Corrected an extra space in Mannan interview

.gitlab-ci.yml

@@ -32,7 +32,7 @@ build_site:
   # Define when this job runs (e.g., only on the main branch)
   # Adjust 'only' or 'rules' as needed for your workflow
   only:
-    - publish # Example: Run only on the main branch
+    - main # builds on commit to main branch
 
 # Job to deploy the built site using cloudron-surfer
 deploy_site:
@@ -63,5 +63,5 @@ deploy_site:
   # Define when this job runs (e.g., only on the main branch after build)
   # Adjust 'only' or 'rules' as needed for your workflow
   only:
-    - publish # Example: Run only on the main branch
+    - main # publishes on commit to main branch
 

README.md

@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ A project of the [Media Economies Design Lab](https://www.colorado.edu/lab/medla
 
 Developed in Hugo.
 
-## Usage
+## Development
 
 Be sure to have a recent Hugo *extended* version installed.
 
@@ -20,24 +20,34 @@ Then, to serve the site locally:
 hugo server
 ```
 
-## Articles
+## Deployment
 
-see `/archetypes/article.md` for the article template. You can create a new article with:
+Thanks to the [MEDLab Hugo template](https://git.medlab.host/dhorn/medlab-hugo-template), the site is set up to deploy automatically to the MEDLab server via GitLab CI. To do so, when developing locally, use this git command:
 
 ```
-hugo new content content/articles/lastname-interview_title.md
+git push origin main
 ```
 
-This will create a new article in the `content/articles` directory with the current date and the title you provide. You can then edit the file to add your content.
+A push to `main` should trigger a pipeline in GitLab to deploy the site. If it doesn't, check for errors in Gitea and GitLab.
+
+## Interviews
+
+see `/archetypes/interview.md` for the interview template. You can create a new interview with:
+
+```
+hugo new content content/interviews/lastname-interview_title.md
+```
+
+This will create a new interview in the `content/interviews` directory with the current date and the title you provide. You can then edit the file to add your content.
 
 Alternately, you can manually add a file there in the proper format.
 
 ### Headshots
 
-Optionally you can add a headshot photo to your article. To do this:
+Optionally you can add a headshot photo to your interview. To do this:
 
 1. Place your image file in the `/assets/headshots/` directory
-2. Add a `headshot` field to your article's front matter with just the filename. For example:
+2. Add a `headshot` field to your interview's front matter with just the filename. For example:
 
 ```yaml
 headshot: "firstname_lastname.jpg"
@@ -47,7 +57,7 @@ headshot: "firstname_lastname.jpg"
 
 ### Narrator links
 
-You can add links to an article that relate to the narrator. To do this, add a `links` field to the front matter of the article. The value should be a list of objects, each with a `text` and `url` field. For example:
+You can add links to an interview that relate to the narrator. To do this, add a `links` field to the front matter of the interview. The value should be a list of objects, each with a `text` and `url` field. For example:
 
 ```
 links:
@@ -56,11 +66,11 @@ links:
   - text: "My Twitter"
     url: "https://twitter.com/example"
 ```
-This will include the links in the article page. The links will be displayed as a list with the text as the link text and the URL as the link target.
+This will include the links in the interview page. The links will be displayed as a list with the text as the link text and the URL as the link target.
 
