Werd I/O

Previous birthday posts: 45 wishes, 44 thoughts about the future, 43 things, 42 / 42 admissions, 41 things.

One. I lie in bed as Ma read Dodie Smith’s ‌The Hundred and One Dalmatians to me. It was the fifth, and last, straight time; after this, she would finally put her foot down. Outside, in the Oxford dusk, the neighborhood dogs speak to each other over fences and hedges, the starlight barking in full force. Occasionally, a bird lands on the spiraling wrought iron fire escape outside.

It’s an old book, and the Romani people are not treated well in it. Revised versions are available. And, of course, the Disney versions.

Two. Nobody seems to want to adapt the anti nuclear war science fiction sequel, though, the cowards.

Three. I borrow ‌Constellations: Stories of the Future from the library for the third time: a hardback book in a protective plastic sleeve full of stories that seem almost illicit. One of the stories, ‌Let’s Go to Golgotha! is about a time-traveling tourist agency; the participants slowly realize that the crowd condemning Jesus to the cross is entirely made up of people from the future. ‌Beyond Lies the Wub was Philip K Dick’s first short story; a horror tale about meat-eating and possession. ‌It’s a Good Life, about a child with godlike powers, sets up a scenario that I still regularly think about. And Vonnegut’s ‌Harrison Bergeron is, of course, a layered classic, rife with mischief.

Outside the library, there’s still a bakery selling cheap bread rolls and jam donuts. (It’s a Primark now.) The smell is intoxicating but the stories already have me.

Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. I feel disconnected from the other children on the playground: like I’m missing a magic password that they know and I don’t. There’s no one big thing, but there are lots of little things; an idiom I don’t understand here, a reference I don’t get there. As an adult, I’ll have a name for what this is and why it’s true: third culture kid. But as a child, I just know that something is off.

‌The Dark is Rising sequence soft launches as a Blyton-esque adventure in Cornwall, and then dives into a story that is deeper than any of the culture I see around me. In its tales of pagan magic that pre-date the prevailing Christianity, of green witches and Cornish folk legends, it both captivates me and informs me about the history of the place I find myself in. And then there’s Will, and the Old Ones, and a wisdom that cuts underneath the superficial nonsense that I don’t understand and suggests that something deeper is far more important.

‌When the Dark comes rising six shall turn it back; Three from the circle, three from the track; Wood, bronze, iron; Water, fire, stone; Five will return and one go alone. I can still recite it. The Dark is still rising. There is still silver on the tree.

Ten. There’s a doorway in St Mary’s Passage, a side street in the collegic part of Oxford, that is adorned with two fawns and a lion. Down the road, a Victorian lamppost still burns, albeit with electric light. There are plenty of tourist websites and videos that explain this was the inspiration for Narnia. I mean, it makes sense. But I don’t think it’s true.

Oxford is full of portals. I would know: I was a child there. There are space ships, time machines, great wooden galleons, castles hidden in dimensions somewhere between our reality and another. CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien were both inspired by Shotover, an area of hilly, wooded parkland on the edge of the city. Lewis had a house adjoining the area; Tolkien lived nearby. (Years earlier, Lewis Carroll roamed the hills, too. Years later, so did I.) They’re not the same place, but rather, multiple places that exist as layers over the same ground; different angles and reflections of the same ideas. They were both Inklings, after all.

Anyway, ‌The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe tells the truth about portals. They’re everywhere. I still check every wardrobe; don’t you?

Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. I consume ‌The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, ‌The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and Life, the Universe and Everything‌ in successive bouts of the flu in our house on the Marston Road, a tiny, water-damaged duplex that my parents have been restoring by hand. My bed is a single red and white bunk above a writing desk, on which I’ve doodled in ballpoint pen.

At the same time, I’ve been playing the Infocom text adventure adaptation, which Douglas Adams was directly involved in. All of these tales are irreverent in a way that directly appeals to me: they poke fun at norms and the bureaucracy of stasis. The books and the game all gently break the rules of their respective forms. They see how ridiculous the world is. This is a different kind of portal: not one to a fantasy realm, but one to a realization that you’re not alone. There are people on the road ahead of you, unpicking the rigidity of the world, and they’re looking back and winking.

And all of us are subject to forces bigger than us. Adams hated the little green planet that adorns every American book and game in the series, but he couldn’t do anything about it. Irony and sarcasm aren’t just forms of wit; they’re escape hatches. At their best, they’re a way of punching up. People who say they’re the lowest are missing the point and are probably Vogons.

Fourteen. It’s not that I’m sick a lot, but grade school is like a Petri dish for colds and flus, so I’m not notsick a lot, either. I’ve finished Douglas Adams but find myself hungry for more, and can’t stomach the direct parody of less wryly satirical books. Terry Pratchett fits the bill, and ‌Mort, the story of Death’s apprentice, is my jumping-off point.

They both eat systems and norms for breakfast, but Pratchett is often more directly, pointedly satirical than Adams was; this is overt social criticism, making fun of people with power and the structures established to dance around them. Teenage me, stuck in my bunk with yet another flu while rain pounds my bedroom windows, literally an outsider while the impenetrable politics and in-groups of high school carry on without me, adores it. I start to see the power of being an outsider. The thing about being a fish out of water is that you can see the water.

‌ It's not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing it, Pratchett writes. Right on.

Fifteen. I’m thirteen and sitting in my homeroom class. We’ve all been reading our own books, and our homeroom teacher (who also happens to be our English teacher) has asked us each to read a passage out loud to the cloud. Some of my classmates are reading The Hardy Boys; some are reading Jane Austen; some are reading Tolkien.

I read a passage of ‌Timewyrm: Exodus where the Doctor and Ace are escaping the regenerated War Chief, the villain of 1969 Doctor Who story The War Games, who has helped Hitler raise an army of Nazi zombies. The passage ends when the zombie horde is halted with explosive grenades.

A few kids who generally don’t like to read come up afterwards to ask where I got the book. They seem excited. They seem excited to talk to me. These are not people who usually want to. Maybe I just have to give them something they like.

Sixteen. I catch my reflection in a department store mirror and shudder. Is that really me? Does that really have to be me? How can I stop it?

I look around at the other kids here: slim, elegant, comfortable in their skin. Effortless. Why can’t I be them?

Being an outsider is still being an outsider. By my late teens, I feel like there’s something truly wrong with me: it’s still like there’s a secret password that everybody knows but me, but now the stakes are higher. I want to belong; I want to feel like I have intrinsic value; I can’t find or justify it.

I’m tall now, really tall, and not exactly obese, but not slim, either. More than one person I have a crush on tells me to lose weight. More than one person I have a crush on tells me that maybe I’d have a chance if we had more money or if I wasn’t so weird. I’m constantly exhausted and the wry humor that used to characterize my otherness has been replaced with despair: nothing I do matters because there’s something wrong with me. It’s a firm depression, but either nobody catches it or nobody knows what to do with it. My grades nosedive.

‌Prozac Nation doesn’t catch everything, but it gives me a window into someone who feels a bit like I do. (I can’t relate to the drugs, but I see the allure, too.) Its author, Elizabeth Wurtzel, is like a cool depressed person: someone who feels this way but is also interesting, desirable, a little bit rockstar-like.

Today, I see the ego. As a teenager, I just see the reflection.

Seventeen. I’ve been writing software for a while now. My mother taught me BASIC on our 8-bit computer when I was five; when I was thirteen, my parents gifted me the PC-compatible version of Prospero Pascal for my birthday. I’ve worked through the manual and written a few small games. My first Pascal effort was Mr A Goes For a Walk, where a letter “A” did exactly that. A year later, I’d written a fully featured ‌Sokobanclone. I’m inspired by Jeff Minter’s seminal (and utterly irreverent) ‌Llamatron and want to build with the same sensibility. Making things feels really good; seeing people enjoy things I made feels even better, and goes some way towards filling the black hole of self-doubt that still lives within me.

Someone recommends ‌Microserfs: a book which should be a warning but isn’t received as one at all. The characters here are quirky outsiders — like me! — who throw themselves into building something on their own terms. They eat flat foods that can be pushed under doors so they can keep working. They struggle with their code, their work, and their lives. And they show me that there might be a place for me.

So many Douglas Coupland books, including this one, are about the emptiness of living in late-nineties capitalism. The clue is in the word serfs, but that isn’t what hits for me. That isn’t what hits at all.

I sit in the sixth form common room, a lounge in my high school where older students can study and do homework, and devour it, as Oasis, jungle music, and mid-nineties hip hop play around me. From somewhere, there’s the smell of cheese and onion crisps. Do they qualify as flat food?

Eighteen. The common room is a harsh place, but just one of a series of harsh places that school has represented for me. Because I’m big and don’t fight back, people feel like they can verbally abuse me, hit me, kick me. It comes from nowhere, usually, and I’m left reeling. Nobody, least of all the people who run the school, seems to want to help. Even today, I see fond reminiscences of people in our school year’s Facebook group, and I think, no, that person caused me so much pain. I’m other to them — a not-person — and that makes me fair game. I’ve internalized that it’s my fault. It happens because I deserve it, and I wonder how I might change to be more acceptable.

I find some kinship in ‌Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood’s story of an artist who revisits her childhood home. There’s something in there about the protagonist being untethered from her environment and the cultureof her environment that resonates. The book diverges so far from my experiences after that, but there’s so much here about the act of creation and how it interrelates with identity.

Nineteen. I’m seven years old and at my friend Clare’s house: a typically Oxford Victorian brick home that spreads over multiple floors. Her dad, Humphrey, has an office off of the stairs that I’ve only seen a glimpse of: there’s a desk with a typewriter and while he’s a very kind man in my eyes, he absolutely does not want us to go in there. He writes for a living, which seems like a magical thing to be able to do: the way I see it, you get to tell stories all day long. You get to create.

Later, he asks me what I want for my birthday, and I’m too shy to tell him what I really want, so I say a My Little Pony. What I really want is for him to sign ‌Mr Majeika for me: a story that’s fun in itself but clearly anchored in his life, his family, his personality. I still regret being shy about that.

Twenty. Years later I find Humphrey’s official biography of JRR Tolkien at Moe’s, a chaotic used bookstore in Berkeley, and buy it immediately. I’m not particularly interested in Tolkien but I remember Humphrey fondly. It’s a portal to him; to that time; to a feeling of possibilities; to laughing while running up the stairs.

Twenty-one. ‌TVGoHome, by an online writer I like called Charlie Brooker, is exactly what I like: a spoof of mainstream culture, through parody TV listings, that doesn’t hold back. One of the fake shows from the listings is later turned into a real show. Later, the author makes a spiritual follow-on about a zombie outbreak on the set of Big Brother. It’s a natural progression but I’m amazed they let him do it.

His final form is Black Mirror, which starts with the Prime Minister and a pig and winds up in sweeping cinematic dystopias starting Mackenzie Davis, Miley Cyrus, Bryce Dallas Howard. It all starting with comic strips advertising a dusty old second-hand store in inner London, and it ended somewhere so much grander, so much more global, without compromising almost anything. The claws are intact.

The book inspires me; the rest of it, too, but later. I wonder if I can be this kind of creator too; a curator of portals for other people to step through, to take them out of the water so they can see it for what it is. Or, at least, take a swipe at the places I can’t seem to fit.

Twenty-two. I wanted a clean break, away from Oxford and the trap of who I am, but this isn’t what I was going for.

I’m in a block of student flats in Edinburgh. If a door shuts anywhere in the building, you can hear it anywhere else: the sound carries, and people are drunk late into the night, and there’s never any peace. A fierce winter wind blows at the windowpanes. The mattress is covered in shiny plastic and I can feel it through my sheets.

I’m fascinated by ‌Brave New World and its setup of totalitarianism defended by acquiescence: a world where nobody has to ban books because nobody wants to read them. A dystopia protected by distraction. From my vantage point, it seems plausible.

Sometimes, my flatmates barge into my bedroom and pile onto me. One likes to spit in my food as I’m cooking it. One inhabitant of the building tells me not to talk to him. It doesn’t feel very far away from my high school common room, as much as I wanted it to be.

Twenty-three. I’ve decided to study computer science, but immediately realized my mistake. It’s not the study of how to make tools for people that empower them in ways they weren’t before; nor is it the study of how to tell stories with new means. It’s a practice rooted in mathematics and physics, of the underlying mechanics torn from the underlying humanity that gives any of it meaning. I hate it. I truly hate it.

And yet, although every day is a slog, I decide to stick it out. I know I’ll be able to use it later on.

The British system is very far from the American liberal arts approach of allowing students to choose their major after sampling a range of subjects. Here, you effectively have to choose your major when you’re sixteen, and it’s very hard to change. There is very little opportunity to study outside of your core subject.

But I do have one elective, in my second year. I choose Forensic Medicine because I think it will be useful fuel to tell stories. I learn about how forensic pathologists use blood spatter to determine the direction of blows and what kind of weapon is used. I learn Locard’s Principle of Exchange, which dictates that every contact leaves a trace: something that seems to apply far beyond the subject. Every time you touch something, every time something touches you, a trace is left. Inspired by this principle, I decide not to attend the optional autopsy lecture, fearing that it will change me in ways I might not like.

‌Simpson’s Forensic Medicine is a grisly book, but at least it’s not advanced calculus.

Twenty-four. Twenty-five. I came to Edinburgh because it was a cultural center more than because the university had a good computer science program, although both things are true.

