Category Archives: people and projects

Onboarding documentation the most important documentation

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Originally posted on the Truss blog

Most of us rely on documentation in one way or another. In this blog post, we attempt to make the following points:

  1. Most documentation should be treated as if it is onboarding someone to an organization, project, process, etc.
  2. Involving multiple people of different practice areas increases the quality and context of the documentation.
  3. Documentation can help a growing/large organization stay in sync with itself.
  4. Truss’s onboarding documentation is great and you should check it out.

Onboarding documentation is the most important documentation

“Documentation” is the media object (text, video, images, etc) which explains how to do something. Docs can take the form of descriptive policy, READMEs, How-Tos, welcoming, etc. 

Documentation is nearly always worth having, but if you only have time to get one piece of documentation in place, it should be made on the assumption it’s being used to onboard someone to the project, organization, process, etc to which it relates. A person rarely looks at the whole project, organization, process, etc as a whole as that is overwhelming. They instead look for signposts that provide context and support in understanding the system they’re about to interact with. 

When I got started at Truss long long ago in 2017, we had an onboarding manager checklist but no real guidance for the new Trussel outside of that human contact. Ari, who at the time was doing onboarding (and is now an engineer), is an incredibly high-touch, welcoming human. However, if she or another person helping with the process had a more pressing thing to be doing (which was often the case at a suddenly and rapidly growing consultancy), a new Trussel would stall out and be left in a sea of tasks, new tools, and new people, with a sense of “what even do I do?” And when one doesn’t have a clear path forward, one can feel useless, which is not a good feeling when you’re just getting started somewhere and want to prove your worth.

This was because we had documentation about how things worked, but not from the perspective of the person being onboarded to the organization. If we were to get this in place, a new Trussel would feel more welcomed and solid in their footing.

Luckily(?) I compulsively document things. So as I learned about bits and pieces of the organization, I wrote down in one place what others should also expect as they came in. Oh, we do have a document about PTO? Link it up and give a quick summary. We don’t have one on role definition? Could I help make one? I tried to set it up so when something was unclear or incorrect in the docs, a new person would feel safe enough to ask questions and empowered enough to edit the docs when they learned the answer. This generated a surprisingly long document which was complete enough, but also incredibly overwhelming.

Pouring the firehose into drinkable cups

Documentation takes a bunch of different people of different practices to make it good. Sharing the load also makes creating and maintaining the docs a lighter lift and a shared source of truth and object worth maintaining together.

Our document was way too burdensome, so we called on our design content strategists James and Kaleigh, who suggested it be reformatted into phases of onboarding time. Delivery Manager Amy tried this format out first on her project, and then I expanded it into the MilMove project. When it stuck well enough, we did a card sorting exercise for who wanted to know about which parts of our operations, and when it made sense to learn about them. We also started linking out to external documents when a section got too long or convoluted. This allows people to focus on the big picture, and dive in deeper when something is relevant to them. Then we took our honking document and rearranged it and edited it down to a mere 28 pages.

Just as people had started asking to have new policy or reference docs put into the emerging guide, everyone also helped edit for clarity. It became a thing for more folk to reference and make use of. And just as Nelz, Jeri, Andrew (all engineers), and Mallory (designer) have held my hand in multiple ways to migrate the Guide from a Google Doc to GitHub Pages, many other folk have also refined the Guide to make it what it is. Including our general counsel Burstein writing the best damn disclaimer you ever did see and otherwise making sure we’re not just witty but also reasonable legally.

We have all done this in the spirit of being a warm, welcoming place for new Trussels. All those folk named here (and those I have forgotten 💔) have demonstrated our values in order to make it an easier transition for others to also represent those values.

If you are working on onboarding documents, call in help! Ask tenured folk to verify knowledge is represented, newer folk that it’s clear, content specialists to review structure, etc. 

Being able to document something requires understanding it

Growing and large organizations are often accused of “the left hand not knowing what the right is doing.” This has to do with the functions of the different hands not being clear to the other. Enter (you guessed it): onboarding documentation! By describing how different components of a system work, the system itself has opportunities to become more aligned.

One thing that came up time and time again as we worked on the Trussels’ Guide were points of inconsistency or lack of clarity around internal workings. As we grew from 14 to 90 Trussels during the development of the Guide, our processes were also scaling. We became more robust and more formal. But importantly, we always did so with an eye to being comprehensible to an incoming Trussel. Docs shouldn’t only be intelligible in the context of the whole — each should stand on its own in a meaningful way. While most Trussels can’t (and shouldn’t have to) know about every tiny detail of how the business operates, they should be able to look up the details and/or who to ask if they start to care.

As an aside, there’s also this great piece about how you can’t fix a product (or a process) by having good words. The thing you’re describing has to be good, too.