 ### Open Graph Image
 
-You can add Open Graph image (for social media sharing) to an article. To do this, add a `ogImage` field to the front matter of the article. The value should be the path to the image file. For example:
+You can add Open Graph image (for social media sharing) to an interview. To do this, add a `ogImage` field to the front matter of the interview. The value should be the path to the image file. For example:
 
 ```yaml
 ogImage: "/images/my-image.jpg"

assets/css/components/wompum.css

@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@
 }
 
 .wompum-container .wompum-grid,
-.wompum-container .wompum-article-grid {
+.wompum-container .wompum-interview-grid {
   gap: 2px;
   height: 100%;
   min-height: 2px;
@@ -12,17 +12,17 @@
 }
 
 .wompum-container--wide-gap .wompum-grid,
-.wompum-container--wide-gap .wompum-article-grid {
+.wompum-container--wide-gap .wompum-interview-grid {
   gap: 1rem;
 }
 
 .wompum-container--no-gap .wompum-grid,
-.wompum-container--no-gap .wompum-article-grid {
+.wompum-container--no-gap .wompum-interview-grid {
   gap: 0;
 }
 
 .wompum-grid,
-.wompum-article-grid {
+.wompum-interview-grid {
   display: grid;
   width: 100%;
 }

assets/css/interview.css

@@ -4,23 +4,23 @@
   margin-left: -1rem;
 }
 
-.article-title--single .article-title__narrator {
+.interview-title--single .interview-title__narrator {
   @apply mb-2 block font-light;
 }
 
-.article-title--single .article-title__subject {
+.interview-title--single .interview-title__subject {
   font-size: 1.5em;
 }
 
-.article-title--list {
+.interview-title--list {
   @apply text-2xl font-bold text-gray-900 group-hover:text-pine-900 underline underline-offset-5 decoration-sand-500 hover:decoration-pine-900
   dark:text-sand-100 dark:group-hover:text-sand-500 dark:decoration-sand-900 dark:hover:decoration-sand-500;
 }
-.article-title--list .article-title__narrator::after {
+.interview-title--list .interview-title__narrator::after {
   content: ":";
 }
 
-.article-title--list .article-title__subject {
+.interview-title--list .interview-title__subject {
   @apply font-light;
 }
 

assets/css/styles.css

@@ -50,4 +50,4 @@ body {
 @import "components/wompum.css";
 @import "fonts.css";
 @import "main.css";
-@import "article.css";
+@import "interview.css";

assets/js/wompum.js

@@ -98,7 +98,7 @@ class WompumGrid {
     }
 }
 
-class ArticleGrid extends WompumGrid {
+class InterviewGrid extends WompumGrid {
     constructor(element, metadata) {
         super(element);
         this.metadata = metadata;
@@ -249,16 +249,16 @@ document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', () => {
         grid.init();
     });
 
-    // Initialize article grids
-    document.querySelectorAll('.wompum-article-grid').forEach(element => {
+    // Initialize interview grids
+    document.querySelectorAll('.wompum-interview-grid').forEach(element => {
         let metadata = {};
         try {
             metadata = JSON.parse(element.dataset.metadata || '{}');
         } catch (e) {
-            console.error('Error parsing metadata for article grid:', e);
+            console.error('Error parsing metadata for interview grid:', e);
         }
         
-        const grid = new ArticleGrid(element, metadata);
+        const grid = new InterviewGrid(element, metadata);
         grid.init();
     });
 

content/about.md

@@ -7,3 +7,5 @@ include_partials: ["facilitator-list.html","wompum-demo.html"]
 The Protocol Oral History Project is an effort to honor and share the stories of protocol artists—the skilled builders and stewards of the rules, standards, and norms that shape our lives in often invisible ways, ranging from technical standards and diplomatic practices to Indigenous traditions and radical subcultures.
 
 The project is led by Nathan Schneider, director of the [Media Economies Design Lab](https://www.colorado.edu/lab/medlab/) at the University of Colorado Boulder. Website designed by [Drew Hornbein](https://www.dhornbein.com/). The project is made possible by support from the Siegel Family Endowment.
+
+The Protocol Oral History Project is part of [Governance Ecologies](https://governance.ecologies.info), a family of projects "expanding the repertoires for community governance."

content/interviews/acey-organizational_closures.md

@@ -0,0 +1,198 @@
+---
+narrator: Camille Acey
+subject: Organizational closures
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2025-05-06
+approved: 2025-05-09
+summary: "Organizations too often fail to prepare for their inevitable end; The Wind Down shares best practices for healthy closures."
+location: "Brooklyn, NYC, USA"
+headshot: "camille_acey.png"
+topics: ["open source", "organizations", "ritual"]
+links: 
+  - text: "Personal website"
+    url: "https://camilleacey.com/"
+  - text: "The Wind Down"
+    url: "https://www.wind-down.org/"
+---
+
+*How do you introduce yourself, particularly in the context of building and stewarding protocols?*
+
+I don't know if I've ever presented myself in the context of building and stewarding. I just say my name.
+
+I practice through an organization called The Wind Down, and I usually describe The Wind Down as having three pillars right now. One is the platform, which provides materials for people. It's an aggregator of information about other people and projects working on closures. I offer a hotline for people who are closing or in discernment around closure—it was free, but I'm trying to charge for it now.
+
+The second is the community of practice, the composting and hospice community of practice that I facilitate. We have a Slack, and we meet once a month over Zoom.
+
+The third is the newsletter that I put out called *Closing Remarks*, which is a roundup of notable or interesting closures, and commentary around the larger themes of closure, either globally or on a national scale. Those are the three main projects I sort of steward under the umbrella of The Wind Down.
+
+*Can you outline the trajectory of your life and career, as it relates to this work of closure, of winding down?*
+
+I was born in Berkeley, California. Both my parents were solidly middle-class workers committed to their respective unions and different sorts of organizing.
+
+My father grew up in Newark, New Jersey, and came out of a Black radical tradition of organizing, working with Amiri Baraka and people like that. He grew up when there were the riots, and he was very informed by that sort of organizing and commitment to various types of political, social, and community engagement. That kind of work was instilled in my household.
+
+I went to UC Berkeley, which has its own history of student organizing. I lived in the student housing cooperatives all four and a half years at Berkeley, and that was very formative for me in terms of seeing how democratic structures could work. We had students ranging from me—I was 16 when I moved into student co-ops—all the way to people in their fifties, and no one was in charge. We were all running it together.
+
+I had to tackle challenges as a 16-year-old first starting there, then growing up in the co-ops, then moving up to working at the more central level, then joining the board at the North American Students of Cooperation level. It gave me a strong sense of self-determination and empowerment.
+
+After college, I went in two different directions. I worked in tech and got very involved in open source. Some friends from UC Berkeley were early people who told me about Linux and open source. So I got involved in open source while staying true to my community organizing and cooperative roots.
+
+I got involved in many different things, and over time some would end in super disappointing ways. I knew from the open-source space that there were protocols that could support better ways of working together. I was curious whether we could apply that to community organizing and have some protocol around how to close better.
+
+I was part of a community called The Maintainers—I still am—and in 2019 I sent an email asking if anybody had a good playbook for closing things, because I was seeing closures happen all around me.
+
+They sent me in a couple different directions—most notably to Cassie Robinson in the UK, who was building something called the Farewell Fund and the Care-full Closures project, which became Stewarding Loss. She was approaching the same questions from the philanthropic perspective: we give people money to start and grow things, but we're not giving people money to close things well.
+
+Another person was Joe McLeod, who's British but lives in Sweden. He approaches these things from product and service design perspectives. He's written two books called *Ends.* and *Endineering*. He's a prophet of endings, and he constantly thinks about how to help things end better and also how we can be more honest with ourselves about disposal and recycling.
+
+The third influence was an activist and scholar called Mariame Kaba, known for writing about conflict resolution, movements, and abolition in prison organizing. I'd been giving small donations to her Nia Project, which was an umbrella for different campaigns. What impressed me was that the campaigns were very discrete with clear desired outcomes and a strong commitment to ending once they achieved those outcomes. I hadn't seen organizing done that way, where it was time-boxed and clear. So those are the three main flows of inspiration that drove my work.
+
+*As you began approaching that work, as you put that message out to the Maintainers list and started engaging in this practice and supporting others, what kinds of models did you draw on? What experiences in your life, what competencies that you had or saw in others, informed your sense of how this could be done well?*
+
+I worked in open-source tech for a while, so I was inspired by this sense of openness and sharing, and the archival that's embodied in projects like Internet Archive and GitHub. I was thinking about how we can share more regularly.
+
+In tech, we also have these cycles where you have retrospectives, postmortems—protocols that kick into place connected to where you are on a timeline. When a project ends, that triggers a retrospective.
+
+I started a collective many years ago called CoLET, which was an attempt to be a hyper-local, radical feminist, tech intervention. We had big dreams after the first Trump administration. We were thinking about getting movement people to move off of Google and Microsoft and start using open-source tech. *What do we need to do to get these people to stop using surveillance technology?*
+
+We approached it from a couple different places. One of the co-founders had been part of Occupy Wall Street's tech committee and Occupy Sandy, which had ended unceremoniously. People hid passwords from each other and all that. So she was coming in with a strong sense of keeping things as transparent as possible and overcommunicating if there's a problem.
+
+Going back to what I learned from Mariame Kaba, we also built in what ending would look like from the beginning. We built out the process for ending at the start and had endings in mind, even if we didn't specifically say we're going to exist for five years. We wanted to have a clear "smash glass to exit" process.
+
+I had been thinking for a while about how nonprofits and movement-based groups could adopt cadences, workflows, and processes where we can revisit things and say, "Do we want to keep doing this?"
+
+I wanted to develop playbooks and take the learnings from working in tech and apply them to movement work, with a movement lens. I could hand people a book of things to do or a checklist. If you look at my website, there's a lot where I'm trying to systematize it. I don't want to do this work forever or maintain everything forever, but I want to push out a body of work because my bigger thrust is to encourage consciousness of endings much sooner.
+
+A lot of times when organizations come to me, it's almost like *I didn't believe this could ever happen to me* energy. I think it's important for more people to be thinking about endings at the beginning, in the middle, all the time.
+
+The other work that inspired how I designed The Wind Down comes out of another project called The Decelerator, which grew out of Stewarding Loss. They're a couple of hops ahead of me in their work. When I spoke to Iona Lawrence, who co-founded The Decelerator with Louise Armstrong, Iona pointed me in certain directions. She suggested the idea of a hotline, and she gave me everything they'd already developed for their hotline so I didn't have to start from zero.
+
+That's how they were with all the materials on the Stewarding Loss website. They said, "*If anything is helpful, just take it and run with it."* They hadn't been formal about licensing—I don't know if they're familiar with that—but it was a "gentlewoman's agreement" that I could use it if I credit them, and they were happy for this work to proliferate. If things don't apply in the US context as they do in the UK context, I tweak things as needed. It felt very much in the spirit of an open source approach.
+
+*When organizations approach you through the hotline or other means, how much do you find yourself leaning on common patterns as opposed to having to adjust your guidance to the particular situation? How much commonality do you think there is in these patterns of winding down?*
+
+There's a lot of commonality and general themes. The more I do these hotline calls, the more I try to make it easier on myself. At the beginning I was doing calls and scribbling notes freehand. Then I started typing while muted, and then I would clean up what I typed and put it in a template I'd created based on what Iona was using in the UK for The Decelerator.
+
+Recently I realized I could just type directly into the template I send people after the call. And then I thought, "Why don't I put all the questions in there too?" I have a "Wind Down Self-Assessment" on The Wind Down website with questions I tend to ask people every time. I just put it in the doc so I don't have to search or try to remember.
+
+Sometimes I can get a few minutes into a call and characterize what type of closure it is. I have a few buckets or checkboxes for types of closure.
+
+One popular type is founder/leader loss—when a founder leaves an organization and no one can really fill their boots. I recently talked with someone who wasn't the founder but was a charismatic leader who'd stepped back from the organization—and then came back because he thought they were in bad shape. He was pointing to other factors for the closure, and I asked, "Does your departure have anything to do with the state it's in now?" He paused and realized that it did. So I mentally checked that box—leader loss.
+
+Early on, when I started the hotline, I saw many well-meaning organizations that were like, *"We're going to hire a Black woman as our executive director because George Floyd was killed and this is how we show we care"*—but she didn't get support, or maybe she was the wrong person. It was virtue signaling, and then everything exploded. I've seen far too many of those.
+
+I'm seeing some decline in those and an increase in organizations saying, "Nobody wants anything to do with DEI anymore, so our services are no longer welcome and our business is imploding." They're probably both happening simultaneously, but I think the "we'll solve everything by getting a Black woman in charge" arc is on the downswing.
+
+Even when I recognize a pattern, I wait and let the person speak it aloud. I don't say, "Oh, you're typical." The only time I might say that is when people ask, "Do I sound crazy?" or "Is this the worst closure you've ever heard about?" It never really is. When people ask that, I'll say, "It happens. I've heard about it."
+
+I keep a spreadsheet with notes about the type of closure and the reasoning for it. The interesting thing is there is never one cause. It's usually like you brought in the wrong ED who doesn't know how to fundraise, so you ran out of money, and then whatever else.
+
+Joe's book *Ends* has this idea of a "crack of doubt," which he learned from Helen Rose Ebaugh's book *Becoming An Ex*, about her experience in life when she was a nun and decided she didn't want to be anymore. She talks about this first moment of doubt, and how other things came on that crack and put pressure on it until it became a fracture. When I speak to organizations, I try to identify what that initial crack was, and then ask what other pressures came upon it.
+
+I think the work I'm doing is really about helping people craft a coherent narrative. That's usually what I give them—I give them a readback of what I heard in a way that's a little bit more narrativized than the way they usually convey it to me. If I have multiple people, like three board members, and they had some conflicts arise while we were talking, I might highlight those. I give them resources, usually links to things, and then suggestions of what they might want to do next.
+
+It's been really nice to templatize everything and have things as simplified as possible. I had imposter syndrome at the beginning, when I thought maybe I should take some courses on something. But people usually say, "We can find a lawyer very easily, we can find an accountant really easily. What you do—we don't know anybody else who does this." So they've been pretty appreciative of the time and space.
+
+*Do you ever see situations where maybe people are too premature in declaring the end? Have you ever found yourself wanting to say, "Maybe it's not the end after all"?*
+
+I always go into the call saying, "I'm not here to call balls and strikes." When people sign up for a closure call, the options are: "we already closed", "we are closing", "we are in discernment around closing", and maybe "I'm just curious about closures in general."
+
+Of the people that have reached out to me, less than half actually closed. I never tell people it's time to close or not. I'm not the Grim Reaper. I'm just here to listen and make suggestions of next steps they might want to take. Not everybody closes.
+
+Another thing I recommend sometimes is a pause. I think many people aren't familiar with what an operational pause might look like, so I wrote a blog post about the power of the pause. Sometimes you just need more time to think about thinking, to think about *possibly* closing.
+
+I don't do the work of saving organizations. When you actually are closing, you can come back, or if you want to think about it more with me. I keep my focus pretty narrow, but I don't tell people they should close or not—what do I know?
+
+People seem to be tarrying between "Should I ride this all the way to the cliff?" or "Is the honorable thing to do this while we have cash on hand?" Somebody's going to be mad at you either way, but I put those options on the table. People who've closed something years ago—in hindsight, nobody ever says, "I should have kept going." People usually say, "It went on too long."
+
+I'm sometimes surprised. Someone just wrote me today saying, "We're not going to close; we're going to see what happens." I was surprised because the person had told me they were personally sick of doing the work, which doesn't bode well. But what do I know?
+
+*Can you say a bit about the practical things that people don't tend to think about but that are important to surface?*
+
+My most popular blog post was one called "Towards Your 'Tombstone Site.'" That was about the idea of your website's final state being a tombstone. Having looked at countless websites of closed NGOs for my Museum of Closed NGOs, I notice common themes—taking down your mailing list, taking down your donate button.
+
+I met with somebody recently who was so good about this. They'd had four locations and downsized and closed them all in this process of winding down. She'd already removed all the other locations from their online presence.
+
+Consistent messaging across all your platforms is important. If your website says you're closed but your Instagram says you're open, get it together. If I don't see consistent messaging where they clearly say they're closing, I won't write about it in the newsletter. If they're not clear, I'm not clear. Into that vacuum of information comes hearsay and gossip.
+
+Another important thing is communicating with professional organizations—if there are groups that year after year you sponsor their conference, or always send a speaker, or have a table—making sure they know you're closing.
+
+Something really cool I've seen is people saying, "Don't donate to us anymore, donate to this other group instead." Delegating to another group you want to direct people towards is valuable.
+
+Other practical things include dealing with organizational credit cards that will be cut off—pay those bills. I've seen some people pay their website hosting five years in advance. And then forwarding addresses, forwarding emails, that kind of stuff. The rule of thumb is generally that for a good ending, you need to have six to nine months of operating capital on hand so you can pay people severance and settle your affairs.
+
+I was just talking to Jess Meyerson from Educopia, and as part of their process of sunsetting fiscally sponsored organizations, they usually find another steward to hold on to things for a while. When people can do that, that's really good too.
+
+*Is there anything you wish was out there in the world that could serve as infrastructure for closure? It's always striking to me that the domain name system isn't really well equipped for handling projects that might still need to exist but nobody's there to pay the fee. Is there anything you've found yourself wishing was structured differently to help make this sort of thing easier?*
+
+It goes back to the beginning of the intervention that Cassie had—operational funds for dignified closures are still super lacking. Philanthropy needs to understand that funding closures is part of pushing forward the missions they claim to have. If you just let these things fall on the ground, it's money wasted.
+
+That's the big one for me: dedicated operational funds for dignified closures that will pay for people like me, lawyers, accountants, and facilitators who can come into your organization and make this as pain-free as possible. Funds that can facilitate these grief cafes or grief dinner parties, destigmatize the whole thing, and bring that from the moment they start funding you—saying, "We're here to provide wraparound for you and your organization from birth to ending."
+
+That's most critical. And then, of course, an end to capitalism in general—more important than better philanthropy is a better system.
+
+*Why the end of capitalism?*
+
+I think wealth hoarding is at the root of so many issues. Half the organizations I encounter wouldn't have to exist if people weren't hoarding wealth and then requiring appeals to those wealth stewards for a small percentage of their endowments. It's artificial scarcity.
+
+Looking at my colleagues in Europe and UK, the challenges they face are different because they have social infrastructure. A lot of organizations in the US stay open longer than they should because people depend on them for health insurance. Without capitalism, we could turn our attention instead to other problems that aren't man-made.
