

Now a newsletterer?

After twenty years of blogging, I have followed my fellow netizens to Substack, where I am publishing a weekly newsletter. You can subscribe via the form to the left and please drop me a note with a link to your newsletter.

Taking Notes

Thinking out loud in my corner of the internets.

About

Best Of

I’ve been writing here for over a decade now. In hindsight, only a handful of those posts are still worth reading.

Colophon

The tools that go into making this website.

See Tools

Latest Essays

[Review] Thinking, Fast and Slow

In the past year I have read two books that completely transformed how I understand reality. The first, The Information by James Gleick, which I reviewed here, helped me truly understand for the first time just what is information, that pervasive abstraction that...

[Grant] Mexican Institute for Competitiveness

This blog post is a summary of a $900,000 grant from Omidyar Network to the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness (IMCO) for general operating support over three years, with a special focus on the development of their Compara Tu Escuela platform. This information is...

[Dispatch] #LimaAssembly: Enhancing Government Transparency and Accountability through Technology Platforms

The following are my notes from the session "Enhancing Government Transparency and Accountability through Technology Platforms" at the World Movement for Democracy conference in Lima, Peru. Matt Bannick, the managing partner of Omidyar Network, begins the session by...

A Critique and Defense of Civic Participation

Last week I was at the Digital Cities conference in Buenos Aires, a convening of civil servants in charge of city open data programs and the technologists and NGOs that use the data. One after another government representative claimed that the ultimate goal of their...

Two Maps and 21st Century Exploration

The following text was written for an art installation at the new Skylink Terminal of Vienna Airport. The title of the installation, Zeitraum, is a German portmanteau combining zeit (time) and raum (place), and roughly translates to "period of time." It's an apt...

Fiscal Transparency (is Not Enough)

OpenSpending.org has simple goal that is extraordinarily difficult to achieve: wherever you may live, you enter in how much you earn per month, press a button, and poof, a stunning visualization of where your tax money goes. Let's say I'm a British taxpayer who makes...