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Here is where I try to make sense of the the world, how we fix and maintain it, how we can best connect and do things with each other. I'm from Dallas, went to Wesleyan in Connecticut, lived in Tokyo, Washington DC, Malawi, Palestine, Albania, Tbilisi, London, San Francisco, and now in Barcelona. Lots of interests, but mainly collective decision making, elections, democracy, communities, startups, social enterprise, and geopolitics. Also swimming, reading on paper, how people get clothes, trains, how information becomes knowledge, and bicycles.
The headings above are the main things I am working on.
Rorshok is an organization dedicated to helping to start and strengthen communities. The strongest communities are those where people are physically together in the same space; how that happens hasn't changed too much over time. But people now spend hours a day scrolling on their phones and technology, as most people use it, tends to divide us. Rorshok runs experiments that try to use technology to build community better rather than to profit investors.
Posts is where I write about the world; what is really happening in it and why, what we can do about it, how different parts and trends related to each other in ways that may not be easy to see. I try to write twice a week or so and it's usually something I am not sure about, so very much appreciate comments, musings, and questions.
Turnout is where I write about what I see as the key problem of US democracy. The problem is that there is an enormous, expensive (and lucrative) focus by progressives on winning individual candidate campaigns; chasing 51% in thousands of races in a mad sprint every two years then doing nothing but fundraise the rest of the year. Turnout Nation, which focuses on "The Captain Method" is a response to that; it helps volunteers help their friends, coworkers, neighbors, schoolmates and family members to vote in an organized way. It ran the most successful voter turnout randomized control trial ever conducted.