+
+*You've mentioned that you like to build in the open and share your resources. Why do you operate that way? Why not treat this stuff as proprietary intellectual property that you only share with paying clients?*
+
+That open ethos got into my head very early on. I've been tinkering with the internet since I was a kid. The idea of discoverability for different ways of thinking—I just believe in the open sharing of information.
+
+Also, I don't want to be a bottleneck. When I worked at one tech company, I once managed  a team  that went from Seattle to Auckland, and someone would always have to be in their pajamas off-camera to join. The idea that you can grab these materials at a convenient time in whatever time zone you're in and move forward without needing me is a relief.
+
+A lot of these ideas grew out of other people's thinking, and I'm putting my remix on them. I don't feel comfortable hiding it from people. I want to see more good endings. If I can do this for a little bit more time and feel like the needle has moved and more people are talking about endings—which I already feel is happening—I'll feel good, and like I've achieved a lot of things I wanted to do.
+
+Less of that would happen if I was just like, "Click here for more information and add your credit card number." I'm a connector by nature, transparent by nature, and I want to keep growing these ideas out in the open.
+
+I used to work with an organization called Question Copyright. They were into open knowledge, open tech, open culture. One of our flagship projects was Nina Paley's film *Sita Sings the Blues*, and it was cool to facilitate people translating her work into different languages, letting it be open source, people taking her raw materials and remixing them.
+
+I'm not evangelical about open source, open tech, open culture—it's not the revolution, but the revolution can't happen without it. The information has to be there. I also honor that in any space there should be some sacred knowledge that stays internal. I don't think everybody needs to put all their business on a public-access forum, but I'm here to share and think through things in community with other people.
+
+*Are there any earlier traditions that you find yourself drawing on in developing this practice? Legacies that you're drawing narratives or experience from?*
+
+My work grew in part out of the work from Stewarding Loss. That loss lens is really valuable for the British context, because they're not supposed to be emotional and have that stiff upper lip. Whereas in the US, our paradigm is really about failure and success, and striving in a way that isn't always good for you to do.
+
+I've been playing with this idea of a workshop of storytelling through weaving. My mother's family is from Ghana, and we have *kente* culture—the fabric that people weave with storytelling in it. People put stories into the fabric, and images together mean something.
+
+In Hawaii, they have a mat called *lauhala* that they weave. During the cleanup after the fires on Maui a few years ago, people would come at the end of the working day and share their grief and woes on the mat, then take the mat to the ocean and shake it out to purge it.
+
+Iona from The Decelerator said something similar—she doesn't want to be a "pain sponge" or absorber in the hotline work. She wants to purge the world of that grief and pain, to be part of the process of throwing that out.
+
+The other weaving tradition I think about is the AIDS Quilt—people weaving together a story of what happened, and that being a place of gathering, naming and shaming, remembrance.
+
+I've been thinking of asking people going through an ending to assign colors and threads. If red and orange are happy, and purple and green are bad, what colors are you seeing here? How are you thinking about how the ending went? Something about narrative, storytelling, and putting things in context is what I'm drawing on loosely.
+
+There's another nautical metaphor I don't mention much because it's kind of arcane. It's the idea of "scarpering," which is intentionally running your boat aground because it will help improve the coastline, so the next boat that comes won't run into the same thing. There's something about the intentional ending of something that's really valuable—what if we do this early and intentionally, with the next generations in mind?
+
+*What would a world look like that more fully adopted these kinds of practices of taking endings seriously? What kinds of things that aren't normal would be normal?*
+
+I don't know if I can talk about the world more broadly, but speaking about organizations or people doing mission work: I think more ritual in general—more ritual around beginnings and endings, clear processes so it's not just about that one big ending but many little ones along the way. Normalization of ritual around departures and arrivals.
+
+I heard something recently about a culture where, when a friend is giving birth, they have a little funeral for them because they're losing their friend as a single friend, and that friend is becoming mother-friend. They cry and mourn, then bury something as a totem, and come back and reintroduce themselves to this friend in her new form.
+
+So more ritual, more commemoration of big wins, and more gratitude for people giving themselves. Especially in the nonprofit world in the United States, it's not very well paid generally, often long hours, and people are seeing and hearing horrible things, then getting up and coming back and doing it again.
+
+I think more appreciation. And maybe even term limits, where people say you shouldn't stay here and do this too long. I had a friend in South Africa who was working with AIDS widows, and at a certain point she had to dismiss herself. She said nobody should stay and do this work that long because the stories are too sad and scary.
+
+What it would look like if groups formalized this and said you can only do a certain kind of work for two years, and then we have a cooling-off period where we take you to a spa and pamper you to scrub those stories and trauma off you. Some way of having a Peace Corps-like tour of duty—there's value in staying longer, but danger in staying too long. Rotation and ritual are important.
+
+Another important thing is breaking that connection between impact and longevity. Taking a step back, doing an assessment---*what are you proud that you accomplished?* --- and letting that be your contribution to the mission or the movement, understanding that the organization is not the movement is not the goal. If there's a place we're driving towards, how did you move the needle, how did you move the vehicle forward in valuable ways? Is there value in you stopping what you're doing now?
+
+In America, we're in this teenager mindset kind of culture where people are always like, "I will never die and we are going to strive until we're all rich." I mostly work with people who are left of center, so I'm familiar with their concerns and values around holistic consciousness and dignified closures. I wonder if I went to the Heritage Foundation whether people would care, or if they'd say, "We should run it to the cliff because who cares, life is cold, brutish, and short."
+
+I've started finding people who have been through closures or are going through them, and I want to destigmatize it. People come to me usually because they don't know who to talk to about closures. People whisper about it, and there's a stigma. It's like a scarlet letter where people are like, "Oh God, you're closing, don't come over here." There is a web of people who've been through it before and are going through it that needs to be woven. I've spent the last year and a half just finding other people and asking them to tell me their story of closing, or waiting for them to find me.
+
+*How has your practice of working on closures changed over time?*
+
+I started from a place of thinking it's about communication and archiving. I came with a very tech practitioner's mindset: how can we get your data, share your data, make it GitHub-able, or put it on Internet Archive? But over time, I started thinking less about data and the archival, and more about it being a relational thing. Another part of the work is honoring that the people that start stuff are not the people that are really excited about closing stuff.
+
+I've been collecting closures I love and closures that were nightmares. I have them in my back pocket to share with people. That's really where it's at—telling people, "Once upon a time there were some people that did this, they nailed it, and here's what was hard about nailing it. And here's what was hard about failing at failing."
+
+I've moved away from some precious idea of tech utopianism around closures to just saying closures are messy. Even a compost heap is messy and smelly. The work of tending that heap and deriving whatever is nutritious or beneficial to the soil is its own kind of messy, smelly, mysterious work that not everybody is going to be called to do.
+
+At the same time, I kind it a little annoying how this language of composting is dancing around the left, because we live in an industrialized society where most stuff isn't compostable. Let's be honest. Bruce Schneier talks about data as a toxic asset.
+
+In any ending, I try to help people balance the emotional aspects with the project management stuff. I think about who they were before they came to the organization, who they were in the organization, who they hoped to become in the organization—all the time aspects of it. And then the other practical stuff like forwarding email addresses and those kinds of details. Part of it is just like being a mom—"I love you, and also go to the bathroom before we leave."

content/interviews/albuquerque-contemporary_dance.md

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+---
+narrator: Jasmine Albuquerque-Croissant
+subject: Contemporary dance
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2024-11-22
+approved: 2025-08-08
+summary: "A choreographer describes how dance helps people learn ways of being in shared space and in their bodies."
+topics: [art, health, family, dance, music]
+location: "Los Angeles USA"
+headshot: "jasmine_albuquerque.jpg"
+links:
+  - text: "Personal website"
+    url: "https://www.jasminealbuquerque.com/"
+---
+
+*How do you like to introduce yourself?*
+
+My name is Jasmine Albuquerque. I'm a choreographer, dancer, storyteller and instructor.
+
+*How do you outline the trajectory of your life and career? Where did you start in your life as a dancer and choreographer? Where are you now?*
+
+I grew up on a mountain---which was problematic, because I never had a ride home. In that world of never having a ride home, I would go with my friend Caitlin to dance class and just watch her do ballet. It got to a point where I knew the difference between a *demi-plié* and a *grand plié* more than the girls in class. So I started taking ballet.
+
+There was something really beautiful about the musicality of ballet and the foundations of ballet. I then progressed into jazz. We had a company called the Dance Asylum. It was really sexy, and all the parents protested it because it was so risque. My teacher played Soft Cell and other eighties music and that was what all the older girls did. I finally got into that company and loved it.
+
+By the time I turned 16 I literally grew out of ballet. I was too tall *en pointe*. I was 6'4", so I was taller than my partners, and I was like, I might as well just pick YOU up because I'm bigger than you. My feet were huge. My feet grew out of my *pointe* shoes. It was such a mess! Then I moved to Budapest in my third year of college at UCLA.
+
+That's when I started studying contemporary, which was a huge shift for me. I would take a train outside of the city and take class from a wonderful teacher. It was in Hungarian, but it really made me realize that dance is a universal language, and I could take my shoes off, and I could stick my ass out, and I could do things that were so anti-ballet. I was even counting in Hungarian. I started going to all these contemporary dance shows in Hungary.
+
+That was before they joined the EU. It was 2003. You could go out for $5 and watch an opera or a dance show. Hungarian work then didn't leave Hungary. So I felt like I entered into this very special time. And they also learned contemporary in a very particular way, because of Communism. They weren't allowed to do it. Certain dancers would go to Italy or somewhere West and learn some contemporary then come back. There were two studios- when someone official would come in they would do the communistic dances, and then, when they left, they would do contemporary in the back. So it felt like this secret language that was really special, and it felt good on my body---finally, something that worked for this big body I had.
+
+Then I came back to LA. I started taking class from Ryan Heffington. Ryan Heffington, mind you, is a pioneer of underground contemporary dance in Los Angeles. One of the first times I met him he had a shirt on that said "I love dick" and sequined pants. I said, "Yo, you look like shit," and he's like, "Yeah, I just got out of jail." I'm like, "What'd you go to jail for?" He's like, "I was defending a woman, and I was a little bit drunk." I'm like, "And you're about to teach class?" He's like, "Yeah, I'm about to teach class." I'm like, "...okay."
+
+Then he goes and teaches the most amazing class you ever could possibly go through. There was an earthquake in one of the classes he taught, and I'm like, "Yo, there's an earthquake." He's like, "Whatever. Focus." Ha! Soon he taught me psycho dance. And that's when we started going into nightclubs to perform. This was happening from the eighties on but I was new to it.
+
+By midnight a fully choreographed, fully costumed 30-minute dance show would happen that no one knew was going to happen. Wild stuff went down in these settings. One time a friend of mine, her leg---someone actually stabbed her leg because they forgot to switch out the real knife with a fake knife. My other friend, her hair caught on fire. One time there was a drunk guy walking in the middle of the dance floor and all the lights came crashing down.
+
+At some point I was asked to choreograph a dance but the DJ was on speed and he played my track underneath another track, and I got so pissed because it was a very specific Aphex Twin song, and you couldn't hear the subtilites, so we just sort of melted and I got mad and I shined a light on him. I ran outside. I was wearing some little dress and a rat ran by, and then a dude offered me 20 bucks, and I was like, "Yo, I'm not a prostitute. What the hell?" I ran back inside to my family members who lied through their teeth: "That was great."
+
+With psycho dance, we were very mixed in. I was trained on big stages where you just look out and you see darkness and you just dance. You see the darkness, and then you hear applause. So I kept saying to Ryan, "I don't know how to do this. I'm staring at my ex-boyfriend. I'm staring at my mother. They're in my face. How am I supposed to perform? Where do I go? I'm too big. There's no space." He crawled through my legs, and he said, "There's space." And he crawled through my arm and he said, "There's space. There's always negative space."
+
+That was so beautiful. I love that. It trained me not only to literally face my fears, but to integrate that fourth wall, to walk into the audience and invite them in and to be able to go into a state in my mind.
+
+A lot of these dancers were doing drugs and drinking. I was totally sober. I just didn't like that kind of stuff. So I had to create a veil underneath my eyes that could allow me to have a little bit of separation and go into a state.
+
+The dancers in LA were so special. You have emotional dancers who are super, super amazing emotionally, and then you have physical dancers who are incredible physically. Then you have that rare group of dancers that can do the combo of both of those. And THEN you have that extra rare group of dancers who can channel past lives while they dance and that's what we were. We were called the Fingered Dancers. The show was called Fingered. You would come and get fingered psychologically. It was wild. It was totally crazy. This was around 2008.
+
+After that, the scene died out. Heffington got sort of famous. He made a music video with Sia. He started a band called We Are the World---two dancers and two musicians.
+
+When Heffington got too busy for us, I started a dance company with Nina McNeely and Kristen Leahy called WIFE. We all had looked in the mirror, and we were like, yo, we're getting old. Let's start talking about age, and we also were very into iconography and just these beautiful images that we had been looking at for so long. So we did a photo shoot where we were standing on boxes, on small boxes and projecting images on us to make us look like sculptures. And we actually looked like sculptures. And we were like, well, that's dope. Let's dance in that world.
+
+So we kept standing on those boxes. The confinement, the limitations of being on a two-foot by two-foot box all of a sudden created the most crazy choreography because you couldn't run across the stage. You couldn't leap. That psycho dance stage, which was already smaller than the giant stages I had danced on, all the sudden got even smaller.
+
+I realized that the best dance is when you have a large limitation around it. WIFE happened from 2010 to 2016 and it was a really special time. It was also a very nerve-wracking time. We were not using infrared, we were using regular projections, so our tech rehearsals were close to six hours long. The precision of where you had to be for the projections to map the body were so insane, and I kept blowing my back because I was so nervous about fucking it up. Nina was making all the projections. She's a self-taught animator and editor and incredible, but she was doing a lot of the work, and Leahy and I were producing everything. And we all had jobs, but we were just really trying to make this happen.
+
+And we did. We went to England. We went to Istanbul. We toured with it. People loved it. They would come and emulate some of the movement and be like, "Are you a WIFE?" It was this kind of secret "if you knew you knew" kind of thing.
+
+*It was an amazing show.*
+
+It really did look like those sculptures came to life. It got very popular. People started teaching it in Germany. It unfolded in ways that we didn't even expect. But by the time we did our last show, which was called "Enter the Cave," I think I had blown my back like five times. I had to use Tess Hewlett to be my replacement and this poor woman---an amazing dancer--would learn a piece that took us a year to choreograph in like three hours and perform it because she's my same height. That was the other thing. It couldn't be just anyone. We once used my friend Zak Schlegel because I had blown my back and we had to tuck his penis under so he looked like a woman. It was totally bonkers.
+
+After Enter the Cave, it got to a point where the energy between us was too intense. We were all fighting. The work wasn't distributed equally. We were stressed. Leahy ended up moving to Mexico and Nina continued on with her career in LA which has fully bloomed and blossomed in all sorts of ways and I did too. It crumbled at what was the pinnacle of what we were doing. It was very sad. It felt like I got divorced. Then I really did get divorced and those two literally got married. That's what was happening.
+
+Since then I've been freelance. I've been a freelance dancer and choreographer for a long time, at least fifteen years. I also have to mention that I started teaching when I was 21. I'm 41 now.
+
+Teaching was the experience that really shifted me into a choreographer. All of a sudden I'm in a room with women in their forties and I'm 21. "These are my students? What do I teach them? Shouldn't I be learning from them?"
+
+I asked them to walk across the room and stop in the middle and look in the mirror and not fidget for 10 seconds, and none of them could do it.  I realized that I needed to teach confidence. I needed to teach bodies. I needed to teach that it's okay to look at ourselves, it's ok to be in our bodies. 
+
+It got to a point where women were like---or people, you know I had a few men, but mostly women---saying to me, "I got a job after doing your class." "I slept for the first time after doing your class. "I broke up with my boyfriend." "I was able to be in my body." Doing that for twenty years turned me into a choreographer. I made a new combo every two weeks. I would have one combo one week, and then it'd be the same, and then we'd switch. So I was making a lot of choreography and I continue to. Teaching is a huge part of my career.
+
+And now? I'm in LA, and the industry's kind of bottoming out. It's a very strange time for dance. Covid was super devastating for us. We lost 80 percent of our dance studios. We've all been kind of dissipated and broken apart. The Sweat Spot was Ryan Heffington's dance studio that went under. It was 11 years of a space to create shows, rehearse, gather, teach, perform and party. You name it, everything...where we went to think and talk was in that studio and it went down. And The Edge, which was around for thirty years also shut its doors.
+
+So things shifted in a really weird way during Covid. We felt like we were Covid, because all we did was touch and grope each other and all of a sudden touching each other would kill each other. This was really, really hard for us. But it was interesting, too, because people started reaching out to dancers and saying, "We need you. We need you to teach us. We need you to help us get through this."
+
+I started teaching on Zoom, which was bizarre. I did it for two years and eventually started teaching movement therapy. I'm not a certified therapist. I was just like, you know, let's figure out how to get through this together. I ran into a woman when I was at the Biennale in Italy, and she said, "You saved my life," and I was like, "Who are you?" She's like, "I took your Zoom class during Covid." We became these fountains of health, in a way.
+
+Now I've had another baby. My brain has changed yet again.
+
+I choreographed a piece two weeks ago, which was really wild in a postpartum state. I took an old piece from 2019, took out the men, put it on women, bought silicon bellies for them that were six months pregnant, and turned them into pregnant women---naked, pregnant women. I pumped my breasts onstage and then had them walk around me in trench coats and heels, take off the trench coats, throw the heels away, and start this very psychotic dance to AFX, which is even more gnarly than Aphex Twin-his alias. It took me 10 years to choreograph to this song. It's so---it makes your brain bleed. I wanted to take people into one little element of birth---what it feels like. I don't think you die when you give birth. You are hyper-alive.
