP, even if they can nominally deliver.

The actual collaboration mechanisms

  • Have multiple people behind one role title and group email/phone number to coordinate with the formal sector. Do not give out a single person’s point of contact or it will be unsustainable for them.
  • They cannot come join you on discord or wherever because of IT rules of what can and can’t be installed on their devices, so you’ll need to find a way to talk to each other. 
  • One-on-one conversations are more likely to get traction for actual collaboration. 
  • They may also invite you to their meetings as information sharing, but it’s not the time or place to try to course correct how they operate. 
  • If you end up sharing their space with them (you’re invited to their phone calls or meetings), expect things to flow very differently from what you’ve seen in your own community and try to follow their lead.

What to collaborate on after they pass the sniff test

  • Ask what usually goes wrong or what complications you’re about to face.
  • Tell them about pain points to elicit feedback.
  • If you need to talk about risks you’re taking or rules you’re breaking, have answers ready about how you’re mitigating those risks.
  • If you need a large number of “simple” things like blankets, you can usually arrange a pickup point from them to then bring to your distro center to get out into your community.
  • If you have a solid distro system going, offer it as a way to do last mile logistics for their supplies. You may need to integrate with their reporting system, but it may be worth it. They won’t have logistics, access, or intelligence (PII) to do last mile.

My struggles with “emergence” organizing

Posted on by
Reply

It seems like some want to be taking bubble baths waiting for the right thought to hit while they burn down our libraries.

I went to the theater recently on a date. I don’t get a lot of time away from everything, so it’s a rare treat that I get to have a date, and rarer still when we decide not just to stay in and roll around. So this was exciting! And it was thrown by a theater group I’ve enjoyed in the past. We arrived and lingered in the lobby with some folks I know, and made friends with some others. Everyone was wearing masks. It was nice. Then the time came, and we were all ushered into a space influenced by Burning Man. It was scrappy, it was cute, but it was not good art. Lights were set to rainbow demo mode, kind of vibe. We all got comfortable. And then we waited. We made more friends with some of the folks around us.

The MC then stood up and told us that the event was about sharing space together. That they had no idea what was going to happen, and that we were just going to see. Emergence! It’s a trend in organizing right now that I appreciate but have some qualms with. So they put on some meditation music and left the room. And then we sat there. In silence. For maybe 10 minutes. Now, I’m all about sharing silence with strangers. It’s one of my favorite things. But I had signed up for a theater event, and expectations hadn’t been set for how long we were doing this for or how things would end. Most folks in the room probably didn’t have a meditation practice and asking those folks to sit in silence for more than about 5 minutes is hard.

I finally held up my phone screen to my sweetie asking if he wanted to leave if this kept up. He agreed, I set a timer for 5 more minutes. The 5 minutes passed. Other folks exited. We did as well. I texted a friend who had stayed there later, to ask what had happened. They said they eventually brought out some art supplies for folks to use, but that not much had happened.

Can you imagine it? A group of relatively radical folks all in a room together, who will never again be just that group of people, with an entire evening set aside to experience something together. And instead that time was wasted. All that potential was wasted.

Continue reading →

Threat modeling for disasters

Posted on by
Reply

Environmental hazards

Investigate what sorts of hazards are likely to occur in your region by using available tools. If you can’t trust the tools, talk to people who have been around for a long time about what is likely to happen and how to prepare. Discuss it with neighbors. 

  • First, find broad strokes. I’m in the Bay Area, so I look up earthquake hazards at a large level to see where one might occur near me.
  • Narrow down to your region. I look up liquefaction zones because that’s what matters in an earthquake.
  • We also have wild fires in California, so I find the state’s hazard website, which tells me which areas are protected how against fires and other hazards.
  • Floods can happen just about anywhere. Here’s the current way to look up your flooding risk.

There are often environmental justice organizations in each region as well, who will have different maps that include super fund sites you’ll need to be wary of if you can no longer trust that government one. During 2017 we worked with Public Lab to find and combine maps of issues.

Political hazards

Depending on the political climate where you’re at, you may face some challenges to your response organizing work.

  • Disinformation – people may try to skew information people are getting in order to further their own political ends. Be aware of who you can trust, and read the pages in here about understanding and combatting disinformation.
  • Cops – bullies with power may tell you that you can’t do some of the things you’re doing. Know your rights in your area, and record interactions. And shut the fuck up. Have your local legal team’s number written down and/or ideally memorized.
  • Wanna be cops – bullies with guns and a sense of power may come by and try to interrupt what you’re doing. Have a sense of what risks you’re willing to take, and stand your ground whenever possible. Have a crew of folks who are willing to show up against these folks, and have them be on an on call rotation. 

Community hazards

Hopefully you already have a sense of who is in your neighborhood. If you don’t, start knocking on doors with cookies. 

  • Narcissists – who is going to show up and look for power in order to look good? They’ll drive things in a way that doesn’t help the community but has their name all over it and looks good for a moment in the news. Not willing to share power or take critical feedback. Should be removed from power and ignored as early as possible. Grey rock that shit. 
  • Spontaneous unaffiliated volunteers – people who show up and disrupt your work in order to “help.” Figuring out who is useful and who is going to get in the way is vital. More in that article. 

Community resources

Map your neighborhood for resources folks are willing to provide. I did this by showing up to community events with a form for folks to fill out with what they were willing to provide, posting on community forums, and hosting disaster-themed get togethers for folks who were interested.

  • Power – who has generators or solar with batteries
  • Water – who has water stored in their house, and is likely to fill up a bathtub
  • Food – who keeps a backstop of food at their house and is willing to share
  • Medical capabilities – who can help with medical issues
  • AED – anyone who keeps an AED in their location
  • Disaster experience – those who are trained and/or experienced in disaster response
  • Block captains – folks who are willing to check in on each other in a crisis

Kickstarting like it’s 2009

Posted on by
Reply

So all those blog posts I’ve been making about informal disaster response? Yeah, it’s growing into a full-on zine. Drew and I have enough put together that we can publish something in the first quarter of the new year, but we’d like to make it even bigger and better. So we’re doing a kickstarter like it’s 2009 again or something.

I’m hoping to pay some folks what they’re worth to do a full-on website, some extra graphics for the zine, and finish up some great articles. It can end up shipping as the mostly-Willow-show, but that doesn’t feel good or right. I’ve run through my 5k personal budget of what to spend on generating this, but people keep getting excited for what it could be. So this Kickstarter is to see if there’s enough heat there to expand the scope. Throw in and share if you think it’s a nice idea. Otherwise, no worries. We can still ship with what we’ve got.