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.

Mine was much lighter fare than the discussion about human rights abuses and political prisoners in Venezuela that followed. Short (and regrettably unrecorded) as it was, it was good to be in a room full of insanely smart yet enthusiastically kind people. As a faraway alum it’s easy to blur the institute’s (oft-conservative) image with the experience of actually being there, and I needed a little refresher of its “try everything, talk to everyone, learn from your mistakes, and iterate” style.