+
+Have I answered your question?
+
+*Oh yes---beautifully. So beautifully, Jasmine.*
+
+From a mountain to birth.
+
+*Knowing very, very little about choreography, the image I have in my mind is a piece of paper with Russian ballet movements on them, with foot positions.*
+
+Like actually writing choreography down?
+
+*Right? What does choreography mean for you like? What does it feel like? What does it consist of?*
+
+A lot of dancers don't choreograph because they want to be told what to do. They don't want to have to create it. When I first started choreographing I was writing things down, and it would be [moving hands and body] "Swoop! Wah! Hee haw! Pregnant swipe knife in out, left, right! Turn up up! La, la!"
+
+*Were you using a standard, or were you creating your own?*
+
+No standard at all. There's a name for that standardized choreography. I can't remember what it's called but it does not work at all. It's like this psycho map and also contemporary dance has changed everything. We're dancing to-you know-Philip Glass. How do you count that? Where is the five-six-seven-eight? Where's the one-e-and-a, two-e-and-a? It's not hip-hop. It's not jazz, it's not eights. Or even this song, this AFX song---like, try counting that song, there's elevens, there's tens, there's fives. I realized as I was teaching that I needed to teach from imagery. I didn't exactly realize this---I worked with a guy named Glenn Edgerton, who used to be the artistic director of Netherlands Dans Theater, which is one of my favorite companies in Europe and I took a choreography workshop from him. This was a long time ago...he taught from images. He always said, "Let's show things with images."
+
+That was really helpful for me. I was sometimes writing things down and that was fun. It helped me remember. I had a hard enough time picking up other people's choreography.
+
+When I was in the process of choreographing, I used to be very precious about it. I used to not allow anybody to watch me. That was what was nice about WIFE---we would have to choreograph in front of each other. But normally I would be like, "Don't watch me do this! This is so embarrassing."
+
+But I started being more comfortable choreographing in front of other people. What I do is I go to the most empty space in my mind---the biggest void you could possibly imagine--the blackest nothingness. I have to let everything out...then the song---I open a song, I enter the song into my mind.  The song tells me what to do. Sometimes it's a conversation, sometimes it's an argument between us and sometimes it just completely flows. It's the weirdest thing---sometimes one minute of a song can take me anywhere from ten minutes to three hours to create depending on the state that I'm in.
+
+But the song is the most important thing to me. The song has to talk to me. If the song does not talk to me, I cannot choreograph to it. So once I stopped writing things down and started working just with my body more, I realized that a dance is really just a repetition of three, you know---once you find a movement that you like, all of a sudden it's a dance. And I told that to my students: you can choreograph by just making a phrase on your body. Start improvising, and then, when you like one little thing, do it three times, and then all of a sudden, you have a dance.
+
+I also used to teach this thing I named "Bomb/Baby" which is where I would have your body experience what it feels like when a bomb goes off and then try to imagine what it's like holding a baby. I would make them do both at the same time. You're experiencing this motion of shock and energy vs. caress and gentleness. Two extremities at one time. I liked what that dichotomy did to the body. 
+
+All dance is a manipulation of energy.
+
+Everybody can dance. But how are you manipulating your energy? What are you doing to manipulate your energy that's manipulating my energy when I watch you? Why are the hairs standing up on the back of my neck when I watch you, but not when I watch *you*? *You*'re not doing anything for me, but you're doing a lot for me. I can watch beautiful dance, but if the person has not opened up their state and allowed me to come in, it's not going to do anything for me.
+
+Choreography is a very strange language. I try to run from it sometimes. I don't like it all the time---it's sort of brutal. It makes me nervous. I'm still nervous to choreograph after god knows how many years I've been doing this. I think now it gets to a point where I just can visualize a feeling.
+
+For example, I'm creating a piece in my head right now, and I know I want to have forty to forty-five bodies on their knees and I want them to be the sea...the grass on the ocean floor...a solid seagrass of humans. But I don't ever want us to see their faces, and I know that there's a future, a chunk of the future walking through that they keep looking at. We don't see their faces, and then I know there's a duet between my friend Maija and Malachi that's happening on top of this sea of bodies---the most abstract, weird stuff.
+
+And then all of a sudden, you have to physicalize that. I used to choreograph when I was on my bicycle, which was really nice because I had motion. I would get a lot of choreography from houseless people. I would watch them doing these moves that were so beautifully kind of psychotic. And I loved it because they were the ones who were watching humans for real, because they were out there seeing it every single day. Whatever they'd experienced in their paths, whether it was war or meth, or just not having money, or whatever it was that brought them to the streets, they communicate with their bodies in ways that's really beautiful.
+
+I'd ride my bike everywhere. I was on a bike for six years in LA and I had this motion underneath me. I'd be listening to music and observing houseless people on the streets and that would bring out a state I could enter into that helped a lot with choreography.
+
+*When you are communicating an idea to dancers, are you telling a story? Are you showing them images? What is the means by which you get your choreography out of your head and into their bodies?*
+
+No, I'm not telling a story. I don't like stories with dance. I think it's too boring. I want half the audience to get up and leave. I want them to be like, "This is shit." I haven't done my work if people like it. You know what I mean? I want them to see it and say, "Oh God, what the hell? This is rude and mean and not fair."
+
+So with my dancers---I told my last dancer, Maija, "Listen, I want you. But I also need a monster. I don't want a dancer, I want a monster."
+
+I had one process of creating a piece where I was teaching them what it felt like to be in a psycho dance situation. I was throwing things at them in the rehearsal space. I was turning the music on and off. I was turning the lights on and off. I was getting aggressive with them. And then when we did the show---it was at a club called Zebulon---which is a very special nightclub---I really loved my main dancer's body movements but her face was frustrating me because she kept doing this little emotional eyebrow thing.
+
+I was doing the piece to Pharmakon, which is super, super gnarly music. There's a section of it where she just coughs for the whole thing, and I came out dancing during the cough, and then the dancers come out, and I had them representing "Liberty, blood, land, justice." It was about immigration, but in a very abstract way. That was the one when my dad played saxophone at the end. He played free jazz and I danced to it. But the woman who was playing me as the Statue of Liberty when we later did this piece at Zebulon---she was doing that eyebrow thing. So during the show, I drank an entire bottle of water and spit it in her face, and she looked at me with an honest expression and I said, "That's the face I want!" She kept going. It was incredible. She tells me, years later, that that moment changed her life in a lot of ways.
+
+I don't know what I do to my dancers. I try to give them enough space that they can translate what's in their heads. But we're meeting at some sort of middle point in the music. I'm giving them movement and sometimes I give them a little bit of a backstory. Like for this last one I did about birth, I showed them what it felt like to be in labor. I screamed. I got on all fours. I ran around. I also had them put the fake bellies on. What does it make you feel like to be pregnant? These were all women who had never had babies. It took 30 minutes of them walking around the studio with their bellies, experiencing that. I asked them, "What do you care for most?"
+
+I don't like "this is the beginning, this is the middle, this is the end, this is the climax, this is what it's about." I don't treat dance as academic. New York has a very academic approach to dance, which I appreciate. Los Angeles is very "dance for fuck sake, dance to dance, dance because we can."
+
+It may seem kind of elitist or weird, but when you find that grit, it's so beautiful, because we're emulating things---again, like a houseless person or someone sitting at a bus stop. We're emulating the things that you see in life. A brief moment or the moment just before something happens. But I don't want to force feed you. Most of my stuff is from a dream or from an experience I've had. It's piecing together abstract elements of my life. My brain is also not normal. I'm an art baby. I'm Lita Albuquerque's daughter---I have cobalt blue pigment and toxins in my mind. That's why I don't need drugs. I am drugs, to quote Salvador Dali.
+
+*I'd love to hear a bit more about that relationship---the role that the dancers play in shaping a piece. How much is it a collective product of everyone who's involved as opposed to something that you are bringing to the dancers?*
+
+Dancers are huge---they are the piece. It's just that I am so particular about picking my music---I'll listen to a track for, I'm not kidding you, 10 years. I work with my dancers in that same way. It's not always the same dancers, but I'm very specific about who I use. Those are the people who can experience past lives when they dance. They're the ones who can throw me off. They have to throw me off. They are bold in their choices. 
+
+There's one woman named Maija Knapp who I just---I'm obsessed with her. She can do anything. She's got these thighs that are like trees and her deep *plié* is practically on the ground. Then all of a sudden, she's frolicking through a meadow, but she looks like she could cut your head off. She's just a beast. She's incredible. I've worked with her since she was 18. She's 26 now. I feel like she's what I always wanted to be in a dancer.
+
+It really depends on the piece. But thinking about who can execute it is a big part of my process, because half the time I don't believe in my work. I don't think it's going to be good enough, and then I put it on the body of a dancer who brings out a different light.
+
+When I was teaching a lot, I remember I would love the mistakes that people made. I would write down the mistakes. If all the bodies drop, and one person stands up because they forgot to drop, I would take that as the next piece of choreography. And Heffington always said, "Live in your mistakes." If you fall to the ground, live in it. Be that mistake, be it even further than you could possibly imagine. Don't run from it. Don't try to pick up the pieces. Thoroughly enjoy your mistake. I try to teach that with dance as well.
+
+*What have been some of your most important decisions in the development of your career, in your practice? What kinds of choices stand out to you?*
+
+I have no idea. What do you mean?
+
+*Did you have moments when you had to choose to go one way or another? When you had to locate what kind of choreographer you would be?*
+
+Yeah, absolutely. The industry in LA is very complicated. You have layers and layers. You have touring dancers, you have hip-hop dancers, you have contemporary dancers. Within the contemporary scene, you have the artsy ones, you have the more normal ones, you have modern dancers which don't really have too big of a place here, because they're more in the academic world---you're going to see them more at universities.
+
+Also contemporary and modern, we kind of butt heads a little bit. Modern dancers are introverted, they're looking down. To me---I'm sorry, modern dancers, I love you, but it looks like a pillow party. There's no guts to it. Rude! 
+
+Contemporary dancers look like they're on drugs but they make eye contact with you. And then all of a sudden, you're like, "Oh damn!" We always joke, we show each other videos of people walking who are on acid or on meth or whatever, and we're like, "Oh, a contemporary dancer." But then we make eye contact and that's what's powerful about contemporary---we use our eyes to communicate. We use our eyes for connection. We use our eyes for direction. 
+
+I've been in Hollywood for too long. In Hollywood, as a movement director, I'm a punching bag between a photographer who wants weird and a celebrity that only knows sexy. Honestly, that's my job. I'm in the way of the lighting person. It's the weirdest job because you have this celebrity that really knows how to be sexy, but the photographer wants them to look bizarre and is trying to convince them to do this for the cover of *Vogue*. It is not the easiest thing to do.
+
+When I was auditioning as a dancer, I would go to auditions with like three to four hundred people. I would be the one in the back, slow dancing with a ghost. "Can I please leave? Like I really don't want to do this. This is not my style." They were sending me out for like *Frozen* the musical, cruise ship gigs, things that were so out of my wheelhouse, and I kept saying to my agents, "I come from Heffington, I come from Kitty McNamee, Mecca Andrews...that world of contemporary," and they said they get it. But when they were sending me out for this stuff I'm like, "Help, I'm not this dancer."
+
+So eventually I got named the "eclectic dancer," which really drove me bonkers. And then I was the "East Side dancer" which also drove me bonkers. They just keep trying to categorize you, and after being with my agency now for like at least fifteen years---I think I've been with Bloc for a super long time---they finally understand me. It also took me a very long time to be repped as a choreographer. They have a very small choreography department and a very large dance department.
+
+It wasn't until I choreographed for Katy Perry that they accepted me as a choreographer. Then things shifted. All of a sudden, now I'm treated differently. But I'm still kind of low-hanging fruit in that world because there are so many incredible choreographers in LA.
+
+This is another thing about dance which is really weird: It's one of the only art forms where your body disintegrates, but your emotional experiences accelerate. So you're at this weird crossroads where you feel "my body can't do this," but I've experienced sexual assault, or I've experienced being robbed, or I've experienced falling in love, I've experienced having a baby. As a 41-year-old dancer, I can bring that. But I can't kick my leg up high and I can't do triple pirouettes anymore. When you watch an older dancer, it's so beautiful because you're witnessing those things that they've seen. And when you watch a younger dancer, you're like, "You can do all that with your body, but you need to go through a little bit more life."
+
+I feel like now they're trying to take the art out of me. Freelancing is constantly trying to take the art out of you. They always hire you, and they're like, "We want dance, but not *dance*. We want this, but not that." Why do I have all this skill but can't utilize it properly? Lack of funding in America for the arts. 
+
+I never became a touring dancer because I was always too tall. You have to look like---you have to blend in. You can't threaten the lead singer. I've always stayed in the art world of dancing. I've made like twelve collaborations with my mother. That kind of puts me in a different category, too.
+
+I don't know about the decisions. I think I've---I mean half the time I wonder why I still do this. It's totally crazy. It's such a weird thing.
+
+*Maybe decision is not the right word for what moved you along.*
+
+Yeah, I mean, I've surrounded myself with the people who move me, and then kept those people close to me as much as I could. I think now I've gotten to a point where I'm one of the people who moves other people, so that feels really nice, you know, for people to gravitate towards me. Some of my dancers were like, "I did this show even though we weren't getting paid because you're a legend." And I'm like, "A legend?!" Okay, that's nice.
+
+But I think it's just---I don't know. I don't know how I got here. I tell people I've tried to run from dance my whole life and it's obviously my passion, because it just keeps eating me.
+
+*It seems like actually the work has grown around you. Your turn to choreography grew out of the mismatch of your body to a certain set of expectations, right? And it grew out of relationships and out of need in the context of the pandemic and scenes you found yourself in, rather than something where you're directing it with an intention or plan.*
+
+And teaching---teaching really turned me into a choreographer.
+
+*Yes, that's right. That's not what one might expect.*
+
+Teaching was huge, because all of a sudden it was just like the---what's the word I'm looking for---the accountability of having to show up with new moves and a new song. That's a lot of pressure over twenty years of having to have cutting edge music and cutting edge moves. Whether I have two people in class or 300 people in class, whether I have professional dancers in class or someone who doesn't know left from right, and they walk into mirrors all the time. I've had everything---I've had people burst into tears. I've had people throw up. We've seen it all. Teaching really helped me understand what choreography is.
+
+*To go back to that question of transmission---and tear apart my framing here if it's not right: How do you communicate those moves that you come to a class with into the bodies of the people who come to experience them and to hold them? Is it through modeling them in your body? Is it through telling them who they're becoming, what they're becoming?*
+
+No, it's modeling it in my body and working it through my body with them. There's a lot of statistics now that say dance is a cure for depression, because bodies are moving in unison together and doing the same thing. You're not just going to the gym and working out by yourself. You're in a collective room of bodies that are doing something together. You're increasing your beta endorphins. You're finding a physical and cognitive alignment in your body. You're turning your goddamn brain off. That's the trick---you have to turn your brain off.
+
+It doesn't work if your brain is on. You need to learn my language, however. So you have to keep one part of your lizard brain on, with one eye open, but you have to turn the rest of your brain off, or else you cannot absorb this information. It's the most meditative state you could possibly be in. Again, going back to Heffington teaching when that earthquake was happening---I was the only one in the class who noticed the earthquake, and he got mad at me because he said, "You're not here, Jazz." And he used to say that to me all the time. He'd go "Jazz, why didn't you take class?" I'm like, "Dude, I was just in class." He's like, "No, you were not in class. You were in the mirror. You were fixing your hair. You were not in class." I'm like, "Damn! You can see that?" He's like, "I see everything."
+
+When I teach, I'm trying to keep it open for people who don't know how to move. I also need to let them experiment. They're trying---first of all, they're in a studio. Let's just start---step one: you're in a dance studio staring at a mirror for an hour and a half. Good God! Maybe you hate your body. Maybe you love your body, but you're staring at a mirror for an hour and a half. It's totally intimidating, especially for dudes, too, because you're walking into this room full of beautiful women in leggings. There's a lot going on.
+
+So I work them out for forty-five minutes. We do cardio. We do sit-ups, we do push-ups, we do burpees, we do stretching. We blow our lips out, we scream, we do so much stuff in that forty-five minutes of fully strengthening and release. There's a lot of release. And then we work on a combo for one minute to a minute and a half of a song and I start with maybe two or three counts of eight, or the beginning of the track, and we just do it over and over and over again. We start building and building and building until, "Does everybody feel good? Can we move on?"
+
+Half the class says no. Half the class says yes. We do a little bit more, then a little bit more, then a little bit more, and then all of a sudden, you have this dance. By the time class is over that dance---you're holding onto it by the cliff's edge. You're like, "I don't have it at all. I can't wait to come next week when I can actually turn my brain off for real."
+
+When I take other people's classes I'm usually struggle city---they do five moves, and I'm like, "Yo yo, do it again." I am so bad at picking up choreography. It is so hard for me, which is weird. Being a teacher, you get into this authoritative state where you're the one telling people what to do. And then when you take other people's classes, you're like, "Oh my God! I have no idea what I'm doing." If my students saw me, they'd be like, "Who is that? She doesn't know how to dance." That's one of the reasons I love dance so much. It's impossible to master. It is always changing. Just as your body is always changing too. It is a cognitive and physical duet. 
+
+Everything is very dependent on what physical and mental state you get to after the warm-up. The warm-up is a really big part of my dance. Some people come for just the warm-up so they can get into that. Some people come for just the choreo. But if they haven't gotten through the warm-up, it's like they haven't been initiated properly and I don't really want them to just do the combo, because they can hurt themselves.
+
+*That's how they begin to turn their brains off?*
+
+The warm-up. And it's the same every time. It's super hard and you're sweating buckets, and we blow our lips out. We stretch our mouths out. We do so much in that warm-up that all of a sudden, once you're done with that, most people say my class is in two parts. They're like, "Your class almost feels like two classes, because your warm-up is almost like its own class." And then we move into the combo.
+
+And I tell people with the combos---this is the other thing about dance that's really interesting, especially when you're learning with a mirror. The mirror can be very problematic. You have to either look through the mirror or practice the "school of fish". I call it a school of fish...if the fish start moving, make sure you know the direction---you don't want to go against the stream, you're going to physically get hurt.