Documenting can surface where things are out of alignment and provide a route to bringing them back into sync with each other. This is important for your organization, project, or process to be functional within the context of itself and the larger systems of which it is part.

A quick how-to

What’s worth documenting? I start documenting when roughly three people ask me the same sort of question. Rather than respond to each separately, I 

  1. try to write it down with the first’s help, 
  2. talk through it with the second, and 
  3. ask the third to try to self-serve with the document created. 

This allows emergent areas of interest, guided by our new Trussels, to determine some of the aspects of the business we next define more clearly. 

We’re proud of how we do things at Truss and want to share them

So now we are ready, dear reader, to show you how we work at Truss and, as importantly, how we talk about how we work. And so I introduce to you the Trussels’ Guide to Truss. In it are the ways we are kind to each other, how the business functions, some of the decisions we’ve made, and how we embed assumptions into our work.

We hope you’ll have a look, take what works for you, leave what doesn’t, and continue to engage in the conversation of how to build great businesses together. Also, if this seems like the place for you, we’re hiring!

“Show you can be free in a colony.” – a brief history of Puerto Rico

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This post is being staged here while the presenters and other Public Lab attendees review it. It will updated in the next few weeks and pushed to Civic and Occupy Sandy blogs (as well as anywhere else that wants to share). Many intended links are missing, as are images.

“Know the history of the region” is something community-led crisis responders tend to repeatedly say those coming into a region impacted by crisis. But most histories are written by the colonizers, and so the role of educator also falls on the shoulders of those fighting to survive.

At an event called the Crisis Convening Public Labs Barn Raising in Newark, NJ in July, 3 Puerto Ricans (Jessica, Luis, and Raquela) gave a brief history of Puerto Rico to a room of folk interested in community-led crisis response and environmental justice. We took a rough transcript and created this blog post to distill their knowledge. With this documentation, those who wish to be in solidarity with Puerto Rico can educate themselves. Much of the blog post is comprised of pulling the transcript and doing slight rewording. The transcript follows the post. None of it should be considered mine. It is published here with their consent and endorsement.

Puerto Rico was first colonized by the Spanish for 400 years. Just as the fight for independence was taking hold, the Spanish-American war ended and Puerto Rico fell under United States rule. Our summary begins there, in 1898.

It is a story of resistance, industrialization, imposed poverty and debt, diminished schooling, imprisonment, bombs hidden on beaches, and a growing trust in self-sufficiency. It doesn’t end with a plan of action beyond listening more.

Resistance has always been a thing in Puerto Rico

In 1917, Puerto Rico got their “citizenship.” But as a different category – it meant if residents could receive financial aid for education, but of those of those who did, the men could be drafted into the military, and that Puerto Ricans still couldn’t elect anyone who has a hand in U.S. politics (no Congressional, no House, no Presidential votes). While local elections for local positions can occur, no matter what is decided in the island the U.S. has veto power, and the last decision.

The United States wanted to make an example of the impact of industrialization to lift a place out of poverty, but that poverty persisted. In 1920, a new fight for independence began. To push back against this fight, the official language (including the language of education) was changed to English, forcing many to drop out of school. After a couple/few decades of this, it was finally accepted that it wasn’t working, and the official language was changed back.

In 1952, a ray of hope! Countries fighting for their freedoms were released as colonies by the UN. But it was fake in Puerto Rico, which was named as a “Estado Libre Asociado,” which translates to “state free associated” – none of which are true.

All this happened during a brutal oppression of the movement. In the ‘20s, more than half of Puerto Ricans were working towards independence. Now it’s far less1. There is a well-documented history of persecuted, killed, and jailed those who stood up for Puerto Rican independence. Oscar López Rivera just released (in 36 years)2; two more are still there.

In the 1960s, organizing against the military complex reached a new height. Here’s as good a time as any to tell you about how the U.S. military used Puerto Rico to test bombs, contraceptives, and Agent Orange (all without consent). We even rented out the region for other countries to bomb! Organizing against these joined the existing movements for independence and educating community members they can be self-sufficient.

In 1999, the realities of these activities were realized when a civilian was killed by a bomb. People took to the streets to stop bombing, told Marines to get out of the land. It wasn’t until 2003 that Marines got out of Vieques. This was a huge deal, compared to the moments where it felt like Occupy Wall Street could win. It crossed political lines, generational lines, those who wanted statehood or independence. Side note that the bombs are still there, marines don’t want to clean it up.

During all this time, Puerto Rico was borrowing money3. Anything produced there had to be shipped to the U.S. and back in order to be used because of a bullshit act called Ley Jones4. In 2016, Obama put in place a fiscal control board, called “P.R.O.M.E.S.A,” which put 7 people who don’t live in Puerto Rico as a fiscal control board to determine how budget is spent. In addition to the standing requirement of having to pay creditors before investing in infrastructure or anything else, these people now also had a say in what budget cuts were. Further privatization, creeping into schools, hospitals, and power occurred in addition to the airport and telephone companies. As you might imagine, this has caused further poverty.