I’m in a tent at the Edinburgh Book Festival, chatting with Garry Trudeau. I’ve loved his comic strip, Doonesbury, since I was an early teen; I started with his late-seventies collection ‌As the Kid Goes For Broke, which was lying around my great grandparents’ house, and kept reading. It’s got its claws into the world in the way I like, but somehow made its way into the mainstream, normy Sunday comics section.

He’s a delight. We’re talking about Asterix the Gaul, a comic it turns out we both love. I can’t believe my luck.

How can I be one of these people?

Twenty-six. I’m on the streets of Glasgow, protesting the impending war in Iraq. Altogether, two million people in the UK — around 3% of its entire population — are protesting with us. Some have pre-made placards made by the usual organizations that want to spread their own agenda as well as the matter at hand; others have homemade signs. My friend carries one that simply reads, “too angry for a slogan”.

It’s clear that the war is based on bad information. The so-called “dodgy dossier” of information about “weapons of mass destruction” is so obviously fake long before it is officially revealed to be. And yet, Britain is part of the invasion, and the dossier of convenient unfacts is used to help justify George W Bush’s war effort.

I’m new to politics and I’m apoplectically angry. Chomsky’s ‌Manufacturing Consent has some of the answers I’m looking for. I don’t like the implications, but the arguments resonate.

Clawing at the status quo mainstream starts to mean something more than poking fun at the ridiculous nature of class and power imbalances. Sometimes, lives are on the line.

Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. I’ve graduated. Almost immediately, I go back to work for my university; at that time there aren’t very many software jobs in Edinburgh, and I’ve grown into the city to the extent that I don’t want to leave quite yet.

I find myself working out of an office — actually a converted broom closet with a window that doesn’t shut, directly above where they fry the chips for the study canteen — at the Moray House School of Education with a belligerent PhD candidate who resents my presence. By necessity, we start talking, and it becomes clear that we have something to share with each other. He’s knee deep in the educational technology world, where people are starting to talk about “e-portfolios”: a collection of examples of academic work that sound a lot like social media if you squint a bit. In turn, I’m a programmer, a writer, and a blogger.

We build a platform together. I call it Elgg, after the town in Switzerland the Werdmullers come from. It’s inspired by Brad Fitzpatrick’s LiveJournal but is designed to be as easy to install as WordPress. Some people seem to like it.

My first published work is a co-written chapter in ‌The Handbook of Research in ePortfolios about our work. Later, people write full-blown books about our platform.

I move back to Oxford so that I’m closer to the London software ecosystem. We rent an office above a bookstore in Summertown, down the road from a Lebanese deli and a wine bar that for some reason sells excellent croissants. Some days I’m too excited to sit still in my chair.

I’ve (co-)created something that people like, and found a community in the process. I feel prouder and happier than I have since I was a child. I feel like this was a portal worth falling through.

Twenty-nine. Ben Brown seems interesting. I’m introduced to his site Uber through an Edinburgh friend: irreverent writing with an internet sensibility. I’m heavily online at this point — blogging, but in ways that feel uncool and awkward. What Ben is doing is very different; literary in a way. It’s a precursor of publisher like The Toast and even McSweeney’s.

Ben publishes books as So New Media, an indie house co-founded with James Stegall. I buy ‌Beneath The Axis Of Evil: One Man's Journey Into The Horrors Of War by Neal Pollack. Yet another dive into the Iraq War; another clawback at the Bush / Blair continuum.

Ben’s whole enterprise is inspiring: you can go it alone now. You can maintain your voice. And you can still find an audience while leaving yourself unmoderated. In some ways, on the internet, the rougher your edges are, the easier it is for other people to latch on to you.

Years later, I meet Ben in person at XOXO (he silently sidles up to me at an X-Men arcade machine). Years after that, I buy him lunch in San Francisco. I don’t think he knows exactly what it means to me.

Thirty. Thirty-one. Thirty-two. I’m exhausted; gaining weight; my feet, for some reason, are constantly cramping up. It’s all stress. All the startup.

My partner is constantly telling me that I need to relax and take time away from work. The startup is all-encompassing; stressful; in every part of my life. My friends and family try to ban me from working past 7:30pm. She buys me my first-ever massage, which is a revelation, and suggests books for me to read.

I’d previously read ‌Maus, a graphic novel that is both autobiographical a vividly-painted portrait of the horrors of the Holocaust. It uses the visual language of comic strips but the meaning runs deep. I come from a family that was also thrust into WWII: my father is a Japanese concentration camp survivor, my (Jewish) grandfather on my mother’s side was captured by the Nazis and presumed dead. The story itself resonates with me, but the form does too: comics are a flippant visual medium, in a way, but here that’s used as an entry point for a realism that might not have hit as hard another way.

So Helen introduces me to Alan Moore: first through ‌From Hell and then ‌V for Vendetta. Unlike Maus, these are unapologetically fiction, but the use of the comics medium is similarly effective. I particularly like the way From Hell establishes a new psychogeography of London, rooting the story of Jack the Ripper in its location by adding layers and resonances that tie back to the planning of the city itself. It adds something new to places I’ve walked all my life. That’s good. I’m looking for something new.

Thirty-three. My co-founder likes to tell new people we meet that we’re not friends. More than once, he’s threatened to physically fight me: most memorably over the limitations of the OpenID specification. On a drive through the rolling Yorkshire hills, sunshine dappling the moor grass, he tells me that he’s worried about hiring women because they might get pregnant. He pulls me aside during a contract for MIT to let me know he’s in this for himself and that I should expect him to make decisions with that in mind. On a work excursion to Brighton, he refuses to eat with the rest of the team.

This is, in short, not working out.

The business threatens to move towards servicing hedge funds, and I choose to leave. One afternoon, I simply close my laptop and listen to the quiet of my house, the footsteps of pedestrians on the street outside, the swoosh of passing cars. Later, there will be worries about money and what exactly I will do next, but for that one spring afternoon, I feel weightless.

I need punctuation. A clean break.

I’ve never been to Rome in living memory. As it turns out, it’s also cheap to get there.

My then-partner and I spend ten days roaming its ancient streets, armed with the Rough Guide to Rome. “I don’t want this to end,” she says, as we eat grilled artichokes and cacio e pepe on outdoor tables set in a cobblestoned alleyway. It’s a new relationship and we’re discovering each other as well as the twists and turns of an ancient city. “Me either,” I say, and I take another bite.

Thirty-four. I’m six years old. My grandparents live with us for a little while in a grand old house in Oxford: a stone Victorian with a curved driveway and a big back garden. The kitchen has terracotta tiles. My Grandma reads ‌The Black Island to me in my bed and stays with me for a bit while I drift off to sleep.

I’m seven years old. I’m told to stay in my bedroom. My mother’s received a phone call and is crying in the living room. I’m not to go see her. I’m to wait. My Grandma had pulmonary fibrosis in her lungs; she was finding it harder and harder to breathe. And now, so suddenly, she’s gone. All the way in Texas; thousands of miles away from my mother. I can’t begin comprehend the loss but I know that if my mother was sick I would want to see her again.

Thirty-five. My parents have lived in California for years now: first to look after my Oma, and then just to live. Ma — after consistently calling her by her first name throughout my childhood, she’s Ma to me in my thirties — has retrained from an analyst for the telecommunications industry to a middle school science teacher in one of the central valley’s most impoverished districts. She loves her work in a way she never did before.

But she has a persistent cough that won’t let go.

At first we wonder if it’s just the dust of the Central Valley: almond shells and the detritus from overfarming. Maybe she just needs clean air.

It’s almost Christmas-time. I’ve wrapped a copy of ‌You Can Write Children’s Books. She would be so good at it — her writing, the way she tells stories, has always been so magical to me — and it’s so in line with what she’s turned her life to do.

In the liner, I add some written lines of my own, based on her life in Oxford:

In a house at the bottom of a hill, in a small town that rarely saw the sun, there lived a little dog who loved to play.

A few days before Christmas, we understand that she has pulmonary fibrosis. This same thief of a disease my Grandma had. We knew, in a way — my dad, in particular, knew — but the diagnosis makes it official. It’s a new cloud.

What we don’t understand:

What happens next.

What to do next.

How long she has.

Who else will get it.

Why.

Thirty-six. My sister is reading my copy of ‌Parable of the Sower to Ma. She’s perched on my parents’ bed in Santa Rosa. Outside, the sun is shining over the Sonoma hills. Somewhere, my dad is tinkering with something downstairs.

It’s been a while. My sister and I both moved to California, starting from scratch. Ma continued teaching for as long as she could; her middle school science teachers were fascinated by the oxygen tanks she began to wear on her back like a Ghostbuster. Then it became too hard and too heavy, her oxygen needs too great. I sent a Hail Mary letter to the hospital explaining how badly in need she was; her oxygen concentrators were refrigerator sized and running in parallel, her movements limited by how far her cannula tube could extend. Eventually, at the very last moment, they tried something new and cut a set of lungs down to fit her size in order to try and save her life.

The first night, I refuse to leave her side. The doctors eventually kick me out of her ICU room and I sleep in the family room down the hall. The day after happens to be the Super Bowl; she takes her first post-double-lung-transplant walk just as Beyoncé takes to the halftime stage to sing Crazy Right Now.

Now, a few years later, the drugs are taking their toll. She’s tired. She’s often ill. But she’s here. My sister likes to read to her, and she loves lying there and listening. Other times, at the dialysis she now needs because the anti-rejection drugs have killed her kidneys, she reads on a Kindle with the font size cranked practically as high as it will go.

Every day is a gift. Every contact leaves a trace. Every book is a portal out of here.

Thirty-seven. The last book Ma and I read together is ‌The Nickel Boys. It’s the kind of thing she likes to read: a story about America’s monstrous history, told with skill and resonance. We share our reflections of it; the experience of reading the same ideas. Asynchronously, sure, but together all the same.

Thirty-eight. When I move to California I land in Berkeley. I find myself a coworking space above a coffee shop: a mix of developers, academics, and artists. Most of us have a standard office desk, but one inhabitant, Hallie Bateman, has brought in an antique wooden artist’s desk that looks like it’s been dropped in from another dimension. It’s covered in paintbrushes, inks, and paper: fragments of a very different kind of professional life to the one I’m leading.

I continue to follow her work long after we share an office. When she publishes ‌What to Do When I'm Gone: A Mother's Wisdom to Her Daughter — instructions from her own mother about what to do once she dies — I buy it immediately. Back then, when Ma was still around, I could read it all the way through. I no longer can. It sits on my shelf and I sometimes think about it, but grief is like a wave, and I know it can overtake me.

Instead of asking Ma for instructions, I sit down with a tripod and a camera and I record her life story, instead.

Thirty-nine. My Aunt publishes a book about evaluating scientific evidence in the context of civil and criminal legal contexts.

I have it, of course, even though I am not a lawyer and I have no professional need for it. I remember her poring over the edit on her laptop in the downstairs bedroom in my great grandparents’ house on Cape Cod.

The last time I see her, we eat Thai food in the Tenderloin. I have no idea it’s the last time. This disease is evil.

Forty. Forty-one. Forty-two. I’m in Santa Rosa and can still hear the wheels of the pole the feeding tube hangs from wheeling across the floor; of the oxygen clicking through the cannula; of my parents talking. It will fade, eventually, but I’m haunted now, and lost.

My mother talked about being radicalized. Both my parents were Berkeley radicals, which just means that they took action on causes they cared about. I think about all those people I’ve looked up to who kept their claws sharp, who dug in, who fought for equity and didn’t compromise their values, who had a voice and used it.

I walk the Santa Rosa hills, looking at these big houses on the edge of wine country, and listen to the audiobook of ‌The Jakarta Method, which details the murder undertaken in the name of America. I re-read ‌The Handmaid’s Tale. Through ‌Caste, I’m appalled to learn that Hitler’s treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany was inspired by American Jim Crow laws.

By now I know that I won’t get the disease — or at least, not according to our current understanding of that. It’s a genetic mutation that I don’t have. But regardless, we all have limited time, and none of us know how much time we have left. Time is ticking for everyone.

I think about how I might do a better job of using my voice to make the world better. Later, I’ll start applying to jobs where I can help people speak truth to power; to work to further the work of journalism. To honor my mother — really to honor both my parents — and what she stood for in the world. I want to live up to them.

Forty-three. I allow myself to start to write again. Words, not software. It feels daunting. My cousin Sarah, who is a very successful author (and whose books, although not designed for me, have made me cry), once recommended ‌Bird By Bird. I’ve come back to it again and again: it’s about writing but also not. Its lessons are relevant to anyone who is building something big and new; anyone who is picking themselves up.

‌You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories.

Forty-four. The last book Ma gives me is ‌Between the World and Me: a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his son. It is masterful. A portal to lived experiences I don’t have; a way in to understanding them, and through this understanding, to better understand the role I have to play, too.

It’s not the main point of the book, but one of those unknown lived experiences: having a son and the sense of responsibility that follows. I can’t imagine the fear of caring for a child while being Black in America; I can’t imagine having a child at all.

Forty-five. Erin’s labor has been two days long, difficult, and painful. Our son wasn’t breathing in the way they expected him to, so I’m standing at a table off to the side while they put a mask to him and try to get him to start. I find myself wondering if this is, somehow, the disease, this curse, out to get us again.

Eventually, after a few minutes that seem like days or years, my heart pounding in my chest all the while, he breathes normally. We’re able to return him, the doctors and me, to his waiting mother. He cries, then snuggles in. She cries with him.