+
+This is another reason why having professionals and non-dancers in the same classroom is very problematic. There's etiquette and there are a lot of rules within a classroom. When you go across the floor from diagonal to diagonal, you would never reverse and go back. You're going to get hit in the face. You go to the other diagonal and you come around to the other side. Some people don't know that and I forget that people are not classically trained. I have had a lot of collisions. I forget that I have to keep telling people, and a lot of dancers get really frustrated when non-dancers are in the classroom because they don't have spatial awareness.
+
+Spatial awareness is a huge part of being a dancer---huge. If you hit another dancer in the face---oof! You have not studied. You have not studied space. You have to understand space.
+
+*What does studying space mean? Does that mean knowing those rules? Or does it mean something else?*
+
+It means knowing that if I'm gonna do this, I'm going to do that. I'm committing to that. What does that mean for you if you're standing next to me? If you'd like to run into me, I will run into you. I will hit you so hard---not on purpose. But this is my space. That's your space.
+
+You can do all you want in your space. If you want to do it in my space, I will hit you in the face. We're gonna clash. We're gonna hit. And that's cool, too---like, I'm down, I'm down for us to mix spaces. We can mix spaces, but be prepared in your body. Hold your center, push your belly button to your spine, and know that you're gonna get hit. I'm gonna get hit.
+
+It's different than martial arts, because we're trained to not hurt each other. It's a team sport that does not hurt. We're trained to lift and help each other. We have to be on that same plane. We're constantly looking out of the sides of our eyes because we have each other's backs. We're in this together. If you screw up, if you fall off the train, you could potentially knock out the whole system.
+
+It's kind of like being on a spaceship. Everybody is part of that spaceship, and we all have to contribute. If you don't know the rules of space, you're going to mess up the ride. If you trip me as a dancer, and I break my leg, you've ruined my career. You have to know the space, or you have to be prepared to take the consequences of not knowing the space.
+
+Does that make sense? I don't know if I'm making any sense.
+
+*It's so beautiful to hear you articulate this stuff.*
+
+I'm really glad to talk about this, because I have a new brain now. Second child in, you get a new brain every time you get a child. I don't even know what left and right is right now.
+
+*A lot of what you've talked about seems to be moments of turning away from traditions like ballet. What legacies, what currents do you find yourself drawing on in building your work?*
+
+I didn't major in dance at UCLA, I majored in history. I was sitting there watching bodies get blown up. I'm watching someone with no legs scoot on their ass. I'm watching violence in the body, because a lot of my students would be like, "Your movements are like a little ballerina that has no head or no arms." My moves can be very violent. I have a lot of aggression too. I need to let it out in dance.
+
+I think of the visuals that I saw as a historian. I also learned as a historian that there are no answers to things. Historians are very different than political scientists. They're not saying, "This happened because of this." They're saying, "I'm going to read everything, and I'm going to say, look at this and look at this---isn't that an interesting juxtaposition?" This concept was working its way into my choreographic brain---history and broken bodies---without me even knowing. 
+
+One of the professors at UCLA would say that dance originated from agriculture, which was really beautiful because you were thinking about people stomping and planting seeds. We don't really know---like what comes first, the chicken or the egg, dance or music? Where is dance from? What is dance? I like this kind of idea that it came from agriculture.
+
+But, again, I am a ballerina at heart, even though I've rejected ballet. My feet look like monsters---like, I've had people come up to me and ask if I'm okay, just by looking at my feet. And I'm like, "Yo dude, yes, I'm fine. I've lived with them my whole life. Appreciate it."
+
+I've also seen a lot of amazing dance. I've seen Batsheva, I've seen Marie Chouinard, I've seen Louise Lecavalier, I've seen La La La Human Steps. I've seen these companies---Netherlands Dance Theater, Crystal Pite---that have blown my mind with choreographically. You know, Pina Bausch---I have to look at it like, "Try not to take everything that they're doing! I want it all!" I allow myself to take a little bit. And when I'm really stuck, I watch videos of these dancers and these choreographers---Paul Lightfoot, is another---people who have blown me away.
+
+Let's say you're going to make pasta, right? You're putting it through this pasta machine, putting the wrong ingredient through the pasta maker. I'm going to put meat or put apples through the pasta maker, and then see how it comes out in my body. I'm looking at them on a flat screen, which is the worst way to learn choreography. Then I close my eyes. I put on a different track and I see what happens. Have I taken some of their movements? Of course. Has it come into my subconscious? Of course. Am I choreographing from my dreams? Yes. It's all mixed in there. Have I ripped from people I love? Absolutely. Oh, Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker! Amazing choreographer. So it blends in. It's kinda hard to pinpoint my choreography to one thing.
+
+I don't know how to answer these questions.
+
+*You're doing it.*
+
+I'm realizing dance is so abstract, it is just---it's so bizarre. I always did tell people I dance so I don't have to speak. There's so much I can't articulate with words. I can write them down, but verbally saying them is super hard.  
+  
+With my body I can scream and whisper, sometimes at the same time. 
+
+*What do you think that other aspects of life can learn from dance? Are there lessons to draw from the way in which patterns carry through bodies?*
+
+I don't know. Keep going.
+
+*Are there lessons from dance for other kinds of worlds---people who are creating traffic patterns, people who are trying to figure out how to go to other planets, people who are trying to survive in the streets? What are the lessons from dance that carry to other parts of life?*
+
+Well, first of all, you have this body just once, and you gotta have fun with it. We all hate our bodies to a particular degree. You're in this sack---what is this thing? What does it do? It gains weight, it loses weight. It looks pretty, it looks ugly, you know---it's all these things. You have to have fun with your sack because you get that sack only once. Please have fun with your sack---step one. It gets so heady, especially the body dysmorphia among dancers. The amount of stuff we do to ourselves is horrible.
+
+In terms of what people could learn, I think it would be the spatial awareness. It has to also do with carrying yourself in a way that makes sense to you, carrying yourself in a way that you want to present. For example, if I'm gonna walk down the street, I'm holding my heart open. My back is down. I'm breathing out of my back. My rib cage is closed, my center is engaged, and I'm walking. Do you think I've ever been beat up in my life on the street? Have I ever been mugged? Hell no! People don't touch me because I'm holding my body in a way that says I understand this body. I own this body and I command this body. Would you want to hurt me? Try to---let's go.
+
+It's a matter of building a body that you're having fun with and that carries the person that you want to be. We have to walk into the world like that, or else we're screwed. Especially as women these days---there's a lot of imagery out there. There's a lot going on with social media---we could go down that rabbit hole, which would be a whole other conversation.
+
+But if you want to wear a mini skirt and you want to wear tassels on your tits, you better own your body. Same with men. If you want to wear a miniskirt and tassels on your tits, you need to own your body. Or non-binary folks or trans. Dance is about understanding your body and understanding where you have your limitations and also where you have your strengths. It is going to make us more powerful as humans walking down the street.
+
+Maybe what I was talking about with spatial awareness: You know your space. I know my space, you know your power, I know my power. If you know your power, I can know my power even better. We can power it up. But if you don't know your power and I have power, this is a problem. Let's move smoothly through this world together, eh? 
+
+I think it's about having a conversation. I talk about dance as having a conversation between your body and energy. Where does my body end? Does it end at my fingertips now? No, because the energy is shooting past and going out from there. If you see a dancer who stops their energy short, it's not good. It's not right.
+
+Taking the outline of the body and extending it, and then having a conversation---that is when you have a beautiful dance. When you bring other bodies into the mix, when you have multiple bodies, that's when things get super beautiful because you have lots of conversations. But it's also---this is something I learned with WIFE---it's also about the silence. We would stand on those boxes very, very still for a long time, for an almost awkward amount of time. There was music, but we were so silent with our bodies that you didn't know what was going to happen.
+
+All of a sudden, the first move was powerful because there had been so much space in silence. It allowed that movement to scream.

content/interviews/berjon-web_standards.md

@@ -0,0 +1,252 @@
+---
+narrator: Robin Berjon
+subject: Web standards
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2025-08-01
+approved: 2025-08-04
+summary: "The standards that govern the World Wide Web develop at the intersection of profit-seeking companies, nonprofit organizations, and small groups of people with rarefied expertise."
+location: "Brussels, Belgium"
+headshot: "robin_berjon.jpg"
+topics: [decentralization, open source, organizations, software, standards]
+links:
+  - text: "Personal website"
+    url: "https://berjon.com"
+  - text: "Social media"
+    url: "https://robin.berjon.com"
+---
+
+*How do you prefer to introduce yourself?*
+
+I'm Robin Berjon, and I generally describe myself as a technologist working on issues of governance. It's sort of fuzzy and blurry, but that's basically what I'm doing.
+
+*How did that journey begin for you, and when?*
+
+It began more or less in the mid-1990s when I was a first-year philosophy student. I got a computer to do philosophy essay writing and homework on. Instead of doing philosophy, I started doing a lot of web things. I'd seen computers before, but they never had people in them. That was immediately fascinating to me.
+
+I built a website that came second in a website competition. I got hooked on that and started making my own tiny web company. Not a family-money kind of thing, but just a tiny thing with my roommate. We basically had a computer between the two of us and started making websites for people. I would do nights, he would do days, because we only had the one computer.
+
+That collapsed within a few months because we had no idea what we were doing. But I got the bug for it and started another company in Belgium that worked significantly better. I started working more consistently in tech from then on. I started asking questions: "Hey, this HTML thing is nice, but I would like it to work differently. Who do you have to ask? How does this thing work? Where does it even come from?"
+
+There was this weird organization called the W3C, or World Wide Web Consortium, where apparently people discussed these things and started agreeing on how they would work. It was complicated to observe from the outside. Back then, as someone who wasn't a paid member, you couldn't get in. You could only send feedback from the outside and maybe receive an answer within a week or two.
+
+I started getting interested in how you change the styling of things and eventually started scratching at that. In 2001, I was invited to participate in SVG---Scalable Vector Graphics, a file format. In 2002, I got a proper job where I was doing standards. Then I did a lot of standards for the following decades.
+
+*Can you say a bit about what drew you into the SVG process? What were you engaged in there?*
+
+What I liked with SVG is that it was a very powerful graphics environment. With JavaScript and all that, you could start to represent anything, from documents to games. You could use it as a rendering layer on the web.
+
+I started building SVG things as part of my job. We were still making websites for other people. I started adding SVG to projects when possible, which was way too cutting edge back then because you couldn't use it. Not enough people had the SVG capabilities on their computer. I had to constantly find customers who would be interested, so I ended up working, for instance, with the French---I don't know what it's called---the people who manage the road network at the level of France. They had these very complicated mapping requirements. They had this antique database with all kinds of weird conventions, and they wanted to bring that into a more modern world. They exported to XML and then wanted to turn that into something else. I started doing all these things around SVG.
+
+Eventually, since it was a relatively small community, the working group noticed and brought me in as an invited expert without having to pay for membership.
+
+*What is the business model for working on standards? Why is it valuable for a company---and in particular, the cases that you were starting out with---to pay someone to work on abstract rules for the whole ecosystem?*
+
+That's a perennial question, and I don't think anyone has a definitive answer, or at least not an answer that works in all contexts. For that specific company, it was a small startup in Paris. When you're small and you have a very specialized area of knowledge, you need to create markets for things. You need to create some stability to improve your credibility.
+
+What they had was a binary XML format primarily focused on optimization of transport at a very infrastructural level. The kind of customer that could adopt that thing would be a large telco or TV broadcaster---those kinds of big companies. But you're not going to get a large telco to adopt something deep in its infrastructural stack that's made by a company of twelve people in France with no proven business model.
+
+In order to solve that issue, the company was very interested in developing standards that included or referenced or made use somehow of their technology so that they would have something credible to offer these large companies. Of course, there's a flipside to that---they had to open up the technology and share it with others.
+
+It was a trade-off. If we keep everything completely proprietary, well, it's ours---and they had patents and everything that was still done a lot at the time---but then they could have no customers, so not wonderful. Or they could agree to open it up at least some and share it with others, and then get customers. That was essentially the play they made.
+
+They were also interested in figuring out avenues in which their technology could be used. Even though they were not directly working on SVG themselves, they were very interested in the potential bridging between their technology and SVG. So they allowed me to continue working on the SVG working group. When I was with that company, I made quite a few projects that used subsets of SVG in embedded devices with tiny screens and limited processing capabilities.
+
+*How did your involvement in W3C develop? This was a long-term process. How did it stick for you?*
+
+What really made it stick for me was that back then it was a fun community. I felt at the time that there were a lot of shared values. People were there from all over---a lot of people who didn't have any formal training in computer science or anything. It was very different from trying to talk to people who were old school professional programmers or people who went to engineering schools. Those tended to look down on web people at the time.
+
+In W3C, you made friends with someone, and they'd be, for instance, a history major---it was a very cobbled together, motley-crew community at the time. People were talking about building the web, and how amazing it was going to be, and all the cool things that we could do.
+
+There's also the thing that---there was this sort of whiplash thing where I was super young and I didn't come from anywhere particularly interesting. Just because I was specialized on this super specific thing, all of a sudden people were flying me to Australia and Japan to talk about my work. This tiny bit of expertise that I randomly developed immediately became weirdly relevant in ways that I absolutely hadn't anticipated. As a twenty-year-old, it's exciting---"Wait, I get to fly to Japan?"
+
+*Just to paint a picture of what is happening here: Are these conversations taking place largely in in-person meetings? Are they taking place largely on email lists or things like that? Where is this discussion occurring? Where are these dynamics unfolding?*
+
+It changed over time. If we're talking about the early 2000s, most of the conversations were on mailing lists and in chat on IRC. You would get to know what people looked like only when you finally met them, but otherwise you had no idea what they looked like. A lot of the time the groups would have a weekly or every other week, or maybe monthly---it depends---phone call. That's very different in terms of focus and difficulty compared to video calls, where you can see the person speaking. These were a grind. They were really difficult, especially if you're working internationally. Everyone has accents all over the place.
+
+The tooling was interesting in those days because W3C had better tooling than other contexts. For instance, they had their own phone bridge---a physical phone---and that was driven by a laptop that had Windows 3.1, I think, on it. The one guy at W3C who was a really good hacker had bridged it to IRC. So you could be in IRC. A lot of the time you didn't know who was speaking unless you recognized everyone's voice. It was tricky. You could ask the bot, "Who's speaking?" You could get the bot to mute or unmute people. There was a whole lot of tooling that worked that way.
+
+I think my first in-person meeting at W3C was the first meeting of that group when they decided they had sufficiently good Internet at the meeting place that they didn't need to bring a server with the email archives. Normally, for the meetings, someone would come with an actual computer that would be the email archives where the group discussions had taken place, because you need to refer to them. That's where the issues are and things like that. They would basically plug it into a local LAN, and everyone in the room could read the email archives on location.
+
+It's not like that anymore. Nowadays it's all GitHub issues and stuff like that.
+
+*How did the relationship progress between standards development and your day jobs?*
+
+I worked at that company for several years, and within that time I started chairing a working group, then a second working group, then being editor of several things. I was on the Advisory Committee of W3C. I basically said yes to every opportunity, which was not necessarily very intelligent in terms of time management, but it was so attractive, and so interesting, that I couldn't say no.
+
+Then, because I became a specialist, I was more hireable in that space. So there was this loop. The first job I got after that was with a company that wanted to build a video system where everything was standards-based. The entire environment was---the entire application was built around Mozilla Gecko. It was a fork of XULRunner, for those who remember. The entire user interface was HTML and CSS and SVG, and the data backend was RDF. The whole thing was super standards-centric. Again, building a completely different set of products with a completely different focus, but it still involved the same building blocks.
+
+After that company, I started my own consultancy, working for other companies as a standards specialist. I was usually referred to as tech strategist or something because the idea was really that you would come in and take in the business strategy that existed, and figure out how that mapped onto standards participation or more generally tech development. The web was still very confusing to many companies. Precisely for the kind of question that you asked initially---how does it make sense? What is the approach? How does it work?
+
+I did that for several years, and in part I worked for a lot of tiny startups that had often a very specific goal: "We're building this. We're trying to understand the role of standards." In those cases, twenty percent of one person is a huge investment for them. So they were figuring out, "Is it worth it if we do this? What's the most effective way of doing it?"
+
+At the other end of the spectrum, I also had massive multinational companies---Vodafone or Samsung, Canon---these really big companies. A lot of the time, they had very much the same questions.
+
+One of the things that I always remember, and that explains a lot about the power structures in standards---I remember being contracted by Samsung HQ, which is rare. They didn't bring in people from abroad to the Korean HQ very often. They brought me in, and there were all these people with very important-sounding titles, half of them from tech units and half of them from strategy.
+
+Essentially they opened by saying, "We have a problem we would like you to solve, which is that we don't think that Samsung can have any influence in web standards." This is from a company---you have to imagine, I was sitting in a part of the world that's called Samsung City, because it's a city where they have their own police force, their own supermarket. All the buildings are built by Samsung construction, they're insured by Samsung insurance. The whole thing---this is a massive William Gibson kind of futuristic massive corporation world, and then they go, "We don't think we can have influence on web standards. Can you help us, Mr. One-Person Company from nowhere?"
+
+It was true, because even though they had, I think at the time, something like an 8 percent market share with Samsung Internet Browser, they had no idea how to use that as political leverage or influence in the standards process---how to put people in the right positions, how to bring in a developer perspective. It was very much a hardware company, and hardware companies do not understand a sort of very agile, fluffy, and imprecise software world. It was baffling.