Bombs hidden on beaches are no longer the priority (somehow)

With Hurricane Maria in 2017, all the poverty, destruction of land, and poor infrastructure was revealed. The same thing that happened with Katrina in New Orleans is happening across the island – cutting social services, closing schools and hospitals. Money is going to contractors who often don’t do the work. School closures help transition to charter schools, which pull more money into outside pockets.

The government (as this history might indicate) have not shown up in a useful way, and so it’s up to the community organizers who have been around through these movements to serve the people to Puerto Rico. Solidary work has become the flag. The work done to build community kitchens, farming projects, occupying abandoned schools for housing, rebuilding infrastructure, and have become the shoulders on which local response to Maria are occuring.

This is a moment to build the empowerment movement. Puerto Ricans know they can do things by themselves, for themselves. They opened roads, created community kitchens, held spaces for sorrow. It is a place for freedom, but it is delicate.

So when you ask to help, this is why there is push back. This is why impeaching Trump is not a good first (or even tenth) topic of conversation.

“I am protecting the 35 years of wins we’ve had.”
Your first plan in helping Puerto Rico should always be listening more, first.

Footnotes

  1. We don’t know the percentage. Less than half of the population voted last election, about 3% for independent party, but there are many more non-party affiliated fighting for independence.
  2. More than Mandela!
  3. Something like 72 billion?!?!
  4. What the everliving fuck

Transcription

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2017 in Review

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This will be my third year in a row doing these, so you can also read about 2015 and 2016 if so desired. They are inspired by Tilde, who has taught me that it can be a Good Thing to remember what one has accomplished over the year. The headers in this post are based on my 2017 goals.

Explore, decide upon, and execute the next work bits.

This was the hardest on me. While my time at Aspiration helped me to slow down, it also removed me from the circles in which I had run, which I feel made finding work far more difficult than it might have otherwise been. Over the course of 2017, I applied to ~200 jobs, and got to the second-interview stage (or further) at 12.

Contracts did come in, some through the consultancy Vulpine Blue my brother and I started. We had 4 clients and a workshop series, including participation in a field scan for technology for social justice (complete next year) and a network strategy workshop around microfinance and direct cash assistance. External to Vulpine, I facilitated a lovely group of folk in creating a game about disaster response, and am working with Megan Yip on a resource repository about digital estate planning. Some of these things have been covered on this blog over the past year.

I applied to a data science bootcamp, and so took time to learn more about Python, statistics, Javascript, and d3. While I didn’t get in based on my lack of memory/knowledge of statistics and calculus, I did learn a lot, especially about coding. The most significant progress in all this has been made under the excellent guidance of Tilde. <3

The work on digital response has also continued, with assisting Greece Communitere in setting up their Monitoring and Evaluation for Accountability and Learning plan, participating in Neighborhood Empowerment Network and Volunteer Organizations Active in Disaster Sacramento, apparently having 35 Marines tasked to me for setting up the disaster response section of Fleet Week, and helping with community technical responses during the hurricane season. The influx of attention has improved our response knowledge base and sparked a new Slack group. A donation came in from a friend for these efforts, which means we can be even a bit more prepared in the future to do more work. For a short period of time, I had a Patreon going, and it was a reassurance that I’m not shouting into the void. Some of these efforts also appears on this blog.

For longer term thinking, I also supported the swissnex Crisis Code event, found a co-author and new editor for the mixed-mode system paper book (which progresses a goal for 2016), and set up the Do No Digital Harm Initiative with Seamus and Joe.

In short, I did manage to explore the next work bits. The route I’ve been selected for, and accepted, is to become the project manager at Truss. Truss embodies my desire to do epic shit quietly, in a healthy working environment. I’m stimulated and supported, and it’s glorious. Also, we’re hiring.

I don’t know how *you* celebrate being a new job, but I sure have a way..

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Make a longer-term financial plan (and start on it).

All that means I have a long-term financial plan and am plugging away at those longer-term objectives. 2017 was a year of sporadic income and job hunting, and has drained all personal savings and put me back in debt to family (I am the luckiest, I know). Being paid like an adult living in SF while still persuading myself that I don’t make that kind of money means I can start saving for bigger Future things.

Remain emotionally vulnerable and available even when it suuuuucks.

After taking some time to heal after the multi-level collapse of 2016, I developed a Dating Plan, which perhaps isn’t terribly surprising to some of you. I executed at full-bore and thereby met lots of lovely new folk.