I can’t believe Ma will never meet him. She’s there, of course. I remember the songs she sang to me and sing them to him; I find myself using the same words to console him and to let him know he’s loved. Maybe I won’t read him The Hundred and One Dalmatians, but I have other books in mind.

There will be new books, too, that we did not discover together but will continue our story.

Have you ever read ‌The Runaway Bunny?

“If you become a bird and fly away from me,” said his mother, “I will be a tree that you come home to.”

She is nowhere and she is everywhere. I see her in him. I see myself in him and him in me. Every contact leaves a trace. We are a continuum.

Forty-six. Donald Trump has been re-elected. The shadow of renewed nationalism, of division, of hate feels heavier than ever. The world is at, or on the brink of, war. I remember marching in Glasgow, the despair when it came to nothing. We are all in need of a refuge. We are all in need of portals out of here.

We’re lying in bed: Erin, him, and me. “Read a book?” My son asks me. Of course I read to him. Of course.

I open ‌The Story of Ferdinand and begin:

‌Once upon a time in Spain there was a little bull and his name was Ferdinand. All the other little bulls he lived with would run and jump and butt their heads together, but not Ferdinand. He liked to sit just quietly and smell the flowers.

He snuggles into my arm and I stay with him until he falls asleep.

I thought it would be fun to revisit Known, the open source publishing platform that powers my site.

How it works

Known allows a team or community to publish news on any topic to a single, searchable stream of content that’s easily accessible from any device. It is not a full CMS, and nor is it designed for independent publishers to sell subscriptions; instead, it’s optimized for publishing to a single feed.

Every Known site is a single feed of content that any number of users can publish to. You can have one user, as my site does; you could have thousands, if you wanted.

The stream can also be filtered by hashtag, author, or content type — so you can choose to only view content on a certain topic, or only photos, or some combination thereof.

Each stream, filtered or not, is shown as a standard web page by default. These can be themed, but it’s also easy to view different interfaces. RSS and JSON are available for every screen you can view as a web page, and it would be easy to add low bandwidth HTML, for example. (I once added an interface type that displayed everything as a Star Wars crawl. It got old fast.)

When you log in, you get a little menu bar that lets you publish different kinds of content. It’s a little bit like Tumblr’s bar, but here, every type of content is powered by a plugin. You can download new content types created by other people, or you can write your own. On my site I’ve created a kind of blog post called an “aside”, which I’ve decided to make a distinct content type.

Hit the button, and you can compose right on the page.

Known supports an idea called POSSE: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. You can elect to syndicate a post to a third-party site by enabling the toggle for that site below the compose window. In this illustration I have two example webhooks, but people have written plugins for Mastodon, etc. (In the beginning, Known had plugins for Twitter, Facebook, and so on, but all those APIs locked down over time. The promo image, which you can see above, includes Foursquare and Flickr as options, which is a clue about the era it originated from.)

You can also compose using any application that supports the Micropub standard. I tend to write all my blog posts in iA Writer.

Known supports Webmention, so when you publish a post that links to a site, that site will be notified. You can even use webmention to respond to someone else’s post elsewhere and have a conversation across the web.

It’s free and open source, and intentionally runs on the same LAMP stack as WordPress. Be warned though; as the screenshots suggest, it’s now a little old.

A little history

Known was originally called Idno. (“What does it stand for?” someone once asked me. “I d’no,” I replied. This is the level of humor you can generally expect from me.)

I wrote the first version of it when my mother was recovering from a double lung transplant: she was in need of community but absolutely didn’t want to discuss her condition on Facebook. I’d previously written Elgg, an older open source social networking platform, so I decided to think about what a social community platform might look like in the era of the mobile, ubiquitous web. What would it look like for a community to publish to a place where it could continue to own its own content, on its own domain? (It seems like a quaint exploration now, but remember that this was 2013.)

I became friends with the indieweb folks, and met Erin Richey at an IndieWebCamp. We decided to collaborate on the project. It was her idea to submit it to Matter, where we took part in the third accelerator class. Along the way, we did some focus group testing (Erin’s instigation) and chose Known as a permanent name.

It was a startup for a couple of years; there was a paid, hosted version; a Known-powered site even won an award for KQED. But it wasn’t the kind of thing that excited investors, and we weren’t making enough money for it to be sustainable. Ultimately, I allowed myself to be acquihired by Medium, which allowed us to pay Matter back, and we both settled into new jobs. The day before my first Medium paycheck, I spent my last five dollars on gas. (Erin and I welcomed our actual child — a human one — two years ago. So there’s a coda.)

But there are still users out there, myself included, and the open source project is still alive. It’s been slower over the last few years, because I haven’t had much time to devote to it. (The main thing I’ve been looking at is a command line exporter to allow people to more easily take their content into WordPress, as well as some experiments with ActivityPub.) But it remains a core part of the operating system that powers my identity online, and the identity of others.

Lately I’ve been thinking that there’s a place for this model of publishing. The internal architecture needs to be overhauled; the Bootstrap-driven default template needs to go; but I think there’s really something to the model of letting communities publish to a simple, queryable feed of content that syndicates out to the world.

Perhaps it’s finally time for Known 2, with an easy upgrade path from the original? If you’re intrigued by the idea — or if you’re a Known user — I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I’m extraordinarily excited about the launch of the Social Web Foundation, which has been created to promote and support the growth of the Fediverse: the interoperable social network powered by the ActivityPub protocol.

Users of services on the Fediverse can follow, share, and interact with each other, regardless of which service each one is using. The most famous Fediverse platform is Mastodon, but there are many more participants, including Threads, Flipboard, and Ghost.

From the announcement:

[…] Advocates of this increased platform choice say it will bring more individual control, more innovation, and a healthier social media experience. But there is work to do: journalism, activism, and the public square remain in a state of uncertain dissonance and privacy, safety and agency remain important concerns for anyone participating in a social network.

The Foundation’s founding members are Mallory Knodel, the former CTO of the Center for Democracy and Technology; Evan Prodromou, one of the creators of ActivityPub and its current editor (who just published the canonical book on the topic); and Tom Coates, a product designer and founder who was one of the earliest bloggers and has been involved in many things that have been good on the web. They become the Executive Director, Research Director, and Product Director respectively.

Excitingly, the Foundation’s partners are a who’s who of companies doing great work on the web today. Those include Automattic, Ghost, Flipboard, Fastly, Medium, and Mastodon itself. Meta is also a backer, in an indication of its continued investment in the Fediverse, moving away from the walled garden strategy that it used with Facebook and Instagram for decades.

In a conversation with Richard MacManus over on The New Stack, Evan explained the Foundation’s relationship with existing standards organizations like the W3C:

“W3C as a standards organization mostly does coordinating the work of a number of different groups to make protocols […] So we’ll still be participating in the W3C — we’re going to become a member organization of the W3C.”

Prodromou added that the SWF will take on the role of advocacy and user education, which is typically outside of the W3C’s purview for standards work.

My opinion: this is the future of the social web. Every new service and platform that contains social features — which is most of them — will support the ActivityPub protocol within the next few years. Service owners can use it to easily avoid the “cold start” problem when creating new networks, and to plug their existing platforms into a ready-made network of hundreds of millions of people. Publishers will use it to reach their audiences more easily. And it’s where the global conversation will be held.

When I was building social platforms in the 2000s, this is what we dreamed of. Elgg, the open source social networking platform which launched my career, was intended to be the center of a federated social web. Although we made some crucial steps towards open data protocols and embracing open standards, we didn’t get there. I’m beyond thrilled that the Fediverse and ActivityPub exist, and that there are so many robust platforms that support it. The Social Web Foundation is another great step towards building the social web that we all deserve.

As Casey Newton published just yesterday about the future of his publication, Platformer:

One way I hope it will evolve is to become part of the fediverse: the network of federated sites and apps that are built with interoperability in mind. The fediverse is built on top of protocols, not platforms, which offers us a chance to decentralize power on the internet and built a more stable foundation for media and social apps.

The Social Web Foundation’s existence as an advocacy, research, and development organization is another key step towards making that happen. But to be clear, its role is in support: each one of its partner organizations has already taken concrete steps towards supporting ActivityPub, and the movement is well underway.

Check out the Social Web Foundation and its projects at its website.

Updated: Read more coverage of the launch.

I write a lot about the intersection of technology and society here, and lately a lot about AI, but over the last year I’ve written a little less about what I’ve been up to. So, this post is an update about some of that. This isn’t everything, by any means — 2023 was, frankly, a hard year for lots of reasons, which included not a small amount of personal loss and trauma — but I wanted to share some broad strokes.

We’re now based in the Greater Philadelphia area, rather than San Francisco. There have been all kinds of life changes: it’s the ‘burbs, which is weird, but I’m writing this on a train to New York City, which is now easily within reach. I grew up in Oxford and could easily go to London for a day trip; now I have the same relationship with NYC. We haven’t yet brought the baby to the city, but that’s coming. (He’s not a baby anymore: we have a delightful toddler whose favorite things, somehow, are reading books and brushing his teeth.)

I joined ProPublica as Senior Director of Technology after working with the team as an advisor on contract for a while. ProPublica publishes vital American journalism: you might remember the story about Supreme Court Justices with billionaire friends that broke last year, or the story about Peter Thiel’s $5 Billion tax-free IRA. You might also have come across Nonprofit Explorer and other “news apps”. Our technology philosophy is very compatible, and it’s a lovely team. I’m hoping we can revive The Nerd Blog.

I work mostly remotely and spend a lot of my time at my desk looking like this:

(Guess the books! Yes, that’s also an issue of .net — specifically, one from decades ago that showcased Elgg.)

My website is still powered by Known, and I still intend to invest time and resources into that platform. I’ve also finally accepted — between having a toddler, a demanding job, an ongoing project (more on that in a second), and other commitments — that I’m not going to be making a ton of contributions to the codebase myself anytime soon. But there’s a pot of money in the Open Collective, and I’m eager to support open source developers in adding functionality to the platform. The first stop has been adding ActivityPub support to make Known compatible with the fediverse. The next stop will be improving the import / export functionality so that it (1) functions as expected (2) is in line with other platforms.

I’ve been struggling with writing a book. I’ve had the benefit of really great 1:1 coaching through The Novelry, and was making great progress until I realized I needed to revise a major element. It’s been a slog since then: I have printouts of my first draft covered in Sharpie all over my office. My fear of being terrible at this increases with every sideways glance at the unfinished manuscript (which seems, somehow, to be staring back at me). I’m certain that as soon as I send it out into the world I’ll be ridiculed. But I’m determined to get it to the finish line, revise it, send it out, and do it again.

As painful as writing the draft has been, I also love the act of it. Writing has always been my first love, far before computers. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t claim any sort of literary excellence, in the same way that I enjoy making dinner for everyone but would never call myself a chef. I’ve got huge respect for anyone who’s gone down this road and actually succeeded (hi, Sarah, you are radically inspiring to me). It’s a craft that deserves care, attention, and practice, and stretching these muscles is as desperately uncomfortable as it is liberating. I find the whole process of it meditative and freeing, and also simultaneously like pulling every fingernail from my body.

So, uh, we’ll see if the end result is any good.

I’ve been helping a few different organizations with their work (pro bono): two non-profits that are getting off the ground, a startup, and a venture fund. Each of them is doing something really good, and I’m excited to see them emerge into the world.

Also, my universe has been rocked by this recipe for scrambled eggs. So there’s that, too.

What’s up with you?

Over on Threads, Amanda Zamora asks:

I'm plotting away on Agencia Media and some personal writing/reporting this weekend (over a glass of 🍷 and many open tabs). One of the things I love most about building something new is the chance to design for intended outcomes — how to structure time and energy? What helps quiet chaos? Bring focus and creativity? Inspired by Ben Werdmuller’s recent callout about new Mac setups, I want to know about the ways you've built (or rebuilt) your way of working! Apps, workflows, rituals, name 'em 👇

A thing I’ve had to re-learn about building and creating is the importance of boredom in the way I think. I know that some people thrive when moving from thing to thing to thing at high speed, but I need time to reflect and toss ideas around in my head without an imposing deadline: the freedom to be creative without consequence.

The best way I’ve found to do that is to walk.

The work I’m proudest of was done in a context where I could walk for hours on end. When I was building Elgg, I would set off around Oxford, sometimes literally walking from one end of the city to the other and back again. When I was building Known and working for Matter, I roamed the east bay, sometimes walking from Berkeley to the tip of Oakland, or up through Tilden Park. I generally didn’t listen to music or audiobooks; I was alone with my thoughts and the sounds of the city. It helped me to figure out my priorities and consider what I was going to do next. When I came up with something new, it was more often than not in the midst of one of those walks.

When you’re deep into building something that’s your own, and that’s the entirety of what you’re doing (i.e., you don’t have another day job), you have the ability to structure your time however you’d like. Aside from the possible guilt of not working a traditional office day, there’s no reason to do that. Particularly at the beginning stages, I found that using the morning as unstructured reflective time led to better, more creative decision-making.

Again, this is me: everyone is different, and your mileage may vary. I do best when I have a lot of unstructured time; for some people, more structure is necessary. I think the key is to figure out what makes you happy and less stressed, and to get out from behind a screen. But also, walking really does boost creativity, so there’s that.

I recognize there’s a certain privilege inherent here: not everyone lives somewhere walkable, and not everyone feels safe when they’re walking out in the world. The (somewhat) good news is that indoor walking works just as well, if you can afford a low-end treadmill.

So what happens when you get back from a walk with a head full of ideas?