+
+The kind of process that you have at Canon, for instance---they would design chips two years in advance, and have a full specification with tests, and everything. The idea that you could just rock up there and code up a feature on the thing and just ship it---and then, oops, it's buggy, sorry we'll just fix it---was something that was outside of that sphere. Those interactions were super interesting in seeing how worlds collided there.
+
+*In these kinds of interactions, did you ever feel a sense of divided loyalty between the interests of the company that you might be working for or consulting with, and the organization---the standards themselves, the broader ecosystem?*
+
+That's interesting because I think I pretty much always managed to dodge the issue. It's an hourglass communication system. You're this tiny, very small thing, with an organization on one side and an organization on the other, and you're the entire point of contact between the two. You can sort of represent---without lying---the information from one side to the other and back.
+
+One thing that is pretty clear is you could be Samsung, and you still have no decision power over what W3C will agree to. You have influence if you play your cards right, but the whole thing---if you want to have influence, you can't be a total asshole. When something would come up that might trigger divided loyalties, I would say, "Yeah, that's very interesting. But I'm not sure I could get it adopted by the community, because that is the kind of thing that they disagree with"---without saying, "I disagree!" and without going into a group being a mercenary. You could make that representation, which wasn't lying in the sense that it was true. It's very hard---at least, it was particularly hard at a time when this process was not captured by a few big companies---to make a change without getting significant political support from multiple people, and that generally meant having to align with the values in one sense or another.
+
+*Did everyone else operate that way?*
+
+No, but it's certainly true that---and this is something I explained to my customers as a freelancer---you can't be a mercenary and be credible. What the group is interested in is not the fact that you're representing Company A, B, or C. The group is interested in your expertise as the person who's in the room. If for the first six months you work for Samsung and you're saying, "Yeah, we really need this feature," and then two weeks later, you move to Canon, and you're saying, "Oh, no screw that feature. It's a really bad idea"---your credibility is shot. So the group won't be interested in what you have to say anymore---or very occasionally, when they wonder what the companies think. But in terms of expertise, it wouldn't work. That is something I would always explain to clients initially. People understand it well. It's your expertise that is valued, and that is how you bring influence. But you can't just snap your fingers and make things happen.
+
+There is one company that did try. I didn't even start working for them, but they tried to basically get me to abandon my previous customers because they wanted an exclusive deal. They promised a lot of money and were saying, "We want you to work for us full time starting next week. We don't want to wait for the three or four months"---or however much was left on my previous contract. "We'll give you money to match or more than you would make from them to compensate, you just have to ditch them this weekend."
+
+I said no, in part because that's not how I work, and in part also because I don't want to work for people who operate that way. But also, you're talking about a tiny pool of potential customers. Even from a purely self-interested perspective, that's the kind of thing that would have shot my credibility right away.
+
+*You mentioned the sense that something has changed from this period. What years are we talking about when the standards processes you were involved in were more distributed---felt more like something that required widespread buy-in---and then walk us into the story of capture that you alluded to.*
+
+The years I'm talking about are---when did I stop consulting? I stopped consulting in 2015. It goes more or less up to then-ish. It's not like there was a sea-change moment where one day everything was fine, and the next day everything was captured. It happened gradually. I think a lot of us were frogs boiled in that water quite progressively before people started noticing. There's still people who are starting to notice today. So there's a spectrum. But in those initial years, from say 2000 to 2015, things were more balanced.
+
+Eventually, it comes down to what the enforcement mechanisms are. We're talking about what's called voluntary standards. In theory, it's standards that you would only adopt if you want to adopt them, and otherwise you can ignore them. Of course, that's never really---it's rarely really the case. But the enforcement mechanism for standards-making and standards adoption was the market. You could rely on market discipline. If most of the players have agreed on the standard and you haven't, you're just going to lose out on the market. For that to work, it's a very convenient enforcement mechanism, because you don't, as an institution, have to do any of the enforcement work. That's what always makes the market so attractive---it's just, yeah, like magic.
+
+But, of course, that assumes that there's competition. The moment competition disappears, the moment the market ceases to have any kind of disciplining power, then you lose that factor. Voluntary standards start to lose the ability to operate as shared standards.
+
+In terms of capture, it wasn't immediate, but the gradual focus on only doing the browser engine part---so really just the rectangle inside the browser chrome, and nothing else---was very much driven by that increasing power by certain players. They didn't want us to standardize search protocols, or e-commerce protocols, or advertising, or anything in the higher layer that they could see as capturable.
+
+There was a push to focus just on this, and it was always presented in terms of, "That's the specificity of the organization. That's what we're good at. That's where we can drive interoperability. Let's leave the rest to *innovation*"---which I think is always a red flag. It gradually got to this place where now it's pretty much only those standards. The only companies that have a say are the ones who have implementation power. That's mostly Google, Apple, and a tiny weeny bit of Mozilla.
+
+*Around 2015, you switched out of consulting. Was that because of the changes that were taking place? What brought about that shift for you? And where did it lead you?*
+
+No, it wasn't because of those changes. It was still early enough in the transformation that I either hadn't noticed, or it wasn't bothering me yet. But starting from 2012, mid-2012-ish, my primary customer became W3C itself. I was still formally a consultant, but during mid-2012 to 2015 I was paid in part by MIT, and in part by Keio University in Tokyo, to work as part of the W3C team editing the HTML5 standard. We had this situation in which W3C had gone down a bad direction with HTML, trying to make it all about XML. That was very unpopular with developers and browser vendors. So the browser vendors sort of forked and went to build their own HTML in the WHATWG. Then there was an attempt to bring everyone back around the same table, because that was silly. I was hired to be the W3C part of that sort of rejoining-the-people.
+
+Part of it was editing the actual spec, bringing it to completion. I think we were given a mandate to close it in two years, and it took twenty-six months, which was good, because no one believed the two years was possible. That was very aggressive. I think we had 400 issues when we started.
+
+Part of it was to be a diplomat and rejoin those two communities from the bottom up. We knew there were people who wouldn't ever get along, ever, but it felt that it was possible to drive alignment, and that actually did work. But to answer your initial question: in 2015, I was really done with that. It was a grueling process, and I was ready to work on something that was not standards at all. So I went to work for a startup, as CTO doing some product work.
+
+*As you reflect on processes that affect things we experience on the web all the time, do you see traces of those processes---and of your handiwork---in your experience of the web today? How does somebody who has been there in the room and on those lists throughout that period experience the web differently from somebody who wasn't?*
+
+There's several things. There are times I see features and I'm thinking, "Oh, yeah, I remember when we were talking about that." It's something silly, and it's not important---doesn't necessarily affect my experience of the web. But you see it in there. It often comes when, say, maybe there's a bug in a video UI thing inside the browser, and I'm thinking, "Oh, that's clearly because they didn't set the whatever-attribute correctly." I remember we talked about how that would might go wrong, the trade-offs, et cetera. So you have an extra level of understanding of what's going on. That jumps out at weird times.
+
+There is another thing where I think, more than a decade later, a sense of "Hey, we got that right." One of the hard projects that got off the ground as part of this HTML thing---the project I really relied on to bridge communities---is Web Platform Tests.
+
+Everyone hates writing tests. It's a drag. You have to go through the spec with a fine-tooth comb and find all the corner cases of any given statement, write code that matches every single thing, and then run it, and then look at what happens---the whole thing is terrible. But also when it's there, and it works, you have actual interoperability.
+
+Before the HTML thing I was doing, every specification had a separate test suite. They used different frameworks. A lot of them did it as a checkbox exercise---so the entire SVG test suite, I think, was 180 tests, or something like that, which is ridiculous. It's tiny. Groups would do it once to get approval to move forward with the standard, and then they would never touch it again, and no one would use it. So you got all these interoperability problems from lack of testing.
+
+We decided to get serious about it. I basically went and took everyone's test suite. I didn't ask permission. I took everyone's test suite, dumped them in this massive repo and started running really horrendous Perl code to replace the ad hoc frameworks everyone had, and put them all in the same kind of test framework---which some other guy had written, and it was very usable and very good. That's how we started having a unified test suite for the entire web platform.
+
+Today, I think it has two million tests or something like that. It's still really big. It's operated in production by every single large browser vendor. So any change you make to any browser will go through the test suite, and if it adds a failure, or whatever, it will notify them.
+
+I still get little sparks of excitement from that thing whenever I write a relatively complex web thing. I'm on Firefox. When I develop, I only look at Firefox, and then at the end, I usually look at other browsers. That's when you're thinking, "Oh, yeah, I've forgotten that Chrome doesn't support this or whatever." But sometimes you do it, and it just works the same everywhere.
+
+It's hard to convey just how incredibly hard it is to get a reproducible execution of something as complex as HTML plus CSS plus JavaScript, plus all those APIs---this is an insanely complex platform. The fact that you can write something complicated, and it works the same in completely independently implemented browsers, still sort of gives me a bit of goosebumps. Just by doing that, we saved---there are about twenty million web developers worldwide I think. We saved all of these people so many hours each, and they've been able to build better things for it. You still see the value in that.
+
+*Amazing. But after that process you moved on to a startup and then also, later, the New York Times. Tell us a little bit about those experiences.*
+
+The startup was very startup-y---five or six of us in a room that was probably ten feet by twelve or something like that. It was called science.ai, and the goal of the startup was to fix scholarly publishing---which, as you are well aware, we didn't succeed in doing. But the tech stack was very interesting. I still think that with more money and better strategic decisions, it could have succeeded, but it didn't.
+
+One thing that was interesting is I was running away from standards, and I managed to do only product work for about a year at that startup. Then it became very clear that we would need to do standards work for what we wanted to achieve. Because if you're building replacement document formats for scholarly publishing, and you're talking to a Wiley or Elsevier, et cetera---once again, you're not going to say, "Hey, please use this crazy little thing that these five people did." You have to document it and start standardizing it.
+
+I tried to avoid doing too much of it, so there was a strategy of doing enough to make them happy, but not a full standards project. But we used a lot of Schema.org to make sure that we were grounded in an ontology that was maintained elsewhere. Then we had this project that brought together what I called HTML vernaculars. The idea was that you could do specialized versions of HTML that would map to a specific domain. You would constrain the HTML in specific ways and also enhance it in specific ways. We constrained it to just be the kind of content that you would have in the scholarly article, which is already quite broad, and then enhance it with all these semantic annotations from Schema.org so that you could say that this figure is this type of figure, and it was authored by this person, who is different from the authors of the paper. We wrote a spec called Scholarly HTML around that. But I was still trying to stay away from standards.
+
+Then at the Times again I managed to go, I think, two or three years without doing standards work. But at some point we needed it for strategic reasons. Google was trying to change how advertising was working and doing this whole "Privacy Sandbox" stuff. The Times needed to be in that room and be in those conversations, and since I was the person doing privacy and strategy around data and tech, that fell to me.
+
+The Times was really trying to push for this world in which you had only one data controller. When someone interacts with you as a first-party website, only you as the website control the data, even if you work with other people---you're still the driver.
+
+That's why we worked on GPC, the Global Privacy Control. With the law that was emerging in California, I wrote the spec specifically for the technical signal in browsers to match the law. Because this needed to move forward and they needed someone who understood standards for that. So yeah, it tends to catch up to me. Right now, I'm in a phase where I'm really trying not to do standards. But I'm not sure how successful I'll be.
+
+*That was a case of standards as regulatory compliance. Is that something that had been a big part of your story before? Or was that something new at that point because new regulations were coming online?*
+
+It was pretty new at that point. It's not the first such thing, but it's definitely the first that I was involved, and it's still not a big thing. I think it should be a much bigger thing. I think there's huge promise in using standards processes to complement the work of regulators. But this was---and just to give you a sense for how hard it is to bring lawmakers and technologists in the same room to align on a standard---this is a one-bit standard. This is a standard for the transmission of a single bit over HTTP, which is a well-known protocol. Several years in, it is adopted but not yet ratified. So there's the whole human component of getting all these interests---the business interests and regulation---to align so that you get a standard. It is pretty challenging.
+
+*To pick up on the earlier story of capture, you mentioned that different people in the community discovered that there were frogs in boiling water at different times. Can you describe a moment or a process when you started to change your perspective on what was going on?*
+
+For me, it really was working at the New York Times that helped me realize we had a problem. Before that, if you'd asked me, I would have said, "Yeah, those Google people---I mean, clearly, they're not very good at privacy, that's not a thing they do well. But I've met a lot of them, and they mean well. They're really trying to do something, and it's complicated. I'll be the first to point out their failures and all that. But overall, it's looking pretty well."
+
+Then I got to see how those tech monopolies treat the media, including pretty powerful media companies. You'd think that the New York Times would have a say. But really what they get is fake deference. It's like the tech companies will send twenty people to the meeting to tell you you're important, but then they won't change anything. The constant arrogance of those tech monopolies---where they assume that if you work for a media organization, you don't understand technology. The people would explain very silly things. I saw that any change I was trying to make to push technologists or people in the standards world towards solutions that would work better for the media would stop moving. You could push a little bit, and then you'd feel a massive resistance.
+
+For instance, one of the things I was interested in at the Times was not doing AMP, because AMP takes your content away and publishes it on google.com instead. You no longer get data, and it's basically Google---
+
+*What does AMP stand for?*
+
+Accelerated Mobile Pages. So it's the whole idea that, because of performance and because the open web has to beat the mobile native apps, you have to give all your content to Google, who will publish it for you.
+
+*Facebook was doing that, too, right?*
+
+Yeah, so AMP was the most aggressive one by far. But yeah, Facebook had something called Facebook Instant Articles that was horrendously, badly designed. Clearly it was one person's job to figure out the format, and they had never built a format in their lives before. But Facebook didn't care. Facebook doesn't care about tech quality. They just care about shipping.
+
+Apple also has the thing that they use for Apple News, which is also not really great. None of them thought to reuse an existing thing---maybe RSS. Google was very aggressive in pushing it, though, because if you didn't do AMP, you couldn't be in the AMP carousel, which means you couldn't be at the top of the search results.
+
+They kept saying, "Oh, it doesn't help for your ranking, because it doesn't change the ranking. It just puts you more at the top." Yeah, okay, so it's not ranking except it's the only way to be in the top position. Gotcha. I could see how everything would get locked down if you tried to push back.
+
+That was one of the ways I almost went back into standards when I was at the Times. I started talking about, "Hey, how about we standardize ways of doing content aggregation such that publishers have a say about how it works, and we can make it work in a way that doesn't push everything to Google?" Everything ground to a halt. You could see that all the avenues of discussion would freeze up. I was thinking, "Okay, yeah, I know who's doing that."
+
+*After the Times, you shifted to a different kind of organization. You were starting to work with organizations that---for instance, Protocol Labs, or the IPFS Foundation---were not just businesses using standards. They're organizations that are trying to build protocols rather than the platform model that big tech companies were involved in. Could you talk a bit about that transition?*
+
+I went there because that's what I was looking for. After five years at the Times, I felt that it was not possible to move the web, either from inside standards organizations, or from significant businesses that were not themselves big tech.
+
+I didn't want to go to big tech with the hope of changing things from the inside, because I've seen too many people do that over the years, and nothing ever changes. Then you have all these people who are smart somewhere on the inside, but who keep justifying things that are less and less justifiable. They are basically frogs boiling themselves. So I didn't want to be one of those people.
+
+It wasn't easy to find a place where my skill sets would work---but at the same time not be a complete blockchain thing, and still be adjacent to this dWeb and web3 world. I really didn't want to do a five-person startup again. I didn't feel I had the energy after all that. So I landed at Protocol Labs.
+
+It was a very chaotic company, I have to say. But there was a very significant community of people who also wanted to do what I wanted to do. Even though I wouldn't say that anything that we built at that time has had massive commercial success yet, the sort of excitement and research and experimentation that happened there is starting to bring dividends today in terms of better protocols that are built on good ideas.
+
+That's a lot of what I've been focusing on at the IPFS Foundation. To give you a bit of context, IPFS was invented, I think, in 2013, 2014---ten-ish years ago. It was this way of doing content addressing. But over the years, many cooks were involved, and also it sort of worked on the principle that it needed a lot of optionality to work in different contexts. While that made it very flexible, it also made it almost very challenging to implement well, and it made it very hard to build anything on top of that you could expect interoperability from.
+
+What I've been working on---at the tail end of this crazy few years of experimentation---is, okay, how can we make these ideas more usable? A project called DASL ("dazzle") is in the process of taking this and eliminating all the options, eliminating everything that's not reliable and just picking one. Even if it's controversial, it doesn't matter. Sometimes there's no good choice. You just pick one making these tiny specs that can easily be reusable by other protocols. The AT Protocol that underlies Bluesky uses DASL under the hood for data, for CIDs---for content identifiers and for packaging.
+
+I think that there is something to the basic idea of data that can be self-certifying. You can have linked sets of content addressed data. I think it changes the kind of governance that you can build on top of the system compared to something that uses a more traditional domain name authority.
+
+*Can you explain what the goal of IPFS is? Protocol Labs is trying to build an economic layer on top of that, I know. It's an addressing scheme, but to what end?*
+
+There's so many different ways of describing it and all of them are partial truths.