But the dating Plan didn’t go exactly as expected because the casual thing I had going with one Reed Kennedy escalated. Quickly. We worked backwards from when we should decide if we want to do other Life Things with each other, and set a move-in date in August. Be still my logic-based heart. We now share a home (but not a room), and his mom knows my parents.

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This isn’t the only relationship in my life, of course. I’ve also worked to maintain my relationships with Jenbot, Lily, and Estee; and to deepen my friendships with friends old and new. A big part of being able to do all this was getting my average miles per hour into the single digits for the first time in years. 7! Seven mere miles per hour. That’s 61k miles traveled over the year.

There are other aspects to being emotionally vulnerable and available. To me, showing up was also participating in the airport protests, women’s march, and acting as security at a Berkeley march. Another aspect of vulnerability is this: over the course of 2017 I experienced two bouts of depression, the second of which was bad enough to mean I’m on medication. A++ modern medicine, would ask for help again.

Find 3+ adventures of any size to go on, and go on them.

I went a little overboard on this one, but I’m really proud of myself for that. In the past, most of my travel has been for work, with rare exceptions. In 2017, I went snowboarding in Colorado, went to Santa Fe to see Meow Wolf, rode to Pinnacles to go rock climbing, hiked Gunsight Pass with my dad in Glacier, and had romantic getaways with two partners (one to Point Reyes, the other to Virginia)!

Where I was yesterday.

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I also managed to Do Things in the Bay Area, including taking a shining to the SF Neo Futurists, playing D&D for a long weekend in Oakland, experiencing an interactive play set during the Prohibition, and seeing Hamilton and the Magnetic Fields.

Adventures aren’t just for experiencing, they’re also for building. Over 2017, I gave a talk at Odd Salon, did some minor support on Radiance, sat on a panel about Apocalyptic Civics at the Personal Democracy Forum, gave a talk on Weaponized Social at SHA (the Dutch hacker camp), contributed to a Cultivate the Karass event, and sat on a panel about disaster response technology at Hackers. Oh, and I ended up in a coordinating leadership role for the 1100-person, 4-day festival Priceless, which I shall continue doing next year as well.

Yours truly, on the last day of #priceless, with “enough” radios.

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Get back into reading a nerdy amount.

I did ok at this, but not as well as I might’ve liked. Instapaper doesn’t offer data, but apparently I’ve finished 18 books this year on Audible, and maybe 3 physical books (yay dyslexia!). Favorites include Thanks For The Feedback, Marriage (a History), the Broken Earth series, The Gone Away World, and The Fire Next Time. I also binged hard on The Adventure Zone podcast.

Physical Things

Here were the physical goals for 2017:

  • Run 400 miles over the course of 2017 (about twice what I did this year).
  • Beat my time/position for a Spartan race.
  • Climb at least 6 times a month.
  • Bike 50 miles or more a month.

Maybe there are so many because they’re the easiest thing to track?

I ran 307 miles (100 more than 2016, but 100 less than my goal), primarily because bicycling became more of a priority than running. I bicycled 1,163 miles over 2017, which is pretty great for the first year of having my own bicycle as an adult. The hardest (but not longest) ride I did was 31.8 miles and 2,554 ft of climbing. I walked 100 miles less than last year, but 500 miles more than I bicycled in 2017.

Hours and hours spent with @sofauxboho for this Goldie-Locks-fit of a bike.

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The Spartan race I ran was during the same month and same location as 2016’s, but the track was slightly different. I ran a better time (1:40 to last year’s was 2:05) but poorer position (583/4800 to last year’s 255/2617). I don’t know that I’ll do another race. It’s been interesting but I don’t see it building to anything.

The only month I missed my 6x climbing goal was November, and November was a tire fire. I got Reed into climbing, who got Josh and Gordon into it, and I made new lead-practice climbing friends Sophia and Alejandro. I made it up a Mission Cliffs .11C (not Yosemite grading, so not as fancy as you think it is, but still damn hard).

I persisted with yoga and strength training, took up boxing (this also knocks out (lulz) a goal for 2016) (shout out to Four Elements Fitness, and to Scout and Debbie for the encouragement), and started on a ketogentic diet which has had huge benefits to my mood stability. And I’ve halved my alcohol consumption from last year, which was already a drastic decrease. My average workouts per month is up to 15 from 5 last year. This is especially strange, looking back to 2015 when working out regularly was notable. Lest this seem easy or accessible, it’s the equivalent of spending just over 7 straight days in the gym (not including walking or biking), almost 4 days of which was just on walls.

Not-Goal-Related Joy in 2017

Got my motorcycle painted so it is now the right colors.

Personal things : still improving.

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Bought myself very nice slippers. I mean, really nice. I’m wearing them right now.

Now drink only decaf coffee and teas unless under extreme circumstance.

