This season was busier than I'd really intended. What happens when people want me to present at something, if it sounds cool I'll say yes because usually the date is really far away. Then before I know it, I look at the calendar and I've scheduled 3 or 4 things within a few weeks of each other.

I've presented at events around the world including IxDA Oslo where my written remarks on Design As Repair were well-received by people near and far. I've long meant to start writing down remarks when I jot them down before an event, so I'm glad I did. I did a workshop at the inaugural Hype Studies Conference in Barcelona. I've done a few events for student groups this semester, thanks to spending more time in the northeast. I ended the conference year at the CUGOS Fall Fling at the University of Washington, an open source GIS conference is a great place to meet public interest technologists who are doing super interesting work that nobody talks about outside of their space and we need their voices in conversations!

A few plugs for features: I did the Soft Labor questionnaire, was on Sean Schumacher's podcast "Did I Do That?" (which is surely the most fun I've had on a podcast appearance...) and enjoyed getting in the weeds about critical design futures on the Service Design Show podcast.

What's next

I'm looking forward to being back in Ann Arbor for the winter term. I'm teaching Service Design and Urban Needs again, as well as a first-time elective I'm calling Public Mechanics. You can learn more about what my studio did in 2024 when I taught the class for the first time.

Speaking of spring, I'm planning an event in 2026—Years Ahead that's meant to be a conversation away from civic tech into whatever the future of that will be. We're planning two events, one in the Nordics (probably my home away from home Finland next September) and one in Ann Arbor. To be honest, I'm less interested in convening for the sake of it and more concerned about getting to brass tacks about what we're solving for. Collaborating IRL makes that easier, but running events is a lot of work.

In general, I've been thinking a lot in the wake of the demise of 18F about how I want to show up moving forward. Back on that public mechanics thing, we really did a lot of teaching when I worked there but it was mostly of the unofficial sort where we saw ourselves as coaches and bringing along senior executives and program directors. There were lots of reasons it's hard to scale "capacity building as a service" but I spent more time than most working on a lot of flavors of it—from training programs to state medicaid officers to running workshops for various and sundry leaders. Across the board, I think there's a lot of greenfield opportunity space to figuring out how we teach people in a world that's still grappling with destruction of civic tech writ large: how to build at all levels, respond and react to the sorts of policy initiatives that are happening in real time, and figure out the longer view.

Oh and one last thing I've been working on for the better part of FIVE years is changing how Oregon HS tennis tournament is conducted. Thanks to some great collaboration with coaches, ADs and the state association, we're making some great progress and I'm looking forward to getting that over the line in the next few weeks. I'm in my last year of high school coaching for a while and also my third and final year as a coaches association state tennis co-chair. It's been rewarding getting into a space where many people are lifers, bringing my systems and tech experience to this fray has been a net positive.