It’s probably no surprise that my other creativity hack is to journal: I want to get those unstructured thoughts, particularly the “what ifs” and “I wishes”, out on the page, together with the most important question, which is “why”. Writing long-form in this way puts me into a more contemplative state, much the same way that writing a blog post like this one helps me refine how I think about a topic. Putting a narrative arc to the thought gives it context and helps me refine what’s actually useful.

The through line here is an embrace of structurelessness; in part that’s just part of my personality, but in part it’s an avoidance of adhering to someone else’s template. If I’m writing items on a to-do list straight away, I’m subject to the design decisions of the to-do list software’s author. If I’m filling in a business model canvas, I’m thinking about the world in the way the canvas authors want me to. I can, and should, do all those things, but I always want to start with a blank page first. A template is someone else’s; a blank page is mine.

Nobody gets to see those thoughts until I’ve gone over them again and turned them into a written prototype. In the same way that authors should never show someone else their first draft, letting someone into an idea too early can deflate it with early criticism. That isn’t to say that understanding your hypotheses and doing research to validate them isn’t important — but I’ve found that I need to keep up the emotional momentum behind an idea if I’m going to see it through, and to do that, I need to keep the illusion that it’s a really good idea just long enough to give it shape.

Of course, when it has shape, I try to get all the expert feedback I can. Everyone needs an editor, and asking the right questions early and learning fast is an obvious accelerant.

So I guess my creative process boils down to:

• Embrace boredom and unstructured, open space to think creatively
• Capture those creative thoughts in an untemplated way, through narrative writing
• Identify my hypotheses and figure out what needs to be researched to back up the idea
• Ask experts and do that research as needed in order to create a second, more validated draft
• Get holistic feedback from trusted collaborators on that second draft
• Iterate 1-2 times
• Build the smallest, fastest thing I can based on the idea

There are no particular apps involved and no special frameworks. Really, it’s just about giving myself some space to be creative. And maybe that’s the only advice I can give to anyone building something new: give yourself space.

Let’s get this out of the way first: 2024 is going to be a hard year across the board. Mass layoffs, another hottest year on record, escalating conflicts with enormous human tolls and flagrant human rights violations in Gaza and Ukraine, not just a declining media but a declining democracy, an oligarchic class that appears to actively reject any policies that might help the vulnerable communities they profit from, and a US general election with wide ramifications that nobody is looking forward to. On a macro level, the time from 2016 to now has felt like hard year after hard year, and I don’t believe it’s going to let up.

I don’t think you can make personal resolutions (or talk about tech or anything else) without acknowledging that context. Sorry to be a downer: 2023 was a difficult year, and 2024 will be too.

I like to make strong resolutions, loosely held. Life comes at you fast, and it’s better to adapt and take care of yourself in the moment than to adhere to a rigid set of intentions. But even if they end up being ultimately unfulfilled (and I always hope they won’t be), they serve as a good North Star for venturing forth into the new year. I won’t be grading myself based on whether I succeed at the end of the year; the exercise of thinking about them is valuable enough.

This last year, I bit off a little more than I could chew, particularly with respect to time management. I really value having clear, unstructured, creative time, and I didn’t leave enough space for that. So I want to pare down my expectations while trying to get healthier and focusing on the things I really care about.

So, here’s how I’m thinking about getting through 2024.

Health

In 2024 I want to increase my fitness and reduce my overall body mass.

For the first half of 2021, I managed to get myself to a point where I was running a 5K almost every day. For some runners, that’s small potatoes; for me, it was enormous. Then my mother died and I stopped caring. (She stopped telling me to go and exercise, too, which is something she did frequently.)

Running is tied up with some complicated feelings for me. I vividly remember running around my high school track on sports day, coming in near-last, my audience of fellow teenagers laughing at the “SPAM” t-shirt I’d chosen from the top of my to-wear pile. To this day, almost thirty years later, I’m scared of running outside. My 5Ks were all undertaken on a treadmill that we no longer own. (A rowing machine makes more sense for this space, so that’s what I have.)

For most of my life, I’ve been a walker: back in Oxford and Edinburgh, I would wander the city after dinner, sometimes for hours. It’s far harder, these days. Life is more complicated, and a baby at home means I can’t go out and wander with impunity. I’m not complaining — but life is different now, and does demand a different approach to exercise.

Finally, my food intake has been fairly poor for the last few years. In San Francisco, I ate out far too often. Here in Elkins Park, I tend to over-eat: having seconds, indulging in snacks, and so on. Let’s just say that the physical results have been unsurprising.

So in 2024, I want to do three things:

1. When I’m home and not sick, I want to spend at least 30 minutes on the rowing machine every day.
2. When it’s feasible, I want to spend at least 90 minutes walking every day (including the hour I spend walking to and from daycare every day).
3. I’ve had great results from the Whole30 diet in the past. I want to spend at least one 30-day period strictly following it. But then I also want to be more careful: no sweet or junk snacks, no seconds, only drinking alcohol rarely.

Stretch goal: I want to try and get comfortable running around the neighborhood (as an acceptable replacement for walking).

The overall intention is to optimize for feeling good in my body, and for improving my body’s longevity. I will not set a weight loss goal or a strict exercise target.

Reading and Learning

In 2024 I just want to keep reading and learning. Putting a number on it is utterly arbitrary but helps me remember that this is something I want to make time for.

In 2021 I read 43 books, mostly because I had a great book-or-two-a-week pace before my mother’s death. I read some books in 2022 but didn’t set a goal. Then, this year, I set a goal of 26 and read 19.

Next year I’m going to go for two books a month. 24 books. It’s a much lower goal than I might have set a few years ago, but, again: life is more complicated now. That’s totally fine and expected, but my goals should be attainable in that light.

As for learning: this last year I participated in Stanford’s Ethics, Technology + Public Policy for Practitioners course. It was transformational, and I can highly recommend it to everyone (it also comes with an enduring community of alumni). I also continued to subscribe to The Novelry, a private course for aspiring novelists that provides 1:1 feedback and coaching as well as a full audit of a completed manuscript on top of its curriculum. Again, I’ve found it to be useful and motivational.

I’ll keep up The Novelry (until I finish this book) but I’m probably not going to take another course, in the name of keeping my time sane.

Writing

I’m going to finish the damn book. And I’m going to do that by prioritizing it rather than leaving it as a thing that happens if I have enough time. It gets an hour a day until it’s done — end of story (until the story has ended).

Work

For the last few years the focus of my work has been to build empathetic, inclusive technology teams that can serve a well-defined mission. It’s been rewarding, but I’ve realized that I’m hungering for a little bit more, and for the impact of this work to be more outward-facing than inward-facing.

Building great team cultures is important, but it’s inward-looking by nature. The impact is on the happiness of the team, the way the team works, and how it relates to the rest of the organization it sits inside. I don’t want to give up doing that — I think it’s a prerequisite for doing good work, and I love supporting engineers. But I also want to renew my focus on being externally impactful.

Back in the Elgg days, I’d often discover that a non-profit was using the platform to share resources, or that someone had used it to create a site that allowed people with a social mission to accelerate what they were doing. We also got to push the web forward in important ways, for example by prototyping the first open format for data exchange between social networks. That was, frankly, exhilarating. Even now, I still learn from time to time about organizations or social movements that were able to use Elgg to become more efficient or help themselves organize or learn. Quite selfishly, I want to have that sort of impact again.

I don’t know what that looks like yet. I think it involves publishing more code, stories, and case studies at a bare minimum. But it’s enough for me to know that this is something I want to do.

Authenticity and Accountability

I haven’t always lived up to my own expectations or ideals. Sitting with that knowledge is uncomfortable. In particular, in a period of around a year after my mother’s death, I sometimes behaved in a way that makes me shudder today.

It’s all complicated, but owning that I made those decisions, without pathologizing or diminishing their effects, is important and is work that is only partially done. I need to be able to move on from that part of my life, which means completing that work, and doing it based on my own sense of ethics and equity.

And with that: I’m a people-pleaser, sometimes to the point of codependency, and it’s only been recently that I’ve understood why that is harmful. So I need to work on that, too.

All of those things will allow me to share more freely, show up better in all of my communities as myself rather than the person I think people want me to be, and move forward with real purpose.

The World

As I mentioned, it’s going to be a difficult year. In this kind of context, I think one of the imperatives is to loudly advocate for the world you actually want to inhabit.

That means being clear and uncompromising about what my values and positions actually are, and living in a way that is true to those values.

I will not support platforms that financially support Nazis or white supremacy. I’ve already cleared my newsletter from Substack and discontinued my X/Twitter account; I will watch carefully to see if other platforms I use contravene this principle.

I will not support colonial or nationalist policies or the people who espouse them. For example, I am clear that I do not support Israel’s ongoing actions in Gaza (and that it is not anti-semitic for me to say so). I am clear that I am not interested in “American interests”; instead, I am interested in global well-being.

I will always support peace over war.

I will continue to advocate for social infrastructure like socialized healthcare, integrated public transit, and welfare, and speak out against libertarianism and conservatism that seeks to undermine those needs.

I will continue to support and amplify diversity, inclusion, and distributed equity.

I will continue to support the right to vote, and democracy itself, as a fundamental human right.

I will be mindful of the environment in the midst of what is not just climate change but a climate crisis.

I will always advocate for community over individualism and care for vulnerable people over a person’s selfish interests. But I will also always advocate for individual self-expression, the ability to be an entrepreneur, and the opportunity to financially (or otherwise) succeed, as long as community and care obligations are met, and as long as opportunities are equal and equitable.

And not only is there nothing wrong with loudly saying so, not loudly proclaiming what you believe is acquiescence to the status quo.

In summary

I want to:

1. Be physically and mentally healthier
2. Be more externally impactful in my work
3. Finish my book
4. Show up more authentically in my communities
5. Stand up for what I believe in

What are your goals for 2024?

Thomas Stringer on compensation in open source:

And then finally, there’s my uninteresting (to me) OSS project. What once resembled passion project is now unrecognizable from a motivation perspective. But the demand is high. There are lots of users, many in a corporate sense using my software to further progress their organization. And the bad news is, I get no money at all from it. So motivation is essentially nonexistent at this point. Where passion is falling short, money could motivate me to routinely work on this product.

I’ve spent over a decade of my life working on open source software as a full-time profession. Like a lot of people who get into open source, it was originally an ideological decision: I wanted the work I was doing to be available to the widest number of people.

(An aside: I use the terms interchangeably, but open source and free software are not the same thing. Open source software is made available in such a way that anyone can use, which often includes as part of a commercial application. Free or libre software is explicitly licensed in such a way to promote software freedom, which is more of an ideological stance that centers on the freedom to use, modify, and re-distribute software while resisting licensing terms that might lock users in to a particular vendor. The open source term was originally coined because some folks thought the free software movement was a little too socialist for their tastes. I have no such qualms, but open source has become the more widely-understood term, so that’s what I use.)

Elgg, my first open source product, was founded for entirely ideological reasons. I’d found myself working in a learning technology department, shoehorned into a converted broom closet with a window that didn’t shut properly in the Edinburgh winter, with an angry PhD candidate who was upset he now had to share the space. I’d been blogging for years at that point, and he was working on learning technology.

What I learned about the learning technology ecosystem shocked me. Predatory companies like Blackboard were charging institutions six or seven-figure sums to run learning management software that everybody hated, from the administrators and educators down to the learners. Lock-in was rife: once an institution had been sold on a product, there was almost no momentum to move. There were open source equivalents for learning management — in particular, something called Moodle — but while they solved the financial problem, they didn’t solve the core usability issues with learning management systems.

And at the same time, people were connecting and learning from each other freely on the web. Inevitably, that angry PhD candidate and I started talking as we did our respective work, and I showed him how powerful blogging could be (at the time, there were no really powerful social networks; blogging wassocial media). We both built prototypes, but mine was the one we decided to go with; more of a social networking stack than a learning management system. I stuck it on a spare domain I didn’t have a website provisioned for (part of my family comes from Elgg, a town in Switzerland outside of Zurich), and we decided to build it out.

We could have run it as a fully software-as-a-service business, and I sometimes still wonder if we should have. Instead, after a year of development, we released it under the GNU Public License v3. We were incensed that taxpayer money was being spent in vast numbers for learning software that didn’t even help people learn. Anyone would be able to pick Elgg up to build a learning network with — we called it a learning landscape, which in retrospect was an ambiguous, near-meaningless term — and they would only have to pay if they wanted us to help them do it.

And it took off. Elgg changed some minds about how software should work in higher education, although it didn’t exactly dent Blackboard’s business. It was translated into a few languages, starting with the Northern European ones. But because it was open source, other organizations began to pick it up. Non-profits in South America started to use it to share resources internally; then global non-profits like Oxfam started using it to train their aid workers. People used it to build social networks for their businesses, their hobbies, their communities. And it continued to take off in education, too.

But it didn’t make us any money. I ended up taking a job as the web administrator at the Saïd Business School in Oxford to keep a roof over my head. I’d walk home from work, make dinner, and then sometimes work on Elgg until 1am. There were people here, and they were doing good work, so it felt like something to keep going with.

Of course, if it had been a SaaS platform, I would have been able to dedicate my full-time self to it far earlier. Thousands of miles away, in Palo Alto, Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini founded Ning — another social network builder — with millions of dollars in their war chest. In those early days, far more networks were built with Elgg than Ning: they had Silicon Valley money, while we had two developer-founders and a packet of crisps, but we were “winning”.

