Interests
These are the four areas where I would most like to put my experience to work. They overlap, and most real projects touch more than one.
Sustainable food systems · Cooperative economics · Ecological monitoring · Appropriate technology
Sustainable food systems
How we grow, move, and eat food can regenerate the places we live or wear them out. I would like the technology involved to push toward the first.
Small and regenerative farms usually cannot afford the tools built for industrial agriculture, and those tools are often the wrong shape anyway. There is real work to do in making sensing, automation, and data useful at a scale of a few acres and a few people.
Examples of the kind of work I mean:
- Soil moisture and microclimate sensing that a small farm can install and maintain itself
- Simple decision support for planting, irrigation, and rotation, built around what a grower already knows
- Ordering and distribution tools for local food networks, CSAs, and food hubs
- Monitoring that shows whether regenerative practices are rebuilding soil over time
Cooperative economics
Worker cooperatives, mutual aid networks, and community-owned resources need software that fits how they actually make decisions and share what they have.
Most software assumes a single owner and a hierarchy. Cooperatives and mutual aid groups do not work that way, and they end up bending themselves around tools built for someone else. I am interested in the unglamorous infrastructure that lets a group run itself.
Examples of the kind of work I mean:
- Member portals, meeting tools, and voting that reflect one member, one vote
- Bookkeeping and surplus-sharing calculations that match cooperative bylaws
- Coordination for mutual aid: requests, offers, and follow-through without a corporate platform in the middle
- Inventory and scheduling for tool libraries, community gardens, and time banks
Ecological monitoring
You cannot protect what you cannot see. Affordable sensing and analysis can give a watershed group or a land trust the same kind of picture a well-funded agency has.
The instruments have become cheap and the analysis has become tractable. What is missing is the patient work of putting them together for a specific creek, forest, or neighborhood, and keeping them running through a few winters.
Examples of the kind of work I mean:
- Stream temperature, turbidity, and flow sensors on a watershed scale
- Acoustic and camera-based species monitoring for biodiversity surveys
- Local climate and air quality records that a community owns
- Analysis and maps that turn raw readings into something a volunteer board can act on
Appropriate technology
Technology should be understandable, repairable, and owned by the people who rely on it, rather than creating a dependency on someone far away.
After fifteen years supporting small organizations, I have seen what happens when a critical system is a black box no one local can fix. I would rather build with common parts, open designs, and documentation that a successor can follow.
Examples of the kind of work I mean:
- Open hardware designs built from parts available at a hardware store or a common electronics supplier
- Systems that run on modest, locally maintained hardware and tolerate an off-grid or unreliable power supply
- Clear repair and operations documentation as a first-class part of any project
- Supporting community spaces where people learn to build and fix their own tools
If your project fits any of this, the contact page is the way to reach me.