On digital security training, propaganda, and what happens when you’ve been working from the US to digitally protect activists abroad, and suddenly you’re asking them to help protect your neighbors at home.
Whistleblowing Responsibly
For the past few months, I’ve been contracting to The Engine Room to support their responsible data research. A few finished reports and posts will trickle in over the next few months, starting with this one on the Responsible Data implications of whistleblowing (co-written with Alix Dunn).
Advanced Planning: Wedding Edition
I have a reputation as an organized person. After three requests in the past three weeks, here’s everything I learned planning the best wedding of all time with Josh in 2013.
Building The Engine Room Library
To coincide with its rebranding, The Engine Room launched a new library site this month. I designed it in Sketch and built it in gh-pages. It’s proving to be an extendable platform for their many research products.
Talking Drones at the MIT Media Lab
On my way through Boston this week, I swung by the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media to give an informal talk about the Wapichan’s monitoring work and Digital Democracy.
Guerrilla Cartography: Global Peer Review
I joined Guerrilla Cartography because, well, the name. But turns out it’s also an incredible team of academic spatial nerds with an eye for radically opening both mapmaking and academic access.
Digital Democracy, Part II: Guyana
Guyana is one of the most densely biodiverse countries on the planet. And this month I spent two weeks in its southern savannah working with forest monitors to document indigenous land claims.
Unplanned Jungle Tech Detox
During a bumpy, hour-long motocab ride out of Iquitos, Peru, my iPhone popped out of my pocket, out of the loosely scaffolded vehicle, and onto the potholed and rocky street. By the time I realized it was gone, it was already dust.
Digital Democracy, Part I: Peru
Last month I joined Digital Democracy, an Oakland-based nonprofit that brings technology to indigenous communities in South America to protect their land rights and fight climate change. I’ve joined for a little while to advise them on how to grow their team. Yes, it is as cool as it sounds.
Microsites with the engine room
This past month, I lent a graphic hand to the good folks at the engine room to turn out two microsites.