We weren’t winning. While we’d built an open source community, the continued development of the platform depended on our time and effort — and there was no way to be paid for our work. We did it for the love of it, and traded in huge chunks of our free time to do that. If we’d had children, or less tolerant partners, it wouldn’t have been possible.

A K-12 school district in upstate New York and MIT called us in the same month about helping them with their various projects, which was when I felt able to quit my job and get to work. We consulted with the school district and helped MIT to develop the platform behind OpenCourseWare, although we parted ways with the latter before launch because the work would have radically changed our platform in ways we weren’t comfortable with. The University of Brighton got in touch wanting to build the world’s first social network to roll out at a university campus, and we got to work with them. We were bankrolled.

But we were also working contract to contract and were often weeks or days away from being broke. The open source software had been picked up and used by huge names — Fortune 500 companies, Ivy League universities, global NGOs, even national governments, years later Jimmy Wales told me he’d picked it up and used it — but because it was open source, its own existence was under threat. We communicated as openly as we could in order to spread our message, through blogging, videos, podcasts; whatever we could. But it didn’t always work.

Around this time, Matt Mullenweg was having similar trouble with WordPress. For a while he even sold embedded links — essentially SEO spam — on his website in order to support his work. He was called out for it and the practice stopped. He went back to the drawing board.

One Friday afternoon we were fed up, felt stuck, and didn’t know where to go. There weren’t any contracts coming in. So we decided to go to the gym, run it out, and work on something else for the rest of the day. I had a weird idea that I wanted to play with: a social network where a profile could be anywebsite. (We’d implemented OpenID and FOAF and all of these up-and-coming decentralized social networking protocols, but none were enough to make this a reality.) Because the Elgg framework was flexible and designed for all kinds of social networks, I spent about two hours turning its components into JavaScript widgets you could post anywhere. I drew a stupid logo in MS Paint and called it Explode. A genuinely centralized, non-open-source social network, rough as hell, but in a form factor that nobody hadn’t really seen at that point.

It was on TechCrunch by the following Tuesday.

There had been an article or two in the Guardian, but by and large, nobody really cared about the open source social networking platform being used by organizations around the world. They did care about the centralized network. We were approached by investors very quickly, and ultimately took around half a million dollars from Thematic Capital, run by a pair of ex-HSBC executives in London.

They were well-connected, and found us consulting gigs with surprising people. We built a rugby social network with Will Carling (who got us all into carrot juice); I found myself explaining APIs to the English rock star Mike Rutherford from Genesis and Mike and the Mechanics.

The trick was this: while we’d founded the platform using open source as an ideology for good reasons (no lock-in, no abusive pricing), those same things affected our ability to build value into the company. We’d given away the thing that held our core value for free, and were trying to make money on tertiary services that didn’t scale. Every consulting gig involved writing new work-for-hire code — which we were usually then allowed to open source, meaning there were fewer opportunities to make money over time as the open source codebase grew. The more human value the open source codebase had, the lower its financial value was. While most companies become more valuable as more people use their product — as it should be — our company did the opposite. Ultimately, the product wildly succeeded (the platform continues to exist today), but the company behind it did not. We would have made a lot more money if we’d doubled down on Explode instead of continuing to build the open source product.

Make no mistake: there are ways to make open source development pay. Joseph Jacks’ OSS Capital invests in “open core” startups: ones that make their engines open source but then sell the features and services that make these technologies particularly useful to businesses. This usually but not always means developer-centric components that can be used as part of the software development process for other, commercial products. Open Core Ventures is a startup studio for the same idea: whereas OSS Capital funds existing startups, Open Core Ventures finds promising open source projects and founds companies around them.

Matt Mullenweg bounced back from his link ad days by creating a centralized service around catching spammy comments on blogs. Akismet was the first commercial service from his company Automattic, which is now worth billions of dollars. The client library is open source but the engine that makes it work is proprietary; for anything more than personal use, you have to pay.

The idea that people will pay to support a free product is very nice, but largely unrealistic. Most simply won’t. Even if someone in a company is like, “we’re relying on this and if someone doesn’t pay for them to do it, it might go away”, they’re one bloody-minded financial audit away from having to shut it down. There needs to be a defined return on investment that you can only get for paying the money: hosting, extra resources, or more capabilities that the company would otherwise have to spend more money to build themselves. Technical support is frequently cited but also unrealistic: it’s a nice-to-have service, not a painkiller. Even creating new software licenses that are free for personal use but paid for corporations is dicey: who does the enforcement for that licensing?

Not everything has to be a business. It’s obviously totally fine for anyone to create something as a hobby project and give it away. The disconnect comes from wanting to be paid for something you’re giving away without tying in any inherent commercial value.

These days, another open source social networking platform has captured much of the internet’s imagination. Mastodon is deployed across many thousands of communities and has formed the basis of a formidable social media network. It has a very small team that makes its money through crowdfunding: some users choose to support the project for a monthly fee, while other businesses pay to place their logos on its front page like a NASCAR car. It also sells mugs and T-shirts. This allows them to book mostly-recurring revenue, but at rates that are far lower than you’d expect from software with its prominence. It’s a non-profit based in Germany, with a much lower cost of living than Silicon Valley, so hopefully these economics work out. In the US, organizations that build software are often refused non-profit status, so it’s not clear that this would even be possible here anymore. (The Mozilla Foundation pre-dates this rule.) Regardless of non-profit status, crowdfunding enough money to pay for the time taken to build a software library would require it to be wildly popular.

My take is this: if you want to make money building something, sell it. If you want to release your software as open source, release the bit (or a bit) that doesn’t have intrinsic business value. Use that value to pay for the rest. If you need money to eat and put a roof over your head, do what you need to get money. And then if you want to be altruistic, be altruistic with what you can afford to distribute.

Tracy Durnell celebrates 20 years of blogging:

A blog is a much nicer place to publish than social media, sparking fewer but more meaningful interactions. Blogging allows writers a more forgiving pace with slower conversation. On their blog, people can be themselves instead of playing to an audience and feeling judged — a place to escape the pressures of one-upmanship and signaling, the noise of the ever-demanding attention economy, and the stress of hustle culture.

It’s a huge achievement, to be sure, and I couldn’t agree more with Tracy’s sentiment here. Congratulations, Tracy!

I’m a little jealous that she can pinpoint an anniversary date. For me, it depends on how you judge: I had a hand-rolled blog of sorts when I went to university in 1998, but was it really a blog? I definitely had a public Livejournal in 2001, but was that a blog? How about blog I used to keep on Elgg dot net (now a domain squatter, may it rest in peace)? My old domain, benwerd.com, dates back to 2006, and my current one, werd.io, only goes back to 2013. It’s a bit of a messy history, with stops and false starts.

On the other hand, I know people who have posted to the same domain for almost as long as they’ve been online. I don’t know if I can match that sort of dedication - or a commitment to even having a continuous identity for all that time. Am I the same person I was 20+ years ago? A little bit yes, but mostly not really. The idea of joining up my life online on a long-term basis is actually quite daunting.

Tracy links to Mandy Brown’s piece on writers vs talkers, which also deeply resonates: I’m a writer. I hate being drawn into making decisions in ad hoc meetings. I want to write my thoughts down, structure them, and then come to a conclusion after getting feedback and iterating. Perhaps that’s why blogging early appeals to me so much: I can put out ideas and very quickly engage in conversations about them that pushes my thinking along.

Blogging might seem like a solitary activity, but it’s very, very social. Even the name — a pun derived from weblog = we blog — is about community. Writing for 20 years also means building community for that long.

Here’s to the next 20!

Dave Winer poses:

If you think of yourself as an "open source developer" please ask yourself this question. Are you as committed to freedom for people who use your software as you are to freedom for developers? Not just freedom to modify the source code, but freedom to do anything they like with the stuff they create. If not, why, and where do you draw the line?

I’m not sure if I do consider myself an open source developer these days. I don’t have the time or bandwidth to write software for myself on a regular basis in the way that I used to. I have the software I help with in my work (which is, these days, more about team dynamics and process rather than writing code); that’s about all I have time for outside of my family. I am having a lot of trouble making any time at all for my own projects.

But I used to write a lot of open source code (Elgg, Known, more contributions elsewhere). And I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this subject.

I think we have to consider that the principles of the free software movement, revolutionary though they genuinely were, were also set in the same mindset that latterly saw its founder Richard Stallman spectacularly fall from grace. They are principles that deal in software development and licensing in strict isolation, outside of the social context of their use. They are code-centered, not human-centered.

Dave’s question has two angles that I’d like to discuss: one briefly, and the other at more length (because it’s more controversial in open source circles).

The first is: how easy is open source software to use, anyway? Can users do anything they like with the stuff they create? Doesn’t a commitment to user freedom also necessitate a commitment to ease of use? I think yes, but open source projects rarely have capacity for design or user experience research, and even when people with those skillsets want to contribute, projects quite often don’t know what to do with them. The tools (from GitHub on down), the culture, the mindsets are all code-first. There is no good way to open source user research or the empathy work that is a core part of software development. A code-centric approach takes the humanity out of software, and work has to be done to put people back in the center.

The second, more complicated one, is: I don’t want my software to be used to cause harm.

You could couch that in liability. Many software licenses disallow use in a nuclear facility, for example. But I want to go further. I don’t want anything I built to be used to kill people; nor to discriminate against them; nor to commit hate crimes; nor to intentionally organize or facilitate any act of violence or assault.

I think many software developers would feel the same way. But any license that incorporated clauses to this effect would fail to be recognized by the Free Software Foundation or the Open Source Initiative.

My blunt take on that is that I don’t care: clearly the principle of not causing harm is more important than recognition by some foundations (and particularly not foundations like the FSF whose leaders have been found to be so lacking in empathy). If the idea of not causing harm is outside the realm of the existing open source movement, then we need a new movement.

The word “free” in free software is famously overloaded. It’s “free as in speech, not free as in beer”. But there are many kinds of free speech, and even in America, where it’s the First Amendment to the Constitution, there are limits to it.

It’s worth considering whose freedom we value. Do we value the freedom of the people who use software, or do we also value the freedom of the people the software is used on? While the latter group doesn’t always exist, when they do, how we consider them says a lot about us and our priorities.

Take a drone used in warfare out in the field which incorporates an open source library that had originally been developed for some other purpose. The author released it under a license that dictated how it could be modified and shared. Shouldn’t they also have a right to say that you can’t use it in a bombing campaign? Open source principles say no.

Consider a police AI system that is used to pre-emptively target people who might commit a crime. Because of underlying biases both in the corpus of data the model was trained on and in the police force itself, and because of a fundamental disconnect between the Minority Report promise of this technology and what it can actually deliver, they tend to be wildly discriminatory and are essentially a new cover for racial profiling. Shouldn’t a software library author be able to opt out from being a part of this kind of system? Open source principles, once again, say no.

Or, closer to home for me, take an open source community platform that is used by neo-Nazis to publish propaganda about Jewish people, or to organize acts against specific people or organizations. The authors might have designed it for use with aid workers or in education, but open source licenses make no restriction on other uses.

Code does tend to find other uses. I once co-organized a demo day when I was at Matter Ventures, and had the privilege of chatting with Chelsea Manning, who was in attendance. I asked her what she thought; she was glowing about some ventures, but then went through a point-by-point list of which platforms on show could be used for military and surveillance purposes in the hands of the wrong investors or acquirers. It was one of the most eye-opening conversations of my life.

When an author releases code to the open source commons, they invite others to enter into a relationship with them. Those third parties can incorporate the code into their own projects under some restrictions, and modify and re-share it under others. The exact nature of how open source code may be incorporated, modified, and re-shared varies from license to license. But other restrictions are not a stretch. The author is giving their work away for free; this is not work for hire. They should have the right to restrict its use. They should not have to simply accept that someone could use their work to kill people, commit hate, perpetuate systemic injustices, or otherwise harm. There is nothing good and principled about that idea.

There is also no need for the FSF or OSI to be the sole arbiters of what is free or open source software. The only thing that really matters is how authors want to release their work, how downstream users might incorporate it, and how the rights and well-being of people it is used on are affected.

This isn’t just about warfare, systemic discrimination, or hate crimes (although those all should be enough). There are questions here about the rights of software authors, and the role of software in a just and equitable society. To limit our considerations to code is to say we don’t care about the people affected by our work. And to do good work, we must care.

I’ve come away from the Online News Association conference with a really familiar feeling: somewhere between unsettled and frustrated. Not at journalists, I hasten to add, who are doing important, democratic work despite shrinking budgets and adverse conditions. But a little bit at the business sides of their organizations, and certainly at the ecosystem of vendors and evangelists that circle them.

Some quick observations:

Work on inclusion in the newsroom has stagnated in most organizations, despite the very real impacts this has on audiences and communities who depend on newsrooms to tell their stories and speak truth to power on their behalf. There is lip service here and there, but not a lot of true equity-sharing.

A few people on stage and elsewhere expressed the opinion that it doesn’t matter if journalists stay on X or not, despite the steep rise in hate on the platform. They might not be comfortable with Elon Musk, but the platform would chug along whether they were participating or not, so they might as well be there if they got something out of it.

AI vendors are out in force, expressing ways in which their software can speed up newsroom tasks, with little time being spent on the functional realities of their products or the issues this can create.

More newsrooms than I would expect are spending time writing and maintaining their own content management systems rather than leveraging existing open source software and collaborating with other organizations.