I also learned 3 songs on the ukulele. This was a huge deal to me, as I’ve always been convinced I couldn’t play an instrument. Now, having played those three songs, I don’t know how much more time I’ll spend on it, but it was fun to figure out. Thanks to Katie and Drew for badgering me into believing in myself.

2018

The term I carried with me into 2017 was personal ambition, as I wanted to start considering my own needs while caring about the world. While I don’t think my personal ambition came anywhere close to the ambitions I have for the world, this goal did shape how I thought about things.

The term I will carry with me in 2018 is space for foundations, as I continue to re-learn how to take up space, in light of the things I’ve learned about humility and ambition over the past couple years. So my goals are:

  • Do solidly (excel, even!) at my job
  • Get certified for lead climbing
  • Continue reducing my intoxicant consumption
  • Meet one of my four savings-related goals. I still feel awkward about money so I won’t go into more detail here.
  • Get the book proposal in front of 4 publishers
  • Go bicycle camping
  • Bicycle further than I walk (without any drastic reduction in walking)
  • Complete the coding project with Tilde for the year-end report next year
  • Responsibly wrap up some of the projects listed here
  • Keep on top of my responsibilities during Priceless and other high-tumult times
  • Feel like I’m speaking 1/Nth of the time

local San Francisco neighborhood preparedness

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One of the hardest lessons and ongoing challenges in digital disaster and humanitarian response is how to connect with a local population. While many digital response groups deal with this by waiting for official actors (like the affected nation’s government, or the United Nations) to activate them, this doesn’t always sit well with my political viewpoints. Some of these affected nations have governments which are not in power at the consent of the governed, and so to require their permission rankles my soul. But to jump in without request or context is also unacceptable. So what’s to be done? It’s from this perspective that I’ve been diving into how civics, disaster, and humanitarian tech overlap. And it’s from this perspective that I’ve been showing up to Bayview meetings for San Francisco city government’s Empowered Communities Program. ECP is working to create neighborhood hubs populated by members already active in their communities. Leaders in local churches, extended care facilities, schools, etc gather about once a month to share how they’ve been thinking about preparedness and to plan a tabletop exercise for their community. This tabletop exercise took place on October 20th in a local gymnasium.

The approach of ECP is generally crush-worthy and worth checking out, so I won’t dive into it too much here. In brief, it is aware of individual and organizational autonomy, of ambient participation, and of interconnectedness. It has various ways of engaging, encourages others to enroll in the program, and lightens everyone’s load in a crisis by lightening it in advance. I am truly a fan of the approach and the participants. It’s also possible to replicate in a distributed and federated way, which means digital groups like the ones I work with could support efforts in understood and strategic ways.

Here is what doesn’t necessarily show through in their website: how grounded in local needs and social justice these community members are. There is a recognition and responsibility to the vulnerable populations of the neighborhood. There is a deep awareness of what resources exist in the community, and of historical trends in removing those resources from a poor neighborhood in a time of crisis. We’ve had frank conversations about what they’ll do about debris, and how the Department of Public Works parking and storage in their neighborhood is suddenly a positive thing. About what to do with human waste, and what a great boon it will be to have the waste water plant in their neighborhood. The things that wealthier parts of the city have vetoed having near them because of noise, pollution, and ugliness (NIMBY, or “not in my back yard”) will make Bayview resilient. They’re preparing to take care of themselves, and then to take care of other neighborhoods.

There’s a plan in NYC now to knock on every. single. resident’s door in the next crisis. It’s an approach other cities might also consider. But it’s one which is nearly impossible to implement. Who is doing the knocking? What are they doing with the information they gain? ECP’s approach is to apply their own oxygen masks first, and then to check on their neighbors, to know what the local Hub can take care of and what is needed for external support. When/If a city employee comes knocking on their door, they can then speed up the process of getting aid to where it’s needed (“I’m ok, but Shelly up the street has our 7 disabled neighbors there and they need a wheelchair, medication, and no-sodium food.”)


The end of the tabletop exercise had Daniel Homsey, the gent who heads up this program, talking about how we didn’t devise plans while together, but we did learn how to suddenly have to work at another role with people we’d barely or never met before. And I, as a digital responder, listened to what the community’s needs were, how they organized themselves, and considered the smallest interventions which could be maximally applied.

Politics and Death

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This was co-written with Fin

When Mihi died, we had some problems beyond just the holes in our chests and the salt in our eyes. 0) He was part of many communities – the medical community, the hacker community, the data journalism community, and many more. We wanted to create a site where these communities could come together, which was complicated as we are 1) activists of one flavor or another, and so most of us aren’t on facebook, 2) facebook memorial pages squick us the fuck out anyway1 2, and 3) there aren’t other accessible options out there for collaborative memorial pages3. Continue reading →

notre dam de la garde

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Yesterday I walked to the top of a hill to see the Notre Dam de la Garde, and was sad that it was just as Catholic as any other cathedral, and even more filled with tourists. I had somehow hoped for a pile of tiny boat models, superstitiously left over decades in hopes of protection. As I couldn’t discover hidden pockets of trust and hope made manifest, my favorite part was sliding down the railings back down the hill.

