projects

PROJECTS
: from proicere, to throw forth; extend outward

A research program led by the Ethereum Foundation and Venkatesh Rao to establish protocols as a first-class concept to understand and shape the world. Over 18 weeks myself and a team of 32 researchers from diverse fields including urban planning, architecture, law, game design, technology, media, art, and workplace safety engaged in collaborative speculation, design and invention to explore protocols, broadly construed, from various angles. My research project employed futures thinking frameworks to develop a series of 6 speculative fiction stories. The project was grounded in current day innovations to explore a world where a protocol approach to public policy making and delivering public goods is adopted at multiple geographic and digital scales.

SUMMER OF PROTOCOLS | 2023

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2024 SOAM Network Sovereignties Resident. Appleid research under Primavera De Filippi of the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Researching affordances of blockchain and P2P networks to transform and update existing governmental design, civic coordination mechanisms and municipal operating systems.

SOAM RESIDENCY | 2024

Rust development. I’m an open source contributor to hREA, a scalable & distributed framework for economic network coordination through an implementation of the Valueflows specification. It enables a transparent and trusted account of resource and information flows between decentralized and independent agents, across and within ecosystems.

hREA | 2023 - present

NYC Regional Lead for the ClimateLaunchpad startup accelerator, an EIT Climate-KIC program and Europe’s largest multi-stakeholder climate innovation partnership, which the team is bringing to the US for the first time. We’re building up a multi-sector climate tech ecosystem, with my specific focus on distributed infrastructure, cities and climate. You can find more info about the program here.

CLIMATE-KIC USA | 2024

← Research blog post

Research Lead for the Mycelium Fund, a 75K experimental grant fund exploring transformative capital management and distribution through a self-governing, grantee-led grant mechanism. A project with one of my favourite collaborators, New Constellations, who are a time-bound experiment to unlock and activate local agency in communities across the UK while experimenting with new forms of organization and governance. I led the research effort to design a set of design principles for the fund based on ecological resource distribution mechanisms, specifically that of mycelium fungi networks. The work is part of a much larger experiment in transformative flows of capital by Arising Quo that New Constellations is participating in alongside Open Collective, DarkMatter Labs, and others. The Fund will publicly launch in Q2 of 2024.

MYCELIUM FUND | 2022

Interactive design principles →

Project Consultant for Stolon Mesh: a community mesh network seeded by 221A that offers free wifi to users in Vancouver’s DTES & Chinatown, and beyond. Developed by artist and 221A Fellow Christina Battle in collaboration with a team of researchers, community liaisons and technologists, Stolon Mesh is a growing network infrastructure with the aim of creating a local-first digital commons that will remain just, caring and responsible to others. What is a mesh? A community mesh network is like a web of interconnected nodes (like computers, routers, or other devices) set up by individuals or communities to provide internet access to a local area without relying on traditional internet service providers (ISPs). Each node in the mesh network both uses and provides network connectivity, passing data from one node to another until it reaches its destination. This setup differs from traditional internet services, where a single provider controls access to the internet, and users connect to this centralized network. In a community mesh network, the network is decentralized and managed by the community, promoting open access, resilience against outages or natural disasters (since the network can reroute data through multiple paths), and lower costs.

STOLON COMMUNITY MESH | 2023

Previously, I worked as a geospatial data analyst, primarily in coastal climate resilience. I created data products, such as the Marine Monitor for Canada’s largest environmental marine and land protection agency, CPAWS. The interactive map accompanied the first scientific report to use the MPA Guide, a new international protocol for assessing the quality of marine protected areas and expected outcomes.

I also conducted applied research and analysis with the NJ Climate Resilience Corps, working with municipalities to quantify and better understand their financial, social and climate risks in various future climate scenarios. During my time at the Coastal Sustainability Studio in Louisiana, I worked in an interdisciplinary team of engineers, community engagement specialists, architects and landscape designers on Inland From The Coast. The project was a multi-scalar initiative to improve our understanding of inland-coastal environmental conditions and vulnerabilities, as well as develop best practices for reducing risk and increasing adaptive capacities in coastal communities.

During this time I also completed my thesis modeling blue-green infrastructure scenarios in Metro Vancouver using the InVEST Coastal Vulnerability model (UBC 3MT Finalist), spent the pandemic summer helping a brilliant friend and researcher collect soil samples and GPS coordinates in fire burned forests in Northern Canada, and conducted GIS analyses at the UBC Landscapes and Livelihoods Lab.

CLIMATE & DISASTER RESILIENCE | 2019 - 22

Various community organizing and more formal policy roles:

- I conducted research on arctic clean energy alternatives and interned at the Pacific Northwest Economic Region (PNWER), a Canada-US policy think tank. At PNWER I supported projects related to the NAFTA Bill modernization, Architecture-Engineering-Construction working group, and helped host the PNWER Annual Summit, a leading multi-stakeholder forum bringing together policy legislators, business leaders, academics, and policymakers from the U.S. and Canada.

- As a student journalist at UBC, I investigated and reported a breaking story on the Alma Mater Society’s $16 million investment portfolio, which was not fossil free as the AMS claimed. During this time, the AMS adopted a new investment policy that would fully divest from companies in the Carbon Underground 200 report. I also worked at the Global Reporting Centre as development assistant, writing grants and doing comms.

- Later on as a graduate student at Rutgers, I was a core community reinvestment organizer for reinvestment efforts aimed at promoting climate-friendly, fair development in local NJ communities by redirecting funds divested from fossil fuels. Our initiatives resulted in the American Federation of Teachers Union in New Jersey and New York successfully adopting a reinvestment resolution. Additionally, our efforts encouraged the university to integrate reinvestment strategies into their divestment working group at the Senate level.

- I occasionally install with NYC Mesh, a community-led mesh network providing low-cost, high quality internet connection to New Yorkers.

POLICY & ORGANIZING | 2017 - Present

I currently work as a freelance associate producer with the Documentary Film Lab led by Emmy award-winning filmmaker, Thomas Lennon. We are currently working on a project following a team of scientists working to reshuffle traditional models of science and integrate community knowledge directly into their work on coastal disaster adaption and mitigation. My work here varies shoot to shoot, but you’ll usually find me interviewing, handling audio, and managing the many moving parts required to tell a good story.

I also work on my own creative projects when inspiration hits, my most recent film, Sympoiesis, an experimental verité-style documentary following the thread of evolution and nature of collaboration, was an official selection at the New Jersey Film Festival, a Montreal Independent Film Festival Nominee and received an honorable mention at the Munich New Wave Short Film Festival.

I was an event photographer, and multi-media designer for many years and generally enjoy the practice of observation.

FILM & MULTIMEDIA

Sympoiesis Interview →

I’ve done a number of odd jobs that have significantly shaped my current thinking and approach, including working as a production assistant for Warner Brothers, a ghostwriter for a newsletter on “boring” businesses and startups with 550,000+ subscribers, and green roof builder in NYC, among others. They’re don’t neatly fit into the storyline you’ve read so far, but I think it’s important to acknowledge the journey hasn’t been linear by any means. Feel free to ask me about them sometime :)

AND ALL THE REST