My Communities


Since 2017 I have been Biodiversity Informatics lead for IMERSS, the Institute for Multidisciplinary Ecological Research in the Salish Sea. I have been working to help communities with different models for knowledge — expert naturalists, citizen scientists, and Indigenous individuals and others — respectfully cooperate to share their knowledge of the natural world and be empowered as stewards of their natural environment. Some visualisations I've produced can be seen on the IMERSS portal.
The Malleable Systems Collective believes, as I do, that it should be as easy to change software as it is to use it. We believe in widening the circle of those empowered to make decisions about their own technology, through making it as easy as possible to understand and change it.
Between 2022 and 2024 I was a Solutions Network Member for CIFAR's Data Communities for Inclusion project, finding ways that self-employed women in India's SEWA cooperatives could effectively own their own technological platforms. I developed a very low-cost spreadsheet-driven e-commerce platform for SEWA Saamarth that allowed the members to advertise and sell vegetable products within the Federation.
I am affiliated with Lichen Community Systems, a Canada-based worker-led cooperative building technologies to support the arts, disability and, non-profit and cooperative communities. Under this umbrella I have issued a manifesto for Knitting Data Communities promoting an ethic for groups of overlapping communities sharing data that concerns them.
Boxer is a highly interesting and ancient programming system which closely conforms to Jonathan Edwards' definition of a substrate. In 2022 I chaired the 2nd international workshop dedicated to Boxer in the form of the Boxer Salon hosted at Programming 2022 at Porto. I also maintain a helpful index to the Boxer literature.