The week has been dedicated to Global Voices Exchange, a project to create a digital advocacy campaign guide by and for women of the global south. 20 of us gathered to question, scaffold, and draft the guide. I was honored to facilitate in my role at Aspiration, and as a friend of the Global Voices community. It was amazing to remember that about 2 years ago, I had facilitated the GV strategy meeting, and it was the first intensive time collaborating as mentee to Aspiration. It was incredible to see the progression of my skills (still so far to go!), the continued trust put in me by GV, and also how significantly working with Aspiration has influenced me. Continue reading →

Missing Persons Application!

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This is a draft of a blog entry. The idea needs further refinement, and we welcome your feedback!

When a disaster occurs, whether fast like an earthquake or slow like a drought or war, people go missing. As outsiders wishing to contribute to restoring the stability of our worlds, the desire to reunite friends and loved ones through the technology we know so well can be tempting. Making use of our knowledge of social platforms, geotagging, and databases is far easier than addressing the long-term systemic injustices which allow these crises to affect entire populations in the way they do, afterall. But let’s say a typhoon has just made landfall, or that there’s a sudden influx of refugees from a drought-blighted country, and you and a group of your friends have gathered to see what you can do about it. This is beautiful — we need to learn how to work in solidarity with those in other geographies. But it’s also a delicate space. This particular post is about whether or not you should build that missing persons app, or spend your time contributing to something like Google Person Finder, OpenStreetMap, Sahana, or Standby Task Force instead.

The missing persons/reunification domain of humanitarian response is not just about people logging themselves so as to be findable by those missing them. It’s also about those individuals being protected during the process, having support in finding those they’ve been separated from, and the infrastructure which surrounds these actions. Software has a lot to contribute to connection, information security, and sorting through indexes, but missing persons is a delicate space with real humans in the mix.

This is an inhabited space


There are already missing persons tools and organizations which have been vetted for capacity and integrity for follow-through and security. Here are the few most successfully used ones: American Red Cross’ Safe and Well, Google Person Finder, Sahana, Refugees United, International Committee of the Red Cross’ Restoring Family Links, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Please offer to help improve and maintain these existing tools (code repos and communities are linked to from each name)! If you are uncomfortable or unsure of how to contact them, please let me/Tim know!

However, we also understand that the world changes. We gain access to new technologies, there are new clever people in the world, and our understandings of situations change. There is *always* room for improvement in this space, just as any other. Want to do something substantively “better” or different than what the existing tools and organizations already do? Here’s what you need to know:

A component, not a solution

The software-based frontend and backing database are a TINY FRACTION of the overall system of missing persons reunification efforts. People are often missing for a *reason*, possibly because of political unrest, domestic violence, or displacement. If your platform publishes photos of someone or their geographic location, will someone try to come after them? Can you protect their physical and emotional wellbeing? There are national and international laws in place to protect such individuals, especially children, and your component of the system must be in alignment with those laws (or have a damn good and intentional reason for not being as such). Ethically, you should also respect an individual’s desire or need for privacy. In the Missing Persons Community of Interest, organizations handling missing persons data are reviewed by external parties for their ability to perform long-term maintainence and protection of said data. You and your tool will need to undergo the same rigor before being launched.

Complications versus easing interaction

Your goal is to make finding loved ones easier, right? Think about how many tools are already in play (see “This is an inhabited space” section above), and what adding one more to the mix would be like. Every new missing persons platform is another point of decision-making stress on the missing persons and those seeking them. Imagine being asked for personal information about yourself while under extreme duress over and over and over again.. or having to repeatedly enter in the details of someone you love and are deeply worried about while on a desperate search for them. The listed existing tools have gone through (and in some cases, are still working out) data sharing flows to reduce these stressors while still maintaining their committments to privacy and security of the data they hold. If you launch your tool, you’ll need to adhere to the same levels of empathy, respect, privacy, and sharing. (Side note, please don’t start a “uniting platform,” either, lest we get here. That’s what sharing standards are about.)

We look forward to your heartfelt, well-thought out contributions to this space.

Tim and Willow

Professorship

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My students just gave their final presentations. Their projects are the most important part of this entry, but because of narrative arcs, come last. If you read only one section of this, please read that.