+
+The first thing I always explain is that IPFS stands for InterPlanetary File System, and it is neither interplanetary nor a file system. On the first part, the interplanetary part, there is a satellite in Low Earth Orbit that is conducting IPFS-related experiments. So that's as far as the interplanetarity goes. In terms of the file system, well, a file system---when you tell people you have a file system, they expect you to give them something like the Finder or whatever, a directory browser. You put a file there, and it's going to be there. If you come from another machine to the same file system because it's interplanetary, you're going to find that file, which you generally won't in IPFS.
+
+IPFS is essentially a suite of protocols to retrieve data in a content-addressed manner. So content-addressed means that the address of a piece of data is derived from its hash. So it's derived from its content. The retrieval method for that can be---it's very open-ended in IPFS. There is this thing called the IPFS Principles that actually celebrates the fact that it's open-ended. I mean, it's great that it's open-ended. But that doesn't always help people building apps.
+
+The core---the most typical way of retrieving IPFS content---is that there's this global distributed hash table, a DHT. Anyone who wants to expose data on the IPFS protocol through that network basically says, "Hey, I have this content, and here are the hashes for that content." When you connect to the distributed hash table, if you have the hash for something you want, you can use that distributed hash table in a peer-to-peer fashion, using libp2p or something to find who is actually providing that data. It could be multiple people on the network---and then you fetch it from them.
+
+*What will ordinary users be able to do with this that they can't do now?*
+
+I think it's not so much about what users can do directly, in terms of user interface. In my mind, forgetting the specificities of IPFS, but really thinking in terms of content addressing and self-certifying data, it really is about the kinds of governance systems that you can build on top of this.
+
+One way of thinking about that---I always tend to think of protocols in terms of Elinor Ostrom, ADICO, and institutional analysis, and all that. If you think of how data works in Web 2.0, for instance, where the authority for any information you have is grounded in the Domain Name System, you know it's a true thing, or it's authoritative in the sense that you got it from the horse's mouth.
+
+For instance, if we're on Twitter---the only way I can know that I'm reading a tweet from you on Twitter is by trusting that Twitter really received that from you, verified that it's from you, and then is giving me something untransformed. But technically, they could go in---you tweeted "I love cats," and they could go in and just replace "cats" with "dogs" and show that to me. You could tell me that it's not true, but authoritatively, Twitter is telling me that. That is architecturally part of the HTTP protocol. It's part of how we've built the web. Any institutional arrangement you build on top of that has to build in that trust of a specific party. It becomes this control point of power for all kinds of interactions you might want to build. That creates bottlenecks, and it increases the institutional complexity of what you're building.
+
+If you switch from that to a system that's content-addressed---where you know you're getting the right thing because you can always verify that you got the right thing---you know the data is correct intrinsically, without needing to ask anyone else. There's no other authority involved.
+
+On top of that, you can---because it's all hashed and deterministic and all self-certifying---you can also add a signature layer. If I know that you have a specific key, you can sign that content and say, "It's from me." I can then have a thing that's a hash that has the content and the signature embedded in it. I know all of these things come together. It's a real statement from you. It has its own authority. Then, because you have the content identifiers that are basically links between various things, you can have a graph.
+
+I have this thing that is content-addressed, so I know the content is correct. It's signed, and it's also referencing all these other things. I know that these references are correct, and therefore I can follow this thing and know what I'm getting without any third-party authority.
+
+Just to add a small point on top of that, in terms of the institutions that you can build: it creates a lot more flexibility. For instance, say again that we're in a social media environment, and you want to create a feed generator, and that feed generator has content from arbitrary people. Normally, I would have to trust you not to transform that content. But in this case you can't. If you transform it, the thing becomes invalid. This means that you can create your own thing, and I don't have to worry about what you're doing other than maybe I'm interested in the governance of how the content gets in. But all the other nitty-gritty of the data itself is taken care of.
+
+To my mind, what matters are the things you can build on that. It means that you switch to a system where you can have an institution over here dealing with identity, an institution over there dealing with data storage, one here that produces feeds, and another here that does search---and you don't need to integrate them. They can operate separately. A good separation of concerns makes them simpler, and they can remain trustworthy in terms of what you see. That's really the goal of these things. It's not, "Hey, you can now do crazy AI, with whatever-super-gradient-looking features." You can build a new world. That's really what I'm interested in.
+
+*How does the work of building protocols for building a new world compare to working in standards organizations with big companies? I mean, in both cases, you're trying to build a kind of rule book, but I imagine it's a very different kind of process.*
+
+It's different. But you always end up having a bunch of geeks in a discussion channel explaining technology to one another. Very quickly, you get interest from---not maybe the Googles or the Apples, but significantly larger companies start to get involved relatively quickly, because if you have something with promise, and you can demonstrate that promise, they come in.
+
+But one thing that's different is---and it might not be an actual difference, it's more like a time shift. The vibe is much closer to what it was like to do web standards in the early 2000s. We have meetings that have maybe ten people and it's super friendly. It's relatively informal. We know that we're a small group who understand these things, and that there's not many other people who understand them. It's not a point of pride, but it creates a bond. You keep having these conversations where you're thinking, "No, no, I promise you---self-certifying data is something that transforms the governance of digital---" and outside that group, those are conversations that are hard to have. Because you have to give twenty years of background and a bit of computer science about what hashes are---because you have something new that no one has explained to the world yet.
+
+It makes those meetings very nice, because you're thinking, "Oh, for the next hour, I can just kick back and just say things plainly the way they are in my brain without having to provide seven layers of explanation." It's also very interesting, because people build cool, small things that they demo to one another, which is something I haven't seen in a while. It used to be that on the web---"Hey, I made this crazy table. Look how cool it is. It's all pixelated!"
+
+For instance, there's this streaming service that is all around self-certifying data. All the video blocks are self-certified, and they create the giant Merkle tree. The whole thing is crazy from a technical level. But that guy could explain it, and he joined one of the meetings, and within two minutes, you could see he understood that everyone knew what he was talking about. His eyes lit up, and he was thinking, "Oh, baby!" He would start talking about how they have this guy who now broadcasts 24/7 streaming, and they don't know how big you can make a Merkle tree of video fragments---you really get that vibe.
+
+I really think it's a time thing. If we do it right and this is the next world, which I hope it is, at some point we're going to screw up and there'll be a new oligarchy. The question is how long can we---how slow can we make the capture process? I think by building better fundamentals in there, we can make it slower. We can enable much more democratic powers, and hopefully, instead of a twenty-year or fifteen-year path to oligarchy, we can get a two-hundred-year path to oligarchy---make it the problem for our great-great-grandchildren.
+
+*It's something to aspire to. Based on these lessons---in some respects you described what you're doing as returning to where you started and trying again---can you say a bit about the lessons you've learned? Not only for your own work, but what do you try to impart among the twenty-year-olds showing up in these spaces, and having the kind of excitement that you had when you first entered the web standards world?*
+
+I try not to pontificate at the twenty-year-olds too much, in part because they wouldn't listen anyway. But if there's something that I think has become really important in understanding how to build these systems, it is this idea that technology is politics by other means.
+
+A lot of what got us to fail in the previous iteration is we were a community that was very much a product of the 1990s. Neoliberalism---great, it works. We built these systems where---and you see that in all the "splinternet" discourse---fragmentation was always bad. You have only two levels, the global and the individual. Anything that intervenes in between is bad. It's going to slow you down, it's going to be a problem. So you build these systems such that you have that global standard for everything. You make it good because you're "ethical," and you have the "right values." Then individuals use it, and they have some choice. That's it. So we really built a system that reflects that. The current Internet governance institutions still reflect very much that mindset.
+
+If that had been on purpose---people consciously trying to build exactly that system---then, fine. I mean, I would politically disagree. But at least you could say that this was done on purpose. It wasn't. It was done by default, through lack of understanding of the mechanics involved in building this.
+
+Really, now, I'm very adamant about the idea that this is political project. What we're building is democracy. In the same way that what makes science work is democracy, the project here is a democratic project. It's a political project through and through.
+
+We have to stop seeing it as a defensive thing. There's a lot in the IPFS world that's very much about censorship resistance---the idea that you have an attacker from the outside, and you're protecting against that. But you're not proposing anything positive. I really trying to ground this in a capabilities approach, looking at what capabilities we're giving people. Again, self-certifying data gives you the capability of building something such that you can trust the data, no matter what institutional structure you put around it. The thing I would bang people on the head about is an old joke that I made many years ago: if you got into tech because you didn't like politics, now you have two problems.
+
+That is the core of it. I think people who are interested in the architecture of technology and of protocols today should take the time to familiarize themselves with subsidiarity, polycentricity---basically, how institutions work, how democracy works. It's not about voting or capture resistance. Then you could build much, much better protocols from that. That would be my lesson learned. I'm sorry it took me twenty fucking years to get to that point before I started, but you gotta start sometime.

content/interviews/ehmke-contributor_covenant.md

@@ -1,13 +1,13 @@
 ---
 narrator: Coraline Ada Ehmke
-subject: Contributor Covenant
+subject: Codes of conduct
 facilitator: Nathan Schneider
 date: 2024-10-10
 approved: 2024-10-11
 summary: "After widespread resistance to codes of conduct in open-source software communities, Coraline Ada Ehmke's Contributor Covenant became the most popular code of conduct in the ecosystem."
 location: "Chicago, USA"
 #headshot: "placeholder-headshot.png"
-topics: [code of conduct, dispute resolution, gender, open source, organizations, software]
+topics: [conflict, mediation, gender, open source, software]
 links:
     - text: "Personal website"
       url: "https://where.coraline.codes"

content/interviews/kiessel-good_market.md

@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 ---
 narrator: Amanda Kiessel
-subject: Good Market
+subject: Community standards
 facilitator: Nathan Schneider
 date: 2024-10-29
 approved: 2024-12-16

content/interviews/mannan-diplomatic_protocols.md

@@ -60,7 +60,7 @@ In protocol one has to work out all the details when you are organizing an event
 
 Once in an embassy National Day event---I will not say which embassy---this was when I was in Tashkent, the CD player suddenly stopped, guests waited for the national anthem to resume, the ambassador turned red in the face. You understand, all the dignitaries were present and the national anthem had halted because of a technical glitch. I'm sure next day the person in charge, whether it was staff or junior officer, was packing his baggage and was headed back to his capital. In Bangladesh too, once when the Prime Minister came to attend a formal program, there was a technical problem that prevented the national anthem from being played, and the next day the chief of protocol was fired. These things happen. With protocol, you have to be extraordinarily careful, you have to be calm and collected under pressure, and you have to be well-trained on how to swiftly handle a *faux pas* or unmeditated disruptions. One has to understand the enormity of any failings and one has to always be on alert. 
 
-*How did you learn to develop that sense of detail? *
+*How did you learn to develop that sense of detail?*
 
 I took interest, that's the main thing. From the very beginning I knew this is one of the most interesting jobs because you will be meeting the heads of state and government, and at least the foreign ministers. My opportunity came as a junior officer to be a guide to a visiting minister---showing him around, taking him to the market, taking him to another ministry, just accompanying him---I was very alert from the onset. And I received very glowing commendations after the visit. No matter how difficult the task was, I never said ‘no’ to anybody---I tried to manage. That is another hallmark of a diplomat, protocol instills this quality because we are entrusted to create positivity and an atmosphere of confidence. The objective has to be achieved, no matter how difficult. At the same time the process has to go smoothly, almost seem effortless. 
 

content/interviews/mayer-mediation.md

@@ -0,0 +1,199 @@
+---
+narrator: Bernard Mayer
+subject: Mediation
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2025-02-07
+approved: 2025-03-11
+location: "Kingsville, Ontario, Canada"
+summary: "Mediation developed as a professional field through experimentation and practice."
+headshot: "bernie_mayer.png"
+topics: [conflict, family, mediation, social work]
+---
+
+*How do you like to introduce yourself?*
+
+I'm Bernie Mayer. I'm an emeritus professor of conflict studies at Creighton University and a founding partner of CDR Associates in Boulder. I live with my wife and dog, who might join us, in Kingsville, Ontario. That's probably enough for the moment.
+
+*There's more to come, because I'd love to hear how you outline your life and career. You can begin wherever you like. How do you trace the beginnings of your interest in conflict?*
+
+A second formative fact was that my father was a director of a residential treatment center for children in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. We had a house on the grounds of it, and that's where I grew up. So I grew up in a suburb of Cleveland, and went to Cleveland Heights High School, but I lived in this community. It was not exactly an egalitarian community, but it was definitely a community with a purpose. It made me feel different in some ways, in a nice way---though not always nice. It had its hard moments too. A lot of hard things happened there over the years. But on the other hand, we had a much nicer house than we would have been able to afford, and I had access to baseball fields and gym and swimming pool and stuff like that that a social worker's kid normally didn't have.
+
+A third formative factor was that I was also, and you probably know the term, a "red diaper baby." I'll just leave it at that. Even though my father became somewhat conservative when he had to confront the sixties, I grew up with that consciousness. Then I was also a child of the sixties, and was very active in the civil rights movement, anti-war movements, peace movements. That was a big part of my identity. I went to Oberlin College, which was a focal point for student activism.
+
+All those things were about conflict. In a sense, conflict was a unifying factor of both the bad things that had happened and good work that could be done. In the early days of teaching and writing---particularly teaching people to be mediators and conflict interveners---I used to say that I grew up as a teenager and young adult, knowing pretty well how to raise conflict, but not what to necessarily do once I had raised it. As time went on the initial answer was: get people together to talk and see what we could work out. But as time went on I realized, no, raising conflict is really important as well. It's almost in a dialectical relationship with doing something to move it in a more constructive direction .
+
+I graduated from college in '68. I was facing the draft. I wasn't sure what I was going to do. My initial efforts to avoid the draft by applying to be a conscientious objector didn't work because they decided I really did believe in war. I thought, well, I don't know where this is going to lead me. But what would be a good thing to do during the period of time before I actually do get drafted? I was a child of social workers, and I liked working with kids. I'd done a lot of work as a childcare worker at this residential treatment center and as a camp counselor. So I went to social work school at Columbia in New York. Over the two years that I got my master's degree there, I received a very high number in the lottery, which meant I didn't get drafted.
+
+Now I had a social work degree, and I worked as a child and family therapist at a drop-in center mostly for recent immigrants to New York, that sort of thing.
+
+*At that stage, what tools were available for you for helping people through conflict? What was offered to you, what was at hand?*
+
+There was nothing specifically framed that way. I was trained to be a therapist, and I was trained in a fairly Freudian agency---a sectarian one, the Jewish Board of Guardians, now the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services. I feel like I had two kinds of trainings or learnings in my life, in grand systemic theories that sought to explain the world in their own way. I'm glad I got training in both of them, even though I ended up seeing significant flaws in both of them. One was Freudianism and the other  Marxism. I guess Marxism and Freudianism are, in a way, training about conflict---class conflict and internal conflict. I reject a lot about those systems now. But it wasn't a bad intellectual discipline at that point.
+
+*Was there a transition, then, from working in the context of agencies, working with who's coming through the agency, to a point where you realized you wanted to try to create some new practices or new frameworks?*
+
+Well, I was struggling with it all along. I mean, this was a Jewish agency, and a good one, but it was running a program that was mostly for kids from the Dominican Republic but also some from Puerto Rico,  Haiti, Costa Rica---and the agency hardly had any Spanish speaking staff at that time.  They did have staff who spoke some Spanish, maybe one or two, but almost no one who came from the cultural background of the people we were working with. It didn't seem an appropriate system to me.  I felt there was an elitist tone to the agency.  The attitude toward staff seemed to be:  how "we are the best, and you should really feel really lucky to be here."  Nonetheless, I got some very good training there, and and an important side benefit for me was the staff union, in which I was very active, became a shop steward and a member of the negotiating team.  In some ways, for my later career, that may have been the most important training I received.
+
+So after working there for a year as an intern, and then for two years after I got my degree , and I received some good training and supervision, I decided I needed to leave. I also felt it was time to leave New York. That was maybe helped by breaking up with somebody who I'd been in a relationship with and being a little heartbroken about that. My brother lived in Colorado. I called him up and asked whether he knew of any ranch in the area that would like somebody to work there for the summer.   That was really naive, I have to say. But it seemed like I needed a break from the professional path I had been on, and I didn't know whether I would ever go back to doing social work.
+
+I ended up living on a collective farm with whom he put me in contact. I stayed there  working for room and board over the summer, and I met Reggie there, my first wife, and Ethan, her then-two-year-old kid. I ended up living there for a year and half during which time I drove a school bus to bring in some extra money.   I guess I was part of the "hippie" culture of those I've never really accepted that term, but my son Mark has insisted, "No, you were a hippie, Dad, just accept it." And then, after a year of being a school bus driver and a wannabe farmer, I was ready to do something else. I moved away from the farm after a year and a half. Reggie and I moved into a house in Boulder, right next to my brother's house. The two houses became the Juniper Street Collective---the place Mark and Ethan grew up in.  I got a job in a program at the Mental Health Center in Boulder called Our House, which was a drop-in center for teenagers. Interesting---there's still a Facebook group of kids who hung out at Our House all these years later that I'm part of.   Many of them are grandparents now.
+
+I also worked on the adolescent team of the Mental Health Center as a therapist, as did Reggie. But my main identification there was with Our House, which was a kind of sixties sort of place that had some really interesting things going on, but some really poor boundaries too.