The feeling it’s left me with is similar to the one I felt when I co-founded Elgg in higher education. At least at the time, there was very little diversity in higher education decision-making; meanwhile, the software tools being deployed made it harder to learn, were inaccessible to many people, locked teaching and learning behind exploitative license agreements, and were being sold for seven figure sums. It didn’t feel right that something as fundamentally important to society as education was being locked down to a narrow demographic of decision-makers and strip-mined for value by rent-seekers. (It must be acknowledged that while accessible open source tools in education are now commonplace, rent-seekers like Blackboard still do a lot of business.)

To briefly return to each of those observations in turn:

You need diverse points of view in a newsroom (both in editorial and management) in order to be able to reflect the communities you’re both covering and trying to reach. A diverse team is more resilient; diverse teams are smarter and do better work.

Journalists have outsize power with regards to a platform like X. They create much of the content that will be shared and discovered on the platform. Their actions matter, and they can effect change in the tech industry. I think this speaks to how disempowered newsrooms have felt at the hands of technology changes over the last decade or two — but it need not be the case.

AI seems like magic but is more like a magic trick. Meredith Broussard’s discussion on recognizing inequalities in artificial intelligence is arguably vital for anyone considering adopting AI. There are genuine use cases for the technology, but her definition of techno-chauvinism — the assumption that technical solutions are better than human ones — rings true in this case.

And development teams should spend most of their time working on projects that add value to their newsroom. Working to maintain commodity technology (as in, maintaining the exact same thing hundreds of other teams are building, like a CMS) more than about 20% of the time is a waste of very scant resources. Generally, development teams should be spending their time building differentiated technology.

Every newsroom needs nuanced technical advice, but not every newsroom can afford to hire a CTO. A few organizations offer platforms, technical and business advice, and fractional technical leadership as a service for newsrooms. They’re a vital part of the ecosystem — and the truth is that some larger newsrooms need something similar. It’s all too easy to fall prey to the hype cycle, and to continue to believe that the internet is something that happens to you rather than something newsrooms can help shape and change according to their needs.

As I’ve written before, I would like to see a kind of tech union for newsrooms that would provide technical advice and commodity technology under an open source license, and then represent newsrooms in technical forums like the W3C. If the internet is a network of people, then journalism is a way for their stories to be told, and for the truth about abuses of power and systemic imbalances to come to light. It should be a virtuous relationship, and I believe it can be. I also believe it is far from this right now.

It’s fun to think of the work I’ve done in terms of Taylor Swift style eras. Hey, I might not have the musical talent, good looks, or legions of fans, but the work I’ve done has required a series of overlapping re-inventions.

So, why not. In roughly reverse-chronological order, here are my Taylor Swift eras; what are yours?

Super-serious journalism supporter.

Distinctive look: open button-down shirt
Distinctive food: Austin-style breakfast taco
Distinctive activity: karaoke

I got into media through a lucky encounter with the founders of what became Latakoo, who attended a talk I gave about user-centered social network design at Harvard’s Kennedy School in 2009. We collectively designed Latakoo to be an easy way for broadcast journalists to get their footage back to their newsrooms using commodity internet connections, in the video format the newsroom needed. It’s the way organizations like NBC News send much of their recorded video today.

I was the first CTO at The 19th, a non-profit newsroom reporting on gender, politics, and policy, and was an active participant in its Senior Leadership Team across all areas of organizational strategy. I’ve also contracted with other non-profit newsrooms to provide tech leadership support.

At Matter, I invested in media startups — but the cool thing about Matter’s fund structure was that the LPs were all media organizations like PRX, KQED, the Knight Foundation, the New York Times, the Associated Press, McClatchy, Tamedia, CNHI, and, yes, tronc. I got to regularly meet with teams from those organizations and (as part of the Matter team) help them through innovation problems they were encountering using a design thinking led approach. I also got to participate in their own internal innovation processes, like giving feedback as part of the KQED Lab internal accelerator.

Startup bro.

Distinctive look: branded hoodie over a t-shirt that was also branded; socks were also often branded; third wave coffee mug also featured logo
Distinctive food: kombucha on tap and espresso using the imported Italian machine
Distinctive activity: offsites

I was the Head of Engineering at ForUsAll, which was my only foray into fintech. I was drawn to it because of its original mission to help increase access to retirement savings for more people. There was a lot of pressure to raise subsequent rounds of funding, and a major culture shift as the in-person company moved to a remote-first company during the pandemic. This allowed me to hire people I ordinarily never could have, in every US timezone.

I was also a Senior Engineer at Medium on its publications team. It was my first experience working at a company that had, frankly, so much money, sometimes alongside people I’d been following for years. I got to work alongside people who had previously built fundamental tools like Gmail as well as core pieces of web technology. The change in context meant I started off terrified: everyone was so completely on top of their respective games, and I had the biggest imposter syndrome of my life. It was also, for reasons I still don’t completely understand, the most fashionably stylish team I’d ever worked with.

Open source utopian.

Distinctive look: the jeans-tshirt-and-blazer look, because we were trying to look fancy and legitimate
Distinctive food: poké, for some reason
Distinctive activity: long, long walks, sometimes to save money on transit fares

I worked with Julien Genestoux on his Unlock Protocol: a way to help independent creators make money on their own terms without a middleman. Fully open source and decentralized, the protocol has taken advantage of various blockchains as they’ve become available, allowing the protocol to become as fast and cost effective as possible. Julien and I are both open-web-first evangelists, and this attitude shows through in the project.

With Erin Richey, I built Known: a kind of social news feed that you host yourself. Any number of people can publish to a Known feed (my site is a news feed of one, but some have had hundreds or thousands). We built an award-winning site with KQED and people around the world are still using it to power their websites. For a while, Known allowed you to directly syndicate your content to third-party websites, which saw us get coverage in Wired, among other places.

With Dave Tosh, I built Elgg: an open source social networking platform that was used by the Canadian national government, Fortune 500 companies, and organizations like Greenpeace and Oxfam. It was, in retrospect, one of the first private social networks and social intranets. We built the first social network ever run at a university, and I’m particularly proud of the social movements that used it. For example, the Spanish Movimiento 15-M anti-austerity movement used Elgg to organize. We also built the first open data definition for social networks, which helped inform the subsequent design of ActivityPub.

Institutional web developer.

Distinctive look: ironed shirt and trousers
Distinctive food: university canteen food (I was kicked out of the Edinburgh MALTS canteen after hacking the menu)
Distinctive activity: inventing acronyms for things

I ran the web properties at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. The coolest thing about this job was getting to know the faculty and students; it wasn’t long before they realized that I knew a lot more about startups and web tech than a random guy in an IT department probably should. I ended up meeting visiting dignitaries and participating in MBA round-tables. They were very kind to me, and in turn, I believe I pushed the IT department forward in its relationship to the web.

And first, perhaps most improbably, I ran the web properties for what is now the St Leonard’s Land Pool at the University of Edinburgh: an Olympic-sized swimming pool set up with underwater cameras to analyze and improve the strokes and techniques of elite athletes. I started being loaned out to the Edinburgh University Media and Learning Technology Service, which is where I met Dave and started cooking up Elgg.

Proto-nerd.

Distinctive look: baggy sweatshirt, jeans, oversized glasses, leather jacket for some reason
Distinctive food: chips
Distinctive activity: putting 486 computers together

I helped build the first website for Daily Information, a local one-sheet newspaper for Oxford that included classified ads (it was possibly the first classified ad website in the world, pre-dating Craigslist) and reviews for local restaurants, movies, gigs, and theater. Before it became a website, I came on as its first BBS SysOp — my first ever job.

I ran a hypertext magazine called Spire, which I built in Windows Help Format because its capabilities at the time outstripped HTML. (We did move to the web later on.) I got to interview celebrities-to-me like Roger Ebert and Nicholas Negroponte. Distribution was via BBS initially, and then we started to be carried on the cover CDs of more professional print computer magazines (something I achieved by faxing them all in turn with a proposal, which blows my mind now). I was 15.

And I ran Rum and Monkey, a website that regularly got millions of pageviews a day and taught me all about social virality (this was 2002). I’ve written extensively about that over here.

I’ve been a technical leader since we started conceiving of the Elgg project back in 2003, twenty years ago. Back then, I didn’t know much — about leading teams, about running startups, about building projects — and I had to pick it all up from scratch, sometimes inventing processes and ideas from first principles. In fact, there wasn’t much of a startup scene in Edinburgh, Scotland, when I started my career, so almost everything I did was either from first principles or from what I’d read.

Since then, I’ve worked for startups and non-profits based in San Francisco, Austin, and New York City. I lived in the Bay Area and was steeped in Silicon Valley culture for over a decade. I’ve learned about building culture from very smart people while working at companies like Medium, as well as from the companies I supported when I was the west coast Director of Investments at Matter Ventures. Matter both taught me a formal framework for human-centered product design when it funded my second startup, Known, and gave me the opportunity to pass on that knowledge to startup founding teams and newsrooms when I joined the team. Later, I helped teach inclusive product design with Roxann Stafford as part of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism’s Product Immersion for Small Newsrooms program.

All of this is to say: I’ve had to figure out a lot, I’ve learned a lot, and I’ve had the opportunity to have some real wins and losses, and all of this has led to a theory about what works and what doesn’t work when you’re leading a technology team.

Everything can be split into two categories, so the joke goes, and sure enough, I’ve noticed two main schools of thought. I think these are well-illustrated through a real-world example drawn from one of the places I worked.

At this particular, unnamed startup, I joined as the engineering lead, but in reality was the de facto CTO. Everything technology-related rolled up to me, and I found myself in countless meetings about company strategy, often late into the night.

I learned very quickly that the previous technical leader had made a particular choice when he hired for his team. He noticed that engineers with poorer communication skills were not being hired by other companies, even if their technical skills were strong. So he decided that he would over-index on technical skill and deliberately not hire for communication skill. That way he could hire what he considered to be stronger engineers more affordably.

He had left the company and they’d had trouble finding another technical lead. The engineers had essentially kept the lights on by themselves, writing code at a furious pace to keep the entire company afloat. Technical debt had built up and built up, and they were spending most of their time on maintenance. They were often re-directed to work on new tasks and pet projects when old ones hadn’t been finished or well-documented. There was next to no testing, either through automation or with users. Meanwhile, the rest of the company complained that the engineers weren’t productive. There were suggestions that code output be measured, or that the team move to one-week sprints to — I am not making this up — make them write code twice as fast. They were great humans, but they’d been placed in an impossible position without the tools that could possibly hope to lead them to success.

Every aspect of this was counter to my own intuition. I took a step back and had some productive conversations with an old boss, who ran technology at a much larger and more successful startup. He confirmed to me that he would have made different choices every step of the way (and helped me feel a little less like I was insane).

One school of thought, then, is this code-led, metrics-driven approach: management by spreadsheet. The other is a qualitative, human-centered approach: management through empathy. A central question is whether you prioritize the things you can measure (lines of code, minutes of engagement in the product) or the motivations of the humans involved (the needs of the people who use your product and the people who build it).

I’m closer to the second camp. The map is not the territory.

My approach to technology is holistic: someone at that same company described it as “supporting the whole engineer”. How could it be anything else? Everybody brings their whole self to work, whether it is acknowledged or not. If you lead a group of people who are engaged in any directed endeavor, whether it’s building software or organizing an event, the experience of being a part of that group has to be intentionally designed. At work, we call that “company culture”, although it’s really community-building: every team should be thought of as a community of human beings who have their own creativity, intelligence, skills, motivations, and preferences.

The output of a technical team is not code. Code is a means to an end, and is only one part of the complete breakfast of tools needed to bring a project to completion. Measuring code is not a good way of figuring out a team’s ability to be successful. While code is likely integral, the job of an engineer is to engineer a solution, not just to be a programmer. That means you’ve got to have a lot of very collaborative human skills; we call them “soft” skills, but perhaps we should think of them as “software skills”, because you really can’t write software without them.

Contrary to popular belief, most people are not coin-operated. It’s not about money (although they need to make enough money). Everyone wants to make progress on meaningful work, in an environment that makes them feel valued as people, and where they feel like they can succeed. I’ve mostly worked in startups, and I like to tell people that although these environments aren’t a Google with kombucha on tap and on-site gyms, they’re opportunities to try lots of different kinds of work and bring more of themselves to work than you might at a much larger company. I want everyone who’s been on one of my teams to look back ten years later and think, I’m really glad I was on that team, because it gave me confidence to be myself at work and helped move my career in a way I care about.

The bottom line is: people who feel supported do better work. Or, as professors Sigal Barsade and Olivia A. O’Neill put it in Harvard Business Review: employees who feel love perform better. In a medical setting, their longitudinal study showed that a strong emotional culture had the following results:

Employees who felt they worked in a loving, caring culture reported higher levels of satisfaction and teamwork. They showed up to work more often. Our research also demonstrated that this type of culture related directly to client outcomes, including improved patient mood, quality of life, satisfaction, and fewer trips to the ER.

It’s impossible to achieve this on a team that focuses on metrics over motivation. It also makes diversity, equity, and inclusion a business imperative: if the only people talking in a meeting, having their ideas heard, or receiving accolades are managers, and particularly if those managers are predominantly white men, will everyone else feel supported? Or will they tune out and feel like they’re not valuable members of the group?

I think even the words we often use in software development don’t serve us well, at least if we don’t consider why they’re there and why they exist. The goal is to create, maintain, and improve a project together, as a community of people, to meet real human needs, in a way that also satisfies the goals of your community.