Last summer, I was looking for more paid work. A job posted to some list I’m on, for a Digital Storytelling position at Brown. It didn’t require a degree, surprisingly, and I thought I’d take a shot. I sent some of the digital animation and community work I’m proudest of, and crossed my fingers. They wrote back to tell me it wasn’t exactly digital storytelling, but it was something, and we should chat.

And so I embarked on the rather bizarre adventure of creating a syllabus (so many thanks and props to Jo, Debbie, and Susan in this especially), and of planning my life around being in Providence every Thursday. At least. I do, in theory, live t/here. Each week, I would stay until the last second of the Civic lunch talk, endure the anxiety of attempting to catch a very exact train to Providence (and sometimes pay the cost for the Acela which departed slightly later), walk or cab to the Nightingale Brown House, and teach a class.
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Dealing with Having Money

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Towards the end of December 2014, with a very probable full-time gig with Aspiration (which I continue to adore) on the horizon, I realized that I would (for the first time in my life) have slightly more money than I needed to live off of. Rather than expand into the space via my consumption (ok, I’ve done a little of that, too), I wrote to the Berkman list asking for help in investment or saving.

After years of living by the skin of my teeth, it seems I’m about to have steady employment. I don’t know how to invest or save money, and I generally think capitalism is pretty evil. However, I do need to survive in the long run in the world we’ve got. Does anyone on this list have advice on 1) who I can talk to about this (I am _clueless_), 2) how to do this as someone who cares about disinvestment from petrol, promoting social justice, smashing the patriarchy and maybe the state, etc?

This was met with an outpouring of advice (and some fascinating discussion about monopolies, silicon valley, investment, etc, which I won’t get into right now), which I’ve distilled here as best I can for a wider audience. Caveat that I have absolutely no idea what I am talking about, and I look forward to making further edits (with credit!) based on feedback. I’d like to specifically thank Brian Keegan and Tom Stites for their amazing overviews and deep investment (ha!) in the topic; Andy Ellis for sitting on the phone with me; and Hasit Shah, Emy Tseng, and Amanda Page for their distilled wisdom and links.

Apparently, socially responsible investing is something tons of smart people have already put a lot of thought into. Hooray! Less work for me! One basic thing to consider is the level of granularity and control you want to personally have — stocks, bonds, and companies are the more granular. Preset choices, such as through funds, are easier to manage, and you can still have some selection-level control. It’s also suggested “to (1) diversify so that all your eggs aren’t in one basket and (2) keep investment costs low so that your returns aren’t eaten up by paying other people to manage your money.” Amanda pointed out that tutorials exist on the websites of Vanguard, Fidelity, and TIAA-Creff, and more.

One suggested thing external to investment is to just have charitable petty cash on hand – like Awesome Foundation – just giving directly to charities without ending up on their lists of People to Pester.

 

The easiest (and seemingly least risky) thing to do is to set up an Individual Retirement Account, or IRA. My bank had a special portal just for this, and it took about 10 minutes. You can set aside $5,500/year in this, and apparently it does nice things to your taxes.

Things to be aware of, when dealing with the risk of investment:

  • A healthy approach seems to be thinkng “I’ve lost the money” the moment you give it. Like covering a friend for lunch — it’s nice to be giving money to something it’s nice to spend money on, but will also enjoy the reciprocal motion if it happens.
  • Via Andy, “always ask yourself, ‘is this too good to be true, and why do I have this opportunity?'”
  • “The investment world is a peppered with people and institutions devoted to fleecing the public, usually in entirely legal ways, so beware.” – Tom
  • REITs are generally considered unsavory.

Suggested groups to check out:

  • Calvert Foundation is a community investment fund – as in, you’re loaning money to communities so they can improve themselves. This was recommended by Tom and stands out to me the most as a meaningful investment.
  • Global Alliance for Banking on Values. One thing that stood out to me from this group was their goal to “promote a positive, viable alternative to the current financial system.” While it’s not possible to interact with this group directly, it seems like a good roster to select a bank from, if you are opening a new account of various sorts.
  • Social Equity Group. If you need/want to talk to a financial planner, this is one group worth thinking about. Another group is from Start Investing Responsibly.
  • The Forum for Sustainable and Resonsible Investment. USSIF seems to be setting up a whole ecosystem of investors, businesses, community funds, etc.

Interesting reading:

Institutions also provide various forms of guidance based on their respective moral frameworks:

In Summary…

There is no direct path from index funds, which by their nature cannot exclude any particular companies, to customary approaches to socially responsible investing, which insists on excluding the worst actors. Socially screened funds charge way bigger fees than index funds — they’ve got to pay people to assess companies and exclude the worst — so one approach is to use index funds and take the money saved by not paying high fees and put it in community investment vehicles offered through the nonprofit Calvert Foundation. Using socially screened funds may help you feel virtuous, but community investment funds can actively make people’s lives better. – Tom

Based on all this, (for as long as it’s possible,) I’ll be putting the suggested $5,500 in my IRA each year, and putting the bit extra into the Calvert Foundation through one of their suggested advisers. Next, I need to figure out what state I actually exist in, if that even matters. Emails are out, we’ll see how it goes.

