What does Community-based Economies even mean?
We can enact alternative social, economic, and environmental relationships -- or, in a phrase, community-based economies. Here the use of the word economies is deliberate. Alternative economies can be designed to foster better social, economic, and environmental relationships than what we currently experience now under the mainstream economy. To do this I employ a research paradigm called action research, using participatory design of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation tools to allow folks to spend their efforts elsewhere, more productively, and in community.
I'm honored to announce that this fall I will start as an assistant professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, in the Ilitch School of Business. Detroit holds a special place in my heart because my dissertation work was entirely focused there. I'm starting this blog now because I want to chronicle an ongoing, long lived attempt at fostering community-based economies in our current day and age.
My background and research goals
I am an industry researcher turned academic. I got my start doing government data science work, which provided me with the background to work with various philanthropies and NGOs, moving from government to the social good sector. It was here that my work turned from the extremely technical to the sociotechnical, which is even more complex. There's a difference between complicated and complex -- the complicated can be tackled by careful planning and routinized action, whereas the complex requires agility, meta-awareness, and collaboration.
In my PhD program at the University of Michigan School of Information, I was fortunate to be advised by Dr. Ron Eglash, an ethnomathematician and community-based economies researcher who regularly applies Generative Justice theory, and Dr. Lionel Robert, who focuses on human-robot interaction, particularly interaction through and with technologies. Later on, I enjoyed guidance and advice from Dr. Audrey Bennett, a scholar of cross cultural and transdisciplinnary design, and Dr. Mark Guzdial, who studies how people come to understand computing and effective processes for doing so. I chose the School of Information over Computer Science at the University of Michigan in part for the vast interdisciplinary connections. Much later in my program someone offhandedly commented that the School of Information houses researchers that would be looked at as slightly odd, even unorthodox, in the halls of another department. But this interdisciplinarity turned out to be an important consideration, particularly motivating for transforming departments of Computer Science into Schools of Computing, which are emerging competitors to Schools of Information.
Although my goals are established my research projects are developing. Philosophically, a core framing is to investigate how solutions to broad-based problems can foster specific community-based solutions. I have several journal articles under revise and resubmit and as they (hopefully!) turn into accepted articles I can paint this point in greater detail.
What to expect from this blog
In terms of what to expect, I am a tinkerer, in many ways a hacker. I'll be posting on topics like productivity management, community participatory design, semi-private musings on academia, policy and philanthropy, and systems change — all through the lens of computing for community-based economies.
As my initial contract to you, my dear reader, I commit to posting bi-weekly as a start and will re-evaluate that pace after a month. I'll also use the chat feature to gather input on topics to cover. Throughout my PhD program one practice that fostered myself was to post daily updates on my work in a Slack channel, stood up during the pandemic, in the style of an agile standup blurb. There was something emotionally anchoring about sustaining a regular practice no matter what was going on elsewhere, and I want to carry that forward as a young community-focused academic.
Several days after I defended my dissertation a scholar whom I enormously respected reached out to me and asked: What is next? How do you want your work furthered? And in that moment, like many with new found children, I realized I had focused on the singular moment of birth and less on the moment(s) of growth. But what happens after is just as important, if not more. So, if Detroit-based economies and ways to foster them using AI and automation sound exciting to you please subscribe! I look forward to undertaking this journey together.
Note: You can read my day to day thoughts and work in my daily notes here.