I’m a longtime community builder and e-participation expert.
Founder, Web Monday. Director, Center for Applied Community Engagement (CACE). Founder, Intellitics, Inc.
Based in sunny San José, CA. Wannabe trailrunner.
Community Lead, IBM Research 2023 – 2025
Community lead for the AI Alliance, the open-source AI consortium spanning models, data, evaluation and safety. Represented it at 15+ international conferences including NeurIPS and FOSDEM, ran dozens of meetups end to end across North America and Europe. AI-assisted prototyping and web development, community ops automation.
Community Lead, IBM Research 2022 – 2025
Helped launch and build OSSci, a NumFOCUS initiative sponsored by IBM connecting open-source research software to the researchers who depend on it. Program design, global ecosystem engagement.
Community Program Manager, IBM 2019 – 2022
Community specialist on the IBM Data Science Community team, running day-to-day operations through an early growth phase. Helped take it past 25,000 members and built the global meetup outreach program.
As someone non-technical, it has been nothing short of amazing to be given these new superpowers. Over the past year I’ve shipped a variety of (social) web apps using AI-assisted tools (Lovable, Claude Code, among others), covering a broad range of use cases. All of it in public: every project publishes its specs and a running development log.
The tools changed; the discipline didn’t. Every project gets a real PRD and technical design before any code, a test suite, mobile-first layouts, and security, privacy, and accessibility treated as requirements rather than things bolted on at the end.
A few highlights:
The most comprehensive global directory of e-participation tools, projects and references. First launched in September of 2009, the site went dark around 2021 due to maintenance issues. Scripted the catalogue out of Archive.org snapshots and reverse-engineered the app: 396 tools, 327 projects, 276 references.
The social graph of German Schlager credits: who wrote what, who performed it, and where the data came from. Built and maintained by a team of AI agents running locally on a cron schedule — 10K songs, 3K people, 24K credits, and counting — each sourced and confidence-scored.
A peacebuilding initiative envisioning a Middle East (re-)connected by high-speed rail. Advanced georeferencing pipeline, turning scanned images of 19th- and 20th-century survey maps into usable geodata, with measured accuracy. Every record carries its source. Full dataset is open source.
A vocabulary trainer for advanced Spanish learners working toward the DELE C1: the top 10,000 high-frequency words. A separate Python pipeline builds and ranks the word list — and I’m the target user, building it against my own exam prep.
Scaled, multi-lane history timelines built for visual comparison — seeing what overlapped what. One-click import of structured data from Wikidata, and the whole app runs bilingual in English and Spanish.
Re-imagining the online survey: questions roll out over time, participants watch results emerge, and shifts in opinion get tracked. Agile, where the traditional survey is waterfall. Simulated test runs to stress-test the architecture against the product requirements document (PRD) before a single line of code is even written.