Tell me your stories, thoughts, etc.

Museo aero solar

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Years ago, after Chaos Congress, Rubin insisted we go to some art show. I, as always, preferred to stay at home — whatever continent, country, city home might be in that day. But Rubin can be lovingly persistent. It would be worth it. It would be beautiful. We went, mere hours before I boarded a plane from somewhere to somewhere else.
blue-haired willow has her back to the camera, focused on a large transparent orb. Children play in the orb, suspended on a clear sheet of plastic. black lacing holds the orb in place. Rubin took this picture, and Willow is fond of Rubin.
Biosphere was a study in liminality to me, suspended spaces tethered to more commonly understood as habitable floors and walls. Perfectly clear water in heavy plastic and vast space define in clarity and iridescence. It was a liminal future, an in-between home, the moment the wheels leave the runway. The terror of my anxiety and the complete love for the possibility of Something Different, wrapped up in the moments of stepping into the future. In short, Rubin was right.

Jump forward a few years.
When Pablo invited me to Development and Climate Days in Lima, I was glad to go. Even before the deeply pleasurable and productive Nairobi gig with Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre and Kenya Red Cross, I trusted Pablo to have spot-on inklings of the future. Maybe all that climate forecasting has gotten into his social forecasting as well. His efforts around serious games resulting in their now being generally accepted, he told about an art-involved step to get people to think about the future differently. Something about plastic bags, and lighter than air balloons. Would I be willing to, in addition to my talk, document their process of creating a Museo Aero Solar for others to participate and replicate? Of course – distribution of knowledge, especially with illustration and technology is kind of my jam. It would also help me venture into the city.

I arrived at 2a to a deserted city and a vast and rolling Pacific out the cab window. I cracked jokes with the driver based on my poor grasp of Spanish (“ehhhh, Pacifico es no muy grande.”) He humored me. And in the morning, mango that tasted like sunlight, and instant coffee, and the Climate Centre team of whom I am becoming increasingly fond. And a new person – the artist Tomas, with whom Pablo and I ventured to an art space to join the already-started process of community building and art creation, large bags full of plastic shopping bags ready for cutting and taping. Pablo eventually had to go spend time at COP20, I relished not going.
a phone-camera captured image of a pamphlet instructing how to create a museo aero solar. it instructs the collecting, cutting, taping, and combining of plastic bags.
I took such specific, ritualistic care with each plastic bag. Cut off the bottom, cut off the handles, cut a side to make a long rectangle. Lay it gently on top of the pile, pressing down to smooth and order. Pick up the next bag. Feel it on my hands. The crinkle, the color. Smooth it out. Cut. Place. The sound of tape being pulled, torn, applied, and stories told in Spanish. The slow joining of each hand-cut rectangle. I smiled, to dedicate so much care to so many iterations of things which are the detritus of life. Francis laughed with me, saying she felt the weight of each one. A heavy statement for something so light. Tomas walking around, constantly seeming to have attracted a bit of plastic bag handle to his heel, no matter how many he peeled off, a persistent duckling of artist statement.

We went to the Lima FabLab to speak to a hackathon about making a GPS and transponder so we could let the creation fly free without endangering air traffic. And this time I saw it from the outside – seeing Tomas speak to a group of self- and community-taught Peruvian coders, and seeing their faces display disbelief and verge protection against the temporal drain of those outside your reality. Then, as he showed step by step, and finally an image, that these can fly, their cousins can lift a person, grins break out. Peoples’ hearts lift, new disbelief replaces the jaded. There is laughter and a movement to logistical details.

And then we took it to the D&C venue, and it worked.

I imagine what Pablo must have gone through, to get bureaucratic sign-off on this. No metric of success. No Theory of Change. Him, fighting tooth and nail for a large and hugely risk-adverse organization to trust fall into the arms of a community, an artist, a facilitator, and a game maker. And they did. And it changed the entire event. People in suits crawling into this cathedral made of plastic bags, each individually cut and added with love to the whole. A pile of fancy shoes outside the entrance, like a ballroom bouncy castle. People’s unabashed joy watching art some of them had made become a room, and then lift off to become a transport.

This future we want — it’s hard work, it can seem impossible. But it’s right here, we made it. It works, and it is beautiful.

I brought up ways for other people to participate. In a beautiful act I would associate with Libre ethics, the Lima crew have opened up not only our stories, but our process. We want you to join us. We want you to be a part of this future, and it means hard work. The fledgling wiki and mailing list can be found here. I hope you hop on.