CivicSense

I live in two worlds. One world is a set of deeply personal neighborhood relationships in a pedestrian and bicycle friendly side of town. I watch, listen and pay attention to cooperative organizations, their growing pains and successes. My friends and neighbors are parts of those groups and we have rich shared histories. The other world is theoretic and bookish. I've been an academic, and talk the language of abstraction. I have designed and taught numerous university courses in conflict resolution, in community development, and in urban planning. My research focus is on organizational uses of democratic ideals. All of this means that my social world of cooperatives, and my theoretic musings all mix together when I get to observe and help groups govern themselves. In the future, I want to help transfer knowledge about  free and open source software (FOSS) governance to other large-scale collaborative governance efforts.

For fun, I like to couch surf in my own city, bicycle, bus and walk everwhere, or just stay home. I watch Chinese and other Asian movies with English subtitles, try to teach myself traditional Mandarin characters, draw solar architecture, and get lost in utopian science fiction and fantasy novels, or women's autobiographies. The day I wrote this, I helped a friend build a new chicken coop in an old shed in an urban back yard.