stephen! @makingarecord@friend.camp

Hi! I'm Stephen. I have over a decade of experience in criminal justice, civil legal aid, government service delivery, and the role of data/technology in all of that. I've done litigation, research, tech projects, and organizing. Always trying to get better at all of it.

I also sometimes make music, go on hikes, go birdwatching, and hang out with my cat. I think that's basically it! #introductions #intro

"You can't be a good organizer if you don't genuinely love and respect ordinary people." - Jane McAlevey

Good organizers are "people who who genuinely believe that ordinary people have high intelligence, people who very deeply respect ordinary people.”

"The next person to talk to that worker will be their manager. Then the next person to talk to that worker will be FOX news." This is why we talk to people three, four, five times, real assessments of commitment. It's so good, wow

"In the mobilizing model, you may be involving people in very large numbers, but the limitation of the mobilizing approach is that you’re only talking to people who agree with you already... What makes organizing different than all other kinds of activism is it puts you in direct contact every day with people who have no shared political values whatsoever."

The homework for this week's meeting includes an interview with Jane McAlevey that is already so incredible, especially her distinction between "mobilizing" and "organizing." https://www.vox.com/podcasts/2020/3/17/21182149/jane-mcalevey-the-ezra-klein-show-labor-organizing

Can't get over a video I just saw of a stadium packed with people without masks all weirdly waving at a children's hospital while a marching band plays a sea shanty

Wow I really did compare the opening polka song of Groundhog Day to Yom Kippur Kol Nidre services, huh

The family who fostered Lucky in his first few months were doing some clicker training stuff with him, and it's been seven years, and I've never done it, but he still perks up and comes running when I click a pen

Just one incredible fact: the rise of streaming entertainment has led to much more unpredictable electrical grid usage, as now people don't just all watch the same shows on the same networks at the same time.

I am now thinking about one of my favorite videos of all time, which makes the analogy between gravitational potential energy and electric potential energy really concrete: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Jx_bJgIFhI

I put up a bird feeder for the first time and have only had one visitor (a cardinal, very nice)

These rental scooters in Columbus should either be banned or free

Hey I got a lukewarm take for you: Cuomo is not a bad guy, that's not how any of that works. But he is a guy who abused his power and who is now losing that power. That's a nice thing to see, even if it's too late and also doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.

Years and years ago, some friends and I observed that lots of the people we met in Columbus, Ohio were unnervingly and uncritically optimistic. This was before you could just say "Millennial White Liberal" and capture essentially the same idea.