The story of my recent professional life. It’s like a resume, but more fun. (PDF download of my actual one-page resume here.) It starts when I came to New York to get an advanced degree.
NYU Draper Interdisciplinary MA in the Humanities and Social Thought
I entered the Draper programming with the intention of building my CV in order to apply for Ph.D. programs in Philosphy. Instead I discovered that I didn’t want to pursue that path. After completing my coursework (a mix of critical theory, social science, and philosophy) I decided to return to a long time back-burner interest: how the Internet can be used for collaboration towards solving difficult global-scale problems such as climate change. Through self-directed study and the practical experiences unfolded below, I’ve achieved a pretty comprehensive knowledge of this emerging field. That said, five years later, I still haven’t completed my thesis. I’m almost there.
Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions
Shortly after completing my MA coursework, I sought part-time work as an SAT teacher at Kaplan’s Manhattan centers. Before long, I was recruited to work full time as a Student Adviser. Over the course of two years I held a number of positions in management and operations, marketing and market research, account management, and was the go-to office tech guy. I attempted to put my collaboration research into practice by implementing a wiki knowledge base focused on the field level. They still use it to a limited degree in the local center. Since Kaplan’s home offices are located in New York, I was able to get a sense of how a large corporation works from top to bottom, and my experiences there have provided a useful reference point when thinking about how collaboration works in an enterprise environment. I left Kaplan in 2008 to pursue research, community organizing, and entrepreneurship full time.
I started helping Leon organize this in late 2007. We decided to borrow the NY Tech Meetup short demos format, and we managed to pull together a decent crowd. This led to a run of good meetups in the first half of 2008. Turns out the most important thing was to get people together in a room, so they could discover each others’ needs. A lot of partnerships that originated in this group are still ongoing, and the group continues under the leadership of Nate Heasley.
I met Connecting.nyc’s director, Tom Lowenhaupt, through the Web4Roots group. We worked together on the .nyc project throughout the Summer of 2008. Alex Linsker, who was also a regular at Web4Roots, helped us redesign the homepage and think differently about how to market the project. We threw some successful events, but always had our momentum killed by ICANN’s timetable slippages. The city has recently taken an interest in the .nyc TLD, but there’s still no guarantee that they will manage this common resource with appropriate care. Contact Tom through the link above to learn more.
Tom, who had been involved with OneWebDay since the start, brought me to a OneWebDay planning meeting in May. The group had decided to initiate the 100 Ambassadors Program: on each of the 100 days preceding OneWebDay, a designated “ambassador” would reach out to their network about OneWebDay. I volunteered to coordinate this program, and before I knew it I was tracking and processing pretty much every aspect of OneWebDay 2008. It was a pleasure to work with Susan Crawford, and to get in touch with change-makers all over the world. Since 2008, OneWebDay has received major funding from the Ford Foundation and OWD 2009 was a huge success under the leadership of Executive Director Nathaniel James. Expect 2010, the 5 year anniversary, to be even bigger.
Evan Korth, a Computer Science professor at New York University, was a core organizer of OneWebDay. He and I collaborated on OWD’s New York events. Since I was still a Master’s student at NYU, I was able to work as a grader in his Fall 2008 course, Computers and Society. At my request, we experimented with the strucutre of the course. 10% of the grade was earned in a “participation market.” We invited members of the web community to create interactive assignments that allowed students to engage creatively with their work. Students were allowed to choose which assignments to complete, based on their interest. The course was accompanied by a speaker series, which I helped to coordinate and promote. I got to try my hand at web design and creating posters, which both went quite well for a first try I think (yes, I used tables for layout – please forgive me).
I met Britt Blaser at the final planning meeting for OneWebDay, where he handed me a flyer for his iYear project. I was impressed by theoretical depth of his vision, and went over for a demo of his software prototype. Not long after that I was working full time on his project. I acted as project manager, but also helped him build out his team and tap into the new generation of tech-for-good activists. In 2009 we re-focused the development track and delivered the iVote4U Facebook Application.
In early October of 2008, Allison Fine and Nancy Scola wrote a blog post speculating that Twitter could be used to report on election day polling place issues. They decided to make it happen and one of the people they emailed for support was Britt. Britt set me loose to work on it, and I got right to work drumming up collaborators, laying out the shape of the project, and building out the collaboration infrastructure. As Election Day approached and the coding was in the hands of talented folks like Dave Troy and Andrew Turner, I focused on organizing the final jam session in Brooklyn, and building a process by which volunteer “sweepers” could log in and help us clean up the incoming data. Despite the short timeframe, we delivered a working product which has been reused a number of times. Ushahidi used TVR’s sweeper interface as a prototype of their powerful Swift River concept during India’s 2009 elections. It was an amazing experience to work closely with so many talented people. I learned a lot about how real-time virtual collabortion actually works. The project was written up by the Center for Social Media here.
With all of the New Yorkers doing leading edge open government work, both at the national and local levels, I saw an opportunity to benefit the movement by putting them all in the same room. Britt saw the value for iYear as well, and allowed me to allocate time to organizing events. We had strong attendance and a passionate crowd right out of the gate in March 2009. The experience is similar to the Web4Roots meetup, except that the territory is more settled and the players more entrenched. I’m learning a lot about facilitation, moderation, mediation, and navigating competing interests. The group is still finding its identity within this crowded space, and we continue to have successful events.
In the Spring of 2009, I started working with Noel Hidalgo and my business partner Oliver Wellington to organize two barcamps: CapitolCamp in Albany, hosted by Noel’s innovative employer the New York State Senate CIO’s office, and CityHallCamp, an equivalent camp for New York City. CityHallCamp soon evolved into Participation Camp, focused on improving citizen participation in government, and was scheduled to occur on the two days preceding Personal democracy Forum 2009. We were joined by Radical Inclusion, a new company specializing in massive virtual participation. RI were instrumental in organizing our virtual participation components as well as generally getting the word out. We had speakers beamed in from India, Netherlands, and Vancouver. Almost 3000 viewers tuned in to our webcasts. In the physical space we had more the 100 participants, and welcomed such open gov leaders as Craig Newmark, Gale Brewer, Steven Clift, Andrew Hoppin and Silona Bonewald. We even had a particiipatory sculpture made from more than a thousand ping pong balls!
After Participation Camp, I brainstormed with Suresh Fernando and Stephan Dohrn of Radical Inclusion about how to build off the momentum we had built. Many participants had rallied round collaboration opportunities discovered during the course of the camp, but before long most of those initiatives had died out. We started to think about how to maintain the momentum coming out of camps, and decided that we needed to 1.) help new initiatives get to their next meeting, and 2.) help new initiatives discover existing initiatives with related goals. We were able to build a community of practice around this concept of “project matching” and have made significant progress towards a process and platform for improving collaboration within large movements. We have now focused our efforts on the climate change movement, in order to get traction and obtain funding. Meanwhile, OpenKollab continues as hub of discussion around the concept of open collaboration.