Now-ish

Back in March, I started the Portland Digital Corps, an all-volunteer experiment in short-term civic tech. The plan is to ramp the project down in June, probably towards the end of the month. The entire project was always meant to be a sprint, and I've learned a lot about what it takes to marshall these kinds of efforts and what it might look like in the future if someone else tried to do it, or if we ran another cohort someday.

My stint at Board President of AIGA Portland is wrapping up at the end of June, too. I'm excited for the board moving forward, we've had some solid continuity, and built a bench of volunteers who'll be taking over key roles. I can't say enough about the folks who helped grow this thing over the past two years of my term—we launched Portland Design Month, rebranded the org and have run some good events.

Inexplicably, I'm still coaching HS tennis. This is my 11th season doing this, my 6th at Catlin Gabel. We're ramping up for the state tournament in a few weeks, the ultimate goal is always to win State, but I'd generally be satisfied with a return to the podium (Top 4) since we didn't place last year—a pretty rare event for our program but something that always happens after a title-winning class graduates and you have to rebuild.

I'm also in my second year one of the tennis co-chairs for the state coaches association, which has been unusually rewarding. We're working on a proposal to change how the state champion gets determined, something I've written about a lot in the past, but we've made a lot of fixes to our proposal since my original attempt at this 4 years ago.

Back in February, I started hosting a radio show every other Sunday on Freeform Portland, a community radio station. Earlier this year, my good friend Joel Goodman and I started a podcast that's basically a book club called Future Perfect Book Club. It's been fun doing this project with him, we've been friends for a long time, but this was the first idea that stuck for us to do a podcast that wasn't just us talking like you're not in a room.

I'll be at Config in SF in early May, and at the end of May, part of a breakout session at Code for America summit in Washington, DC, with some former colleagues of mine at 18F, talking about what you can learn from the 18F story. I've got at least one stealth project I'm working on and I'll have some news forthcoming about some more college teaching in 2025-26.