Some examples of terms that are bad when left unexamined (and I think should probably be changed):

Documentation sounds like the driest thing possible. But we’re not writing a manual for the hell of it. We’re leaving signposts in the code that explain why we built something this way, how it works, the context behind its creation, and most importantly of all, who you are writing it for. Code is never self-documenting, because it can never tell you who it is for and why it exists. One might (might!) be able to follow clean source code, but you’ll never be able to understand the hopes and dreams of the people who made it, which are crucial for understanding the choices that were made in the past and how to continue to maintain the project.

Specifications are a subset of documentation that sound like bureaucracy. What I think is important is that, when you’re embarking upon building something, you take a step back and reflect on what you’re about to do. It’s good to get social feedback on your intended approach, but I think the personal reflection is the biggest value. These don’t have to be super-formal, but should be clear enough to be (I’ve had engineers literally yell at me: “I just want to code!” But after a few times going through this, they’ve all seen the value.)

Retros are, again, reflections. It’s about creating a space to learn what could have been better. A team’s processes are prototypes that are never too precious to be improved; sometimes individual team members need to think about how they felt during a project, and how that might have been better for them. If a project didn’t go well, it’s worth thinking about what the definition of success was, whether they had the tools to achieve success, and what might make a similar project go better next time. Standups are mini versions of this: about learning and supporting the engineer, not reporting back to managers.

Coding standards also sound like bureaucracy. But they’re there to help engineers make decisions about how to write code so that it’s usable by other people in their community. If everyone in a community is writing code the same way, the cognitive load to understanding someone else’s work is much lower. It’s a way of helping other people to understand what you’ve done more quickly.

We could go down the list — and maybe I will in a future post — but it’s clear to me that technical team management has fallen into a metrics over motivation trap that looks at hard numbers over experiential stories. That’s been a trap in technology overall: teams are more likely to do quantitative research rather than truly get to know the people they’re trying to help and learn their stories. The truth is that while some of the tools of the trade are drawn from math and discrete logic, software is fundamentally a people business, and the only way to succeed is to build teams based on great, collaborative communication, human empathy, true support, and mutual respect.

In turn, that means that I look to work in organizations that have those things (and in particular, mutual respect). It’s much harder to change an organization’s existing culture than to establish great norms in a new one — although it is possible, as long as management is on board.

I’ve rarely spoken about my work directly in this space, but I intend to do more of it over the next few weeks and months, including practical examples of techniques I use. If these topics are interest to you, and you haven’t yet, sign up for my newsletter.

Meta’s new social network is interesting: an obvious strategic shot at Twitter just as that network is running into trouble, as well as a way to iterate on its aging Facebook property. To that end, it makes sense that Meta would piggyback on the fediverse of independent social networks that interconnect through the open ActivityPub protocol, and I’m genuinely very excited to see it take that leap. Meta is already the closed social networking top dog by a long shot, and by embracing Mastodon et al, it puts itself in a position of working with the open web to compete with Twitter instead of battling with both entities. For perhaps the first time ever, it also aligns Meta with the open web.

By working with Instagram’s accounts and social graph, and concentrating on one form factor, it gets a lot right that other decentralized social networks haven’t managed yet. There’s no waitlist or complicated registration procedure to figure out: if you’re on Instagram, you hit a single button and you’re set up.

The feed starts off by showing you content from influencers and people you’re already friends with on Instagram, bypassing the cold start problem that many social networks suffer from. The more people you follow on Threads, the more the feed seamlessly segues into content from people you follow. Like Instagram, there’s always some new stuff in there, and there’s no way to get to a chronological feed. The algorithm abides. I hate algorithmic feeds, and I find this one somewhere between annoying and maddening. I’ve found myself muting brands with wild abandon, but I recognize that I’m not the target audience — I can see how this would be more accessible for more casual users. Crucially, though, once federation is launched I’ll be able to access Threads users from the social networking interface of my choice — a huge advantage over any other mainstream social networking platform, and a way to support power users without having to explicitly build for them.

It’s fairly easy to find existing friends and people you’re interested in, and there’s a great inline “add friend” option as you see new folks pass through the feed. This isn’t an entirely new mechanism - Instagram has this, and we even built it into Elgg twenty years ago - but it’s noticeably easier than Mastodon in particular.

The content in my feed is less cerebral and much friendlier than I get on Mastodon, which probably makes it more accessible. Of course, as soon as federation launches, I’ll be able to follow folks on Threads from my Mastodon profile and vice versa. This is a boon for the fediverse overall: Threads will bring the celebrities, while Mastodon will bring the academics and activists. The net result will be a mix of everything and everyone, with a choice of user interfaces and host services, in a way that a closed social network could never manage.

Because the goal is, in effect, to grow a bigger pie for this kind of service, I think Meta would be wise to think about how to help build an ecosystem of interoperable tools and services. Assuming Threads takes off, ActivityPub will be the way social networks interoperate for at least the next decade and the majority of ActivityPub profiles will be Meta-hosted. Given this, providing an easy to use SDK, potentially an AWS-like cloud service to make it as easy as possible to build new apps on top of the protocol, and some funding would be a great way to create developer leverage and differentiate themselves from Twitter’s extortionate API pricing. (If Meta doesn’t do this, by the way, this would make an amazing startup for someone else. Hell, I’d gladly talk to investors myself about building this.)

All in: I don’t hate it. Despite the gnashing of teeth in the fediverse about Meta’s arrival, if Threads implements ActivityPub cleanly I think it’s actually going to be a decent addition. It may even be a boon to the whole open social web that validates the space and creates a stronger ecosystem of developers and platforms. Imagine that.

Christian Heilmann writes:

One thing I am not good at is write in superlatives about myself. That’s a good thing, I think? But often you are asked to big yourself up for some official publication or marketing materials. So I thought I give ChatGPT a go to turn a list of facts about myself into a big-up intro.

Intriguing. So I thought I’d try it for myself.

GPT-4 prompt: Discuss the accomplishments of Ben Werdmuller as glowingly as possible.

Ben Werdmuller is a prominent figure in the tech world, renowned for his innovative thinking, expert leadership, and deep commitment to open-source technology and digital rights. His accomplishments span a variety of areas, particularly entrepreneurship, web development, and thought leadership, making him a beacon of progress in our digital age.

Ben Werdmuller's endeavors in entrepreneurship are nothing short of exemplary. He co-founded Elgg, a pioneering social networking platform, and Known, a collaborative publishing platform. Both have revolutionized the way people and organizations communicate, collaborate, and share information online. In particular, Elgg's dedication to providing an open-source social networking engine laid the groundwork for a new era of online community building. Known, on the other hand, has been applauded for empowering individuals and groups to own their social activity online, a groundbreaking contribution to digital rights.

As an adept web developer, Werdmuller has demonstrated a profound understanding of technology's potential to create more inclusive and equitable online spaces. He has shown extraordinary skill in creating platforms that prioritize user needs and foster transparency. His commitment to open source is an embodiment of his belief in knowledge sharing and the collaborative advancement of technology.

Werdmuller's contribution to thought leadership is equally impressive. As a partner at Matter Ventures, he leveraged his deep tech insight to help burgeoning startups establish their footing and scale effectively. His writing, too, provides unique insights into the evolving digital landscape. Werdmuller frequently shares thought-provoking ideas on subjects like the future of the web, the dynamics of online communities, digital rights, and more. He is also an ardent advocate for a more equitable digital future, consistently pushing for policies that ensure the digital world is accessible, inclusive, and beneficial to all.

Overall, Ben Werdmuller's accomplishments are a testament to his unwavering dedication to leveraging technology for the greater good. He embodies the essence of a true digital pioneer, continually pushing the boundaries of what is possible and inspiring others along the way. His unique blend of technical acumen, entrepreneurial spirit, and visionary thought leadership make him an irreplaceable asset in the tech world. Werdmuller is a luminary, brightening the path towards a more inclusive and equitable digital future.

As Christian says about his own efforts, “if this blog ever sounds like this – just shoot me.” Let’s try the other way around.

GPT-4 prompt: Now rewrite to be as scathing as possible about Ben Werdmuller's achievements.

Ben Werdmuller, a figure in the tech industry, has been involved in several initiatives and companies. His undertakings span entrepreneurship, web development, and thought leadership. However, his contributions have been marked by a series of contentious and arguably over-hyped projects.

Werdmuller co-founded Elgg, a so-called social networking platform, and Known, a collaborative publishing platform. The relevance and impact of both these platforms are questionable at best. They are far from the mainstream and have not achieved the same level of success or influence as other social platforms or publishing mediums. Elgg, while touted as an open-source social networking engine, hasn't exactly become a household name. It struggles to maintain relevance in a world where giants like Facebook and Twitter dominate the scene. Known, meanwhile, purports to empower individuals and groups to own their social activity online, a grandiose claim that barely materializes in practice.

His role as a web developer is also questionable. While Werdmuller has certainly been involved in developing platforms, his offerings seem to be more in line with the ideology of open-source than the pragmatic needs of the average user. This approach, while potentially noble, seems disconnected from market realities and user demands.

In terms of thought leadership, Werdmuller's influence has also been quite limited. His tenure at Matter Ventures, where he served as a partner, has failed to produce any major success stories. His writing, while filled with lofty ideas about the future of the web and digital rights, often lacks practical and actionable insights. Advocating for an equitable digital future is commendable, but without concrete plans or successful implementations, his proposals seem to fall flat.

To sum it up, Werdmuller's career appears to be marked by a series of misfires and over-promises. His attempts to innovate and impact the digital world, while fueled by commendable principles, have largely failed to gain traction or produce significant outcomes. His vision of a more inclusive digital future, while noble, seems disconnected from the reality of the current tech landscape.

Much better.

I mildly redesigned my homepage today, in order to do a better job of what this site is and what you might read on it.

I’d hoped to use the Internet Archive to go back and look at all my blogs — I started my first personal website in 1994 and my first blog in 1998. Sadly, those seem to not be archived. But I can go back to look at my first blogs on platforms I built for myself.

First up, my blog on Elgg, circa its public release in 2004 (sadly missing a few profile icons):

And then the very first version of this site, using Idno (which became Known), in 2013:

The form of the blog hasn’t really changed much in those 20-ish years. In fact, I’ve maybe gone backwards; for example, I don’t check into spaces on my website anymore in the same way as I did in 2013, although I could. I just write.

At its heart, of course, a blog is just a diary; we wouldn’t expect it to. And that diary-like design makes it easy to transform into other formats like RSS and JSON. But if we were to reimagine what a regularly-updated website might look like, what would we do? How might we move from a feed to something else? Is that even possible?

At the very least it’s clear that what was a relatively revolutionary design - a web log that anyone can publish and anyone can read - has transitioned to being the subject of relatively mundane iterative design. There are no revolutions in blogging, just steady updates.

I fell into startups by accident.

There were two paths I could have gone down at university. Next to an over-posed photo taken at a digital photo booth at a branch of Boots the Pharmacist in downtown Oxford, my high school yearbook declares that I’m likely to become a journalist. On the other hand, I’d taught myself to program, and then to write HTML, and the web seemed like an exciting medium to tell stories with.

I got into the Computer Science program at the University of Edinburgh. In England, at least at the time, you effectively picked your major two years before even going to university: at sixteen years old, you were asked to choose three or four A-level subjects that you’d study exclusively until the end of high school. In turn, those subjects would dictate which degrees you were allowed to apply for. I refused to filter myself in this way, and I was still in the early stages of trying to figure out who I was, let alone what I wanted to do — a tall order for any sixteen year old, let alone a third culture kid who felt physically and socially out of sorts with the world. Edinburgh was one of the few programs that didn’t see my spread across arts and sciences as a bad thing.

I was big and I hated it. I’d grown up to be well over six feet tall, and I wasn’t skinny in the way some tall people get to be. I couldn’t (and still can’t) catch myself in the mirror without cringing. I hated every aspect of my physicality in a way that I didn’t quite have words for, and that self-loathing translated to an overwhelming awkwardness in real life. It crossed the line into self-harm, both directly and indirectly. If I was always going to be this, what was the point in throwing myself into anything?

My mother had become a financial analyst in the telecoms industry — she’d studied the split-up of AT&T and the formation of the Baby Bells as a postgraduate at Oxford — and she saw the internet revolution coming. She tried out the emerging ISPs for work, and I devoured it. I gophered around the world. When we finally got Demon Internet at home, which turned every dialed-in user into a genuine node on its network, I discovered newsgroups, and realized I could communicate with people who were roughly my age without them ever seeing me. I could be myself freely. It radically changed my life. To this day, this is the part of the internet I really care about: not protocols or code, but the ability for people to be themselves and tell their stories. The opportunity for contexts to collide, relationships of all kinds to be built, and for learning to happen between people.

Of course, computer science has almost nothing to do with that. Edinburgh is a well-renowned program, particularly in conjunction with its AI school, and I’ve benefitted from it. But at the time, I was deeply disappointed with the focus on mathematics. The part of computing I cared about more than any other was the internet, and the internet was made of people more than it was any networking technology or algorithm. I’m still not sure why I didn’t change my degree (I’m also not sure if they would have let me). Having an honors degree in CS has helped my career, but I didn’t find the meaning in it that I’d hoped to. In retrospect, I wish I’d used my US citizenship to go to a liberal arts school, but at the time I didn’t have any interest in leaving the UK.

So I got distracted. Back in high school, I’d started a hypertext computer magazine called Spire that I distributed on various bulletin board systems. For my friends, it was a way that I could get them free review copies of games; for me, making something and putting it out there was a worthwhile project in itself. At university, I transitioned it to the web, buying my first domain name in the process and setting it up on Pair Networks hosting. It wasn’t particularly well-read, but the process of building and writing it made it worth it to me. I kept up my personal homepage; I wrote a blog; I continued to write on the newsgroups and hang out on Internet Relay Chat for hours.

