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In the untimely demise of 18F, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I wanted to do with my time on administrative leave. (The arcane term for the purgatory between having a job and no longer having one.)
Over the last two weeks, I’ve talked to folks galore. I’ve also been working with my crew at AIGA Portland on the 2025 Portland Design Month (scheduled for October 1-18, 2025) and a rad crew of volunteers working on the revamp of the AIGA Portland website where it’ll live.
Meeting lots of folks at events around the city, along with my own critiques about “civic tech” and where it’s heading and how people can use their skills to solve real problems led me to wonder, “what can I do with this time that’d be a way to help?”
Thanks for the reading the blog, Dad.
Yes, I know it sounds counterproductive to lose your job — albeit through a cascade of norms-breaking chicanery — and decide to start an all-volunteer effort where you lead people into projects working for free.
But my logic here is sound. As a critical theorist, one of my big critiques about design as practice, is complaining about how it doesn’t matter what the logo looks like in a world that’s being upended by chaos actors who don’t care about you or your neighbors. Why should we continue to design interfaces that radically transform modern life as we know, without an iota of benefit (besides payment) being delivered to the places we live, with the people who are neighbors? What is the graphic design answer for suffering?
These are heavy questions that many people would simply reply, “that’s not my job, we pay taxes and elect leaders to deal with that.” Or “I don’t have kids, so good schools aren’t really my problem.” And it’s precisely that sort of delegation of societal concerns, of caring about things happening far away and paying less attention to the various and sundry ways that unelected committees that meet at 1pm on Monday indirect contribute to the housing crisis in your town.
I kept asking myself, “what we can do about [insert here]” and the answer is “it depends,” but I tend to like more decisive action than waiting around for stuff to happen.
And that’s where the Portland Digital Corps comes in.
What I’m proposing is deliberately different: short-term, designer-led engagements focused on quick wins and low-hanging fruit. Think of it as complementary work existing in a different timeframe and scope:
My big frustration with civic tech — especially the so-called leaders of this movement — is all the puffery centering the work. I want to center the benefactors of this work, and the doers who make it possible. Having spent the past few years rising through the ranks of bureaucractic leadership, I have a lot of appreciation for how providing air cover, understanding the rules and hurdles can enable you to ship things, move boulders and get stuff done.
It’s labroious, requires multivariate skills including actually knowing how to deliver things, so that when you do get an opening, you can help people with less context move through and use their window of times effectively.
I attend a lot of events in the city and I run into so many people who are job hunting, often people early to mid career, or career transition folks who are seeking to get a foothold in fields they were told were good for jobs.
While that’s shifting with the incursions of LLMs into everyday life and impacting the jobs, some of this is just the unflexible job market that Portland has for folks working in tech. It might be better than a small town, but it’s not as good a place for an upstart tech worker compared to Seattle or San Francisco on the west coast. This is the sort of place where you need to bring your job with you or else, you’ll often make less and there’ll be fewer opportunities.
I’d never have moved here without a job already, and I’m not 100% sure I’ll stay long term, without another remote job.
The PDX Digital Corps isn’t meant to get anyone a job, it’s not explicitly for people who are job-seekers either, folks who have time to volunteer should reach out and get involved. But I do think giving people who are less familar with shipping digital products in an Agile way could benefit from our team structure/model, and more importantly, getting people into their communities helping out others with their skills is so important.
I want to acknowledge the excellent work that Code PDX is doing for years in Portland’s civic tech space. They’ve built impressive, long-term projects that have made real impact in our community. Ideally, once the Portland Digital Corps sunsets, people will join them too.
Over the past few years, I’ve consistently launched projects that engage people through participation. This was long an area that I wanted my work to expand in, because while I’ve been fortunate to speak at conferences around the world, and be on podcasts and the like, it wasn’t until a few years ago that I started doing what felt more like “art-style critique” projects.
The Portland Digital Corps will fit that in a different way, since it won’t be a one-day event, it’ll last several weeks. You can learn more about my participatory design work over the last few years including Death To UX (2022), Manipulation Engineering (2024) and A Parliament of Neighbors (2023) on my professional website.
The short-term nature of this is really about making sure that we’re action oriented, that nobody gets the impression I’m trying to start a new organization, because that’s not my goal with this project. I want to show that you can create a nimble, community-centric, people-designed civic tech engagement that doesn’t have to turn into a lifelong project or something that exists forever. Not because the work isn’t important, but because if you can build resilience into these organizations through coaching and teaching and various modalities, it makes the need for scrum teams of technologists showing up to “save the day” less necessary.
Maybe you have a lot of time on your hands, maybe you don’t. This idea might just be a handful of us working on 1 or 2 projects and calling it a day. It might be more than that. I just think that we should be thinking about how we can help, and this is one way to do that. If you are somehow from a local public interest, non-profit or civic group and think we could help (Why are you on my blog, lol) please do check out the site and reachout.
Learn more and get involved at digitalcorpspdx.org.
I’m still finalizing where the info session will be, probably in the next week or so, this idea is about 48 hours old as of this blog post…so things are moving fast and I’m working this out as we go.
Drafted while listening to Aloha - You’ve Escaped (2006)