Sometime towards the end of my degree, I accidentally wrote a meme that spread like wildfire across the blogs. I put it up on a Friday evening, and by Sunday it had almost a hundred thousand pageviews. I’ve written this story elsewhere, but to make a long story short: I built it into a satirical site that got millions of pageviews a day, I built a community that endures to this day, and through it all, I got a taste of how powerful the web could really be. It wasn’t commercial at all — in fact, it was militantly not — but that wasn’t the point. The point for me, as always, was to connect and feel a little bit more seen.

Edinburgh has a little bit more of a technology scene now, but when I graduated there was nothing. I looked for jobs that I might find interesting. A computer magazine was interested in hiring me as a reviewer, but the pay was abysmal: just £12,000 a year, and they really wanted me to move to London to do it. I didn’t see how you could possibly afford to take a job like that and live in London if you weren’t already rich, which I wasn’t. So I ended up getting a job back at the university, working to create an educational site for professional sports coaches as part of the sports science department.

They weren’t sure where to put me, so I wound up in a converted broom closet with a window that didn’t shut, right over the canteen kitchen. The room was freezing in winter and permanently smelled of chips. Worse, it already had someone in it: a PhD student called Dave who made no secret of the fact that he resented my being there. I’d been pre-announced to the learning technology folks as a “computer scientist”, so they all thought I was some hoity-toity egotist rather than an entry-level developer who had no real idea what he was doing.

Dave was angry a lot of the time and liked to talk about it when he wasn’t playing games on the BBC Sports website. He was studying educational technology, which hadn’t really been in use even when I was doing my degree. But through him I learned all about virtual learning environments like WebCT. Later, I transitioned from the sports science department into general e-learning development, and I got more of a hands-on look, and I understood some of his frustration. The university was a pretty rigid environment, and the software was terrible. Students hated it; teachers hated it; administrators hated it; I’m not convinced that the people who wrote the software didn’t hate it. Platforms like WebCT and Blackboard, and even their open source counterpart, Moodle, were the worst: a terrible model for learning.

The web, on the other hand, was amazing. People were learning from each other all the time. It had already been changing my life for almost a decade, and now, through more accessible social media sites like LiveJournal, the benefits were spreading. Social media was informal learning, but learning nonetheless. All of this was already happening, but the actual learning technology products weren’t built with this understanding or intent. The internet had been so freeing for me — that release from my own physicality, the hooks and hangups that came from how I looked and felt in the real world — that I wished I’d had something with the same dynamics at university. I wished I’d been free there. I didn’t express this idea at the time, but that’s what drove me.

I suggested he started blogging his ideas. He was skeptical, but I somehow convinced him to start a blog — he gave it a very official-sounding name, the E-Portfolio Research and Development Community — and both post and comment on someone else’s blog almost every day. It worked, and his blog started to be accepted into the worldwide e-portfolio community. There was obviously something here for education.

Dave and I decided to build something that did take the social web into account. First, we simply described it in a very short informal paper, and put it out on Dave’s blog. The response from the community was immediate: one very well-respected analyst called it “visionary”. Another sniffily commented that it was one thing to talk about it and another to build it — which, well. Game on.

We both built a prototype; Dave’s in Macromedia Coldfusion, mine in PHP. (Even then, I don’t know that these were the right technology choices.) I can’t remember what his was called, but I put mine on a domain name I’d bought so that I would have an official-looking email address to apply for jobs with, based on the town in Switzerland my dad’s family comes from. Of the two prototypes, we decided to go with Elgg.

We first tried to give it to the university. Dave’s supervisor ran learning technology at the time; he took it to a meeting, and the response I heard back was that “blogging is for teenage girls crying in their bedrooms.” For all these years, I’ve taken Dave’s word that this is what was said, although I’ve sometimes wondered if he just didn’t want to give it to them. Either way, it appalled me enough that I quit my job.

I moved back to Oxford and into my parents’ house. They’d moved back to California to take care of my grandmother, and their plan was to rent it out; in the end we rented out the other bedroom to a friend of mine and I was lucky to be able to live in it rent-free for six months while I figured everything out. This was a big burden on them: we didn’t have a lot of money, and while the house wasn’t exactly in a great neighborhood, renting half of it didn’t cover its costs. They essentially underwrote me while I wrote the first version.

And then I had to get a job. I became the webmaster at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, where my job was to revamp the website to use a new CMS and a design that had been created by a prestigious firm in London. Instead, what happened was that I very quickly started becoming a startup resource inside the school. Students came to me to talk about their work, and would invite me to their seminars. Lecturers would ask me questions. I was allowed to attend an event called Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford, where people like Ev Williams (then CEO of Blogger), Reid Hoffman, and Craig Newmark would speak and share their experiences.

After kicking the tires for six months, we released Elgg as an open source project. Eventually, it was able to make enough money to employ me and Dave full-time, and I left to work on it. We were asked to help build the first version of MIT OpenCourseWare (which we eventually parted ways with), and consulted with a school district in upstate New York who wanted our expertise more than our software. But it was enough to get going with. My friendships at the Business School were so strong that I was allowed to come back the next year, with Dave alongside me. We asked Biz Stone to become an advisor, which he agreed to, and it felt like we were off to the races.

We had no idea what we were doing at any point, and we didn’t exactly get along. Our company was formed poorly; I was the CTO and Dave was the CEO because he’d looked me dead in the eye and said, “I’m going to put my foot down on this one.” I was still so unsure of myself and full of self-loathing that I just accepted it. Behind the scenes, we decided things together, and in some ways, the partnership worked; he had a kind of hubris that I lacked, and I understood the internet in a way that he didn’t. It helped that I could also build and write. At the same time, it didn’t make me feel good; Dave liked to tell people that we never would have been friends, which I think he meant as an odd couple style joke, but was hurtful every time. When we were in Cambridge to speak to MIT about OpenCourseWare, he took me aside to tell me that when push came to shove, he would be looking out for myself, and that I should do the same. It wasn’t the way I liked to think or act; we came from different worlds. I’m sure he was similarly perturbed by me: this maladjusted nerd who seemed to care much more about writing than about operating in the real world.

Elgg didn’t make anyone rich, but it was successful in a way I’m still proud of. The original version had over 80 translations and was used all over the world, including by non-profits who used it to organize resource allocation. A revamped version with a stronger architecture was used by the anti-austerity movement in Spain, by Oxfam to train aid workers, and by the Canadian government as a sort of intranet.

After a few years of bootstrapping, working almost 24/7, we accepted a modest investment from some executives at a large international bank, who were getting into startups on the side. They really wanted us to get into the fintech market, specifically around hedge funds, and maybe they were right from a business perspective: there’s a lot of money there. But it wasn’t why I’d started working on it, and it wasn’t what I wanted to do. Dave was more enthusiastic, and between that and the fact that our relationship had broken down to being almost antagonistic every day, I decided to leave. The day I shut down my laptop for the last time, I felt almost weightless: for the first time in the best part of a decade, I had no commitments. It had been weighing on me hard. I was 30 years old now, somehow, and it felt like I was emerging from a dark cave, blinking into the sunlight.

No other working experience has been exactly the same. I know a lot more, for one: I wouldn’t make the same mistakes. But I also wouldn’t take the same risks, exactly because I know more. My naïvety brought a kind of propulsion of its own; like many founders, I was fueled by pure Dunning-Kruger effect. But at the same time, there were days when I was dancing on my chair because of something that had happened. The startup brought incredible highs — the kind that can only come from something you’ve created yourself — as well as deep lows that interacted horribly with my already damaged self-image. It made me feel like I was worth something after all, but also that I wasn’t. It was a rollercoaster. And yes, despite everything, I would do it again.

I’ve loved every moment of working with The 19th. I was a supporter before I joined, and I’ll continue to be one afterwards. As well as well-executed journalism at the intersection of gender, politics, and policy, The 19th is a masterclass in building an equitable remote organizational culture that should serve as a model to other newsrooms and startups. (Hopefully, in part thanks to the documentary about it that will be released at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, it will be.) The CTO role is now open, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

So what’s next?

The internet is at a new crossroads. Mainstay services that have been constants for over a decade are ceding space to newcomers that challenge prevailing venture capital business models and offer equitable alternatives. The over-financialization of the web is giving way to co-operatives, collectives, and true decentralization.

This is a movement at the heart of the open web that I care very deeply about. We’re in a very unique moment in time where that movement could succeed, empowering communities everywhere - or it could topple back and be replaced by the same old extractive gatekeepers.

I began my career by building the first website for a local paper in my hometown. I co-founded Elgg, an open source social networking platform that was used by Oxfam to train aid workers as well as universities like Harvard and Stanford. I was a part of the indieweb community, helping people to own their own web presence apart from silos like Facebook - and co-founder of the indieweb platform Known, which powered KQED Teach, a site that won an award from the National Association for Media Literacy. I helped train newsrooms in human-centered design at Matter (where I also invested in mission-driven startups) and taught equitable product design workshops at the Newmark J-School.

I want to use these ideas - human-centered design, open software development, and radical collaboration - in service of the next phase of media and the open web. I want to work with organizations that are similarly motivated, and who have empathetic, inclusive remote work cultures.

What does that look like, exactly? I’m not quite sure yet. It could involve joining an organization or it could involve starting one. It could involve advising many projects or concentrating on one. It will certainly involve lots of experiments.

If this mission resonates with you and you have a Ben-shaped hole in your organization - or if you want to help support these kinds of projects and communities - let’s talk. You can always email me at ben@werd.io.

Thanks for sticking with me. Let’s find out what happens next together.

I’m learning that I cannot write at night. Many writers do their best work once everyone else has gone to bed when the house is quiet; I, on the other hand, am a ragged, sorry mess.

This is a bit of a turnaround for me: I wrote the first version of Elgg in the evenings, usually logging off at a little past 1am. But the rigors of parenting an infant have meant that I’ve become a morning person by force.

So right now I’ve really got two options: wake up really early, and write before everyone else wakes up. (After I’ve made my first cup of coffee, obviously.) Or carve out time and write during baby’s first nap, which is usually somewhere between one to two hours. The latter has been working out pretty well for me lately, but I’ve also been booking calls during that slot.

New rule, then, at least while I’m the primary carer for our son (perhaps it’ll change if we start sending him to daycare or hire a nanny). The morning slot is for writing. The afternoon slots can be used for calls. I need to make that first naptime sacrosanct, otherwise I’m never going to finish this thing.

And I’d like to finish this thing.

I had a revelation about the book I’m writing at about midnight last night: something that elevates the whole idea and ties it together in a way that I didn’t think I’d even been looking for. It makes the idea more resonant for me, which is what I need to emotionally follow through with a project. I’ve been struggling, and I hope this extra motivational push will help me. It turns it from something I think is a good idea to something that is intensely personal for me. It answers the question why should I write this? in a way that isn’t just because.

This led me to thinking about the software projects I’ve built. It’s all well and good to say that you need to build something that people want - which, of course you do - but that doesn’t answer the question of why you will follow through with it. Why is it meaningful to you?

I’ve worked on many things, but probably the two most prominent projects were something called Elgg and something called Known. Elgg was an open source social networking engine, built for higher education, which was originally inspired by LiveJournal: a place where anyone could post to as big or as small an audience as they wanted, and converse, using any media. Known was more of a publishing platform: something like a decentralized, self-hosted Tumblr that allowed you to build a stream of content that any number of people could contribute to. Perhaps by coincidence, I build them a decade apart.

When I worked on Elgg I had a giant chip on my shoulder. I was much younger, and high school was still relatively fresh in my mind. There, teachers had laughed at my ambitions, and more so, at me. I wanted to prove that I was capable of doing something smart and meaningful. More than that, as a third culture kid, I constantly felt out of sorts: posting online had allowed me to show more of myself and find friends. Creating a platform that allowed other people to do the same also carried the hope that I would meet more people through it. Through the software I made, I hoped I would be seen. It won awards, was translated into many languages, and became relatively influential. Because it was fully open source, any organization could pick it up and use it for free. I felt good about it, and it felt like I had done something good that in some ways justified my existence. My photo is on my high school’s alumni website: I showed those teachers.

In some ways, that motivation carried me through Known, too, although with a new chip: although in the early days I’d written every line of code and designed the core mechanic, I hadn’t been the CEO of Elgg. What if I was? How would that feel? What other choices would be possible? As it turned out, it did not feel good, and I don’t think that particular chip was enough to hang a company off of. Elgg introduced the idea of social media to a higher education context - and then NGOs, followed by corporations. Known didn’t really break any new ground; I wonder now if I just wanted to see what happened if I did it again in a different context. I met people through both projects, but one felt like a company - something that could, theoretically, grow and live beyond me - and the other was always just a project. The personal resonance that Elgg had for me could be felt by others. It’s not that Known wasn’t meaningful for me, but Elgg was on another level, in part because I was in another place in my life.

My next project is a book, not a software product. I’m unapologetic about that. I’m sure I will build another software platform afterwards; I think, eventually, I may even have another startup in me. But regardless of the form or the nature of the project, I think that personal resonance really matters. People notice if you’re just trying to make either a point or a buck; if it’s something that really matters to you, that will come through in the quality of your work, the conviction of your arguments, and the time and effort you spend on it. We’re all human, and creating work that resonates with each other is the best we can hope to do.