+
+Then I was asked to run a methadone clinic, which I did for about a year and a half or two years, acting part of the time as head of the overall substance abuse program of the MHC (which included the Methadone Clinic, Our House, and several other program). This was part of a program funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse money.  This funding base was a problem for the Our House program because those kids weren't coming in to be treated for drug abuse, although some of them did have substance abuse problems.  They were there to hang out in a supportive environment with friends, engage in a variety of structured and unstructured group activities, and receive various kind of counseling as  and if they were ready for it. Working in the methadone clinic was  a real learning experience for me. I was way too young and inexperienced to be the director of the program or even a substance abuse counselor, as most of us were in that program, but we did okay, I think. There were some really intense things about that job in terms of the trauma people were dealing with and the conflicts they faced and staff had to deal with.
+
+After about 3 1/2 years in that job I was ready to be done with it. I didn't know what I wanted to do next. I had this ambivalent relationship to therapy and social work. I felt like I had something to offer, but it didn't feel quite like home in a way. So when Reggie finished getting her MSW in Denver,  we both quit the MHC and traveled for about four months.  We took a four-month trip through Canada and the US. Then Ethan went back and stayed with his dad, while Reggie and I went  to South America.
+
+When I came back, what was I going to do? I didn't really know, and my father was quite ill then. I spent some time with him in Cleveland. This would have been 1977, and then he died in December. Then I started looking for jobs. You can figure out the psychodynamics of this if you want---it kind of hits you over the head. I ended up getting a job as a team leader at a residential treatment center in Broomfield, Colorado, which in those days was called Wallace Village. Then I was appointed as the program director, which was like the clinical director.
+
+But then once again my ambivalence about what I was going to do arose. I ended up having not the best relationship with the director, who was a behaviorist---and even though I wasn't a Freudian, I also wasn't a Skinnerian.
+
+At the same time, I was involved organizing  demonstrations being organized at Rocky Flats, a nuclear weapons facility. There I met Chris Moore, who eventually moved to Boulder, but was then living in Philadelphia.   I met him doing nonviolence training in connection with the protests and sit-ins at Rocky Flats. He and I ended up doing a lot of training in peacekeeping and nonviolent civil disobedience.  Anybody who was planning on joining the sit-ins at Rocky Flats had to go through a training that we conducted. When Chris went back to Philadelphia, I continued to  e part of the team of trainers we had recruited. Later on, Chris moved to Boulder and for a while lived in the Juniper Street Collective. My meeting with Chris was critical to my future work a mediator and conflict intervention/
+
+Chris had  become  interested in mediation, and with his encouragement so did I. When I left Wallace Village (by mutual agreement---although I think there was no way I could have stayed there any longer)---I worked part-time at a really interesting residential program called Forest Heights Lodge in Evergreen Colorado, about an hour's drive from Boulder. I also started a small private practice as a therapist and was getting training in mediation (mostly through starting to act as a mediator, but also as a mediation trainer myself). Chris and I had been offering conflict training to activists but also in a number of other settings--, for example prisons and social agencies, and Chris asked me to help him do some training for people interested in mediation.
+
+*So your first exposure to conflict and mediation was more out of the social movement experience than the therapeutic experience?*
+
+Absolutely. But there was also a movement building in mediation, and four of us ended up as partners at a place called the Center for Dispute Resolution in Denver, which became CDR Associates in Boulder, which still exists, with offices above the Spruce Cafe in North Boulder, on Yellow Pine and Broadway. That was my formal entry into doing it as work. We were trying all sorts of ways of making money, but then we got a grant from the Hewlett Foundation that allowed four of us---Chris, Susan Wildau, Mary Margaret Golten and me---to  make our work CDR a paying job.
+
+By then I was also doing a doctoral program at the DU school of social work, and I used that as a vehicle for studying conflict. I was studying conflict theory and conflict intervention. I was also doing a little bit of therapy on the side when a lawyer who I knew approached me to ask for my help. She represented a parent who was undergoing a termination of parental rights process because there had been serious abuse and neglect in the home. She needed an expert witness to testify for her client and asked if I would be that expert witness. I said, "No, I won't do that. But how about if I mediate?"
+
+That just came out of the top of my brain, and she said, "What?" which was pretty much my own reaction to what I had just said. I suggested an attempt to mediate a voluntary relinquishment agreement between the birth parent, the foster-adopt parents, and the child protection services agency. It turns out that was a very innovative approach. So Mary Margaret and I acted as co-mediators and the parties worked out an agreement averting a formal trial and allowing the foster parents to adopt the child in question.   After that I was   referred a number of other child welfare  cases. Mary Margaret and I then started a two year long child protection mediation project, which became the basis of my doctoral dissertation. This effort turned out to a significant foundation for a whole new area of mediation services---child welfare mediation is now happening throughout the US and Canada (and elsewhere). We were one of the first two places to try it, and developed an important partnership with child welfare services in Boulder and Denver's (including lawyers who represented agencies, children, and parents).  
+
+In this and in many other ways CDR took off--growing from literally a church basement operation to a well funded and recognized conflict training and intervention service.  In order to survive in our early years, we basically had to take all comers because we needed the money, which meant we were doing a lot of work that we weren't specifically trained for. But neither was anybody else. 
+
+*Who were these clients?*
+
+We worked in many different conflict arenas.  We had a family mediation program. We did work for government agencies, teaching them conflict resolution for public processes, and we did some fairly large-scale conflict interventions. I did a bunch of organizational work---labor management, but also on conflicts within organizations. I still do that occasionaly. And we also ended up training internationally and helping set up conflict services in quite a few other countries. So things just grew that way over the years. Even though the Center for Dispute Resolution existed before the partnership formed, we really built it from a church basement bare bones operation, doing mostly landlord-tenant or neighborhood mediation. We did community mediation too and facilitated dialogues on public policy issues. For example, one of the more recent ones I did in Boulder under CDR's auspices was about the location of the homeless shelter in North Boulder.
+
+*Yeah, that was a big deal.*
+
+Still is.
+
+CDR was starting to do a lot more work that required traveling---for example, over the years I did a lot of work in Eastern Europe, and then I also did a lot of work in Australia and New Zealand and Alaska. But when Mark was born in 1984, I started trying to develop local work with city government, state government, and county government. 
+
+So that's my journey. Fast forward from 1978--79 to 2002, when my first marriage ended. I got remarried to Julie and moved to Canada. I still was doing work for CDR, but by 2006 or so, I started thinking I'm far away from there. CDR was going in some directions that weren't my favorite---I used to joke (although there is truth in this) that when I couldn't stand the words "billable hours" anymore, I realized that I needed to move in a different direction.  
+
+So then I thought, well, maybe I could go out on my own part-time, but maybe it might also be time for me to have an academic home.  In 2006, I got a nice offer from Creighton University, which had a grant to start a conflict program there--the Werner Institute. The guy who was the founding director asked me whether I would you be interested in doing some work with them.  I said, "Sure!" And he asked whether I would consider being a faculty member.  I said, "Well, I'm not moving to Omaha." So we worked out a deal where I worked half-time as a non-tenured full professor. I'd already written a couple of books by that point---I believe that's why they wanted me.
+
+They would fly me in a couple times each semester for ten days or so, and I'd do some online work with students in between. They provided accommodation and transportation as well. It was a very nice deal which worked well for all of us.  I did that for fourteen years, and then I retired from it because that program was going through changes. I was seventy-four years old by then.
+
+*As you were getting started in Boulder and developing this practice, clients were coming in with challenges that you were never trained to deal with---nobody was. How did you start building up a practice, building up tools and strategies? How did you begin to learn how to mediate conflicts?*
+
+I did eventually take some courses and go through some seminars, so I got some training, but a lot of it we were creating ourselves. It was a very creative period of time. And it wasn't just us---this was happening in the conflict field more broadly. The field had a lot of very interesting creative people, like John Paul Lederach. I went to a course he taught, and he went to a course I taught.
+
+People were making efforts all to build the peace and conflict studies field in many places. The Harvard Negotiation Project was starting. There was some funding for  community mediation centers that we were one of, but these programs took many different forms. There was the deliberative democracy movement, Partners for Democratic Change, Search for Common Ground, Accord, Resolve, the San Francisco Community Boards, and many other growing and innovative groups/  So we weren't alone in doing this. We were part of a growing literature and organizational base. There was also the National Conference for Peacemaking and Conflict Resolution, which was part of the peacemaking field that was growing too. It came out of a slightly different tradition, but we interacted a lot. The peacemaking field to a large extent  came from the Quaker and Mennonite tradition. Actually, the Mennonites played a role in our formation---when we were still a church basement office in Denver, it was in the Mennonite church, and their volunteer was our first office worker.
+
+Arbitration was also growing at that time, and there was a whole labor management side of this too. There was an organization called SPIDR---Society of Professionals in Dispute Resolution---and there was also\\ the Academy of Family Mediators with which I was also very involved.
+
+A lot of creative stuff came out of what we did. If you're familiar with Chris Argyris or Donald Schön's work on reflective practice, that's kind of how we did it. We had approaches we taught, and then our actual practice (our "espoused theory" and our "theory in practice"). For me, it was a very creative process to see the tension between what I was doing and what I was teaching.  
+
+The kind of bible in the field of negotiation in those years---to some extent it still is---was a book called *Getting to Yes*. It talked about positional and interest-based negotiation, this idea that the way you resolve disputes is to get people to talk about the interests underneath their positions. There were two co-authors from the Harvard Negotiation Project: Roger Fisher and Bill Ury. Roger Fisher's been dead for many years, but Bill Ury still lives in Boulder. He's a wonderful guy. He's written quite a few books. He's a wonderful writer, one of these writers whose storytelling does the heavy lifting of presenting his ideas, and his book has been a major bestseller.  But I came to believe it was overly simplistic and prescriptive.  Position and interests are not that different in essence--it's more about how they are presented and how far we did into the reasoning and motivational basis of people in conflict.
+
+I also remember how we taught active or reflective listening n our earlier years, and I always felt there was a lot of bullshit about that. No natural conversation really is that formulaic.  These discrepancies between what we taught and how I at least really worked were at the basis of a lot of growth for me much of which ended up in books that I wrote and in the way I taught as well. 
+
+That was a way in which my own thinking developed. It was partly in response to what others were saying, and partly in response to what I had been saying that I didn't quite believe anymore. My favorite bumper sticker  says, "Don't believe everything you think." I was noticing either my practice wasn't following what I preached, or my preaching wasn't following what I practiced, and in that tension was a great deal of creative space.
+
+*Are there particular tools or patterns of conflict or techniques that you keep coming back to and keep finding truth in?*
+
+Yeah, but they tend to not be things you do as much as ways of thinking. People always want you to teach how you do it---"I want something practical. Give me something practical." That is all well in good, theory and practice need to inform each other, but real growth comes in the maturation of our understanding of what we are dealing with in conflict and how can intervene in it in a productive way.
+
+There are two things that I've really come back to over and over again. First, we do not really succeed in conflict by being neutral. In fact, the concept of neutrality is a very flawed one. That's why I wrote a book *Beyond Neutrality*, and another book, co-authored with Jackie Font-Guzmán, called *The Neutrality Trap*. Mediators often market themselves as neutral---"we're neutral, we're impartial, we're just here to help you." But we have an awful lot of values and life experiences that inform our work, and in most circumstances people want us to be authentic and transparent about that. One of the things I did not like about psychoanalysis, for example, is the expectation that we  not put our own personality into the process.
+
+People want that personality. What people don't want is for us to manipulate them. If we say we're going to help them work out stuff, they don't want us to power them into something they don't want. But they also don't want us just to sit by in the name of neutrality while people get run over.
+
+I have learned over the years that my great ideas, when I'm in a third-party role, for how to solve a conflict are usually not such great ideas---you really have to trust people that they know what's best, and it needs to come from them. Not that I never have ideas, but I'm not the type of mediator who listens to everyone, gets opening statements, and puts people in separate rooms, which is how a lot of corporate mediation goes. You beat this person up a little bit, you beat that person up, you come up with something---no. I really believe people need to be brought together as much as possible and our job is to help do the hard work in conflict that they need to do. But that doesn't mean I'm passive.
+
+The second thing is that we have to help people raise the level of conflict. If we just see ourselves as calming things down, helping people come up with some resolution, and avoid intensifying a conflict we are often papering over really important issues and contributing to often unjust or unstable status quo.  While there are often times when what people want is to calm down a conflict and paper over the deeper issues,---a lot of times that's what people want and need, but a lot of times it isn't. Particularly in very serious conflicts, people need help in raising the more difficult issues, and they need help in saying what they are thinking and feeling in a way that is authentic but  doesn't shut everything down. As conflict interveners, have to be aware of our own conflict-avoidant tendencies and so that we don't actually stand in the way of getting to the level of depth where the conflict actually "lives."
+
+In fact, I think of our field as a field of conflict *engagement* specialists. One of the things I used to ask students is, before you ever know anything about a case, what do you see your purpose as being in a conflict? People can have all sorts of different answers. My answer was: I'm here to try to help people have the conversation they need to have.
+
+*Right. You wrote about "staying with conflict."*
+
+That's right. I also wrote a book called *The Conflict Paradox*, which is in some ways I think my most interesting way of looking at things---though it's probably the least selling of my books. A lot of what we're doing in conflict is helping people get past where they see things as in opposition to each other, and instead see them in a more dialectical way, as part of the same whole, like competition-cooperation, or logic-emotions, that sort of thing.
+
+*I appreciate the way you talked about your interventions as being primarily about a way of thinking as opposed to, say, a system or a procedure or an algorithm. How do you impart to clients that way of thinking? How do you prepare them for entering into and maybe escalating a conflict in the way they need to? How do you take them from where they're first coming to you to a point where they're ready to engage in a more productive approach to conflict?*
+
+There isn't a single answer because, for one thing, some clients aren't ever going to be ready. And I don't see myself exactly in a kind of didactic relationship with clients. But I think if I listen, if I'm there to listen for what's really important to them---and in the interactional space---it's going to come out. And the question is, do I shut it down or move it forward?
+
+Sometimes you have to say, "What do you need right now in this situation? Not necessarily from me, but just what do you need? Do you feel you need to be heard better? Do you feel you need to understand better? Do you feel you need to be empowered in some way? Do you feel you need other people participating in this? Do you feel you need an advocate?"
+
+One of the ways we can help people is to get beyond their belief that we are  here to fix things is to take on other roles than third-party ones.  For example, some of the most useful work we can do in many circumstances is as  an advocate role or a coach. That's something I've talked about: the three kinds of roles we often play are system roles, third-party roles, or ally roles. Sometimes the best way you can help people is to be an ally. I remember Bill Ury saying he thinks that's true for some of the most important the work he's done in the international arena.
+
+Even as an ally, you have to remain true to yourself. Once I was working with a university as they were dealing with some pretty intense student protests. I said, "I'm not here to help you put down student protests. You know my background. But I can talk to you about how you can interact with them." That got me into dealing with facilitating---co-facilitating, really---interaction between Jewish and Muslim, and also Palestinian students on campus (this was about 25 years ago).
+
+I don't do a lot of formal mediation anymore. I live in this little town. I find myself getting into it sometimes, but I do a lot of consultations still, often in that ally role.
+
+*How much do you see patterns playing out across conflicts that repeat themselves in conflict after conflict, as opposed to having to approach each one as a really distinct challenge with very distinct sets of strategies? How much about conflict, as you experience it, repeats itself as opposed to needing to be treated as always new?*
+
+That's a very important thing to look at---the patterns of interaction, both between the parties and between you and the parties. I used to say, if I've tried something twice, and it hasn't worked, I better try something else. Even just asking the same question---I remember one time in a video somebody took of me during a demonstration, I could see myself not letting this go. I kept saying, "What do you think the other person's trying to tell you right now?" And this person kept projecting all these evil things onto the other person. I kept wanting to sah, "Bernie, will you give it up?" It was a real learning.
+
+From case to case, there's always the question of whether people can listen, and whether, when people aren't feeling heard, instead of listening, they speak louder. I started realizing that, more often than not, if you want to be heard, what you have to do is listen better. And if you want someone else to be a little more straight with you, you have to be more revealing yourself. I'm not proposing that as a rule always, but it is something you see happening over and over again---that particular kind of communication pattern.
+
+Another thing to look at over and over is what I learned in therapeutic workshops: looking at rhythms of interaction. So we've established a rhythm of interaction---you ask your question, I go on for ten minutes, then you ask another question.
+
+Is one person doing all the talking? Does somebody get halfway through a sentence and the other person breaks them off? Is it like my Jewish family's conversation at a table, where nobody ever finished a sentence?
+
+Those are patterns of interaction. Another pattern is the rhythm of emotionality. Something you also see over and over again is how quickly people rush to solutions. Sometimes that's fine---sometimes people rush to very good solutions very quickly when you think you really need to have a much longer process, and you don't.
+
+I always remember an organizational mediation where there was a dysfunctional team of people, but the real problems were between the supervisor and one of the key staff members who had a lot of power in the team. They were really going at it, so we set a day aside for a retreat. They kept arguing about how they said good morning to each other.
+
+One said, "I say good morning, and you never respond to me. You never even lift up your head." And the other person said, "Yeah, but that's because if I say good morning, you're going to feel you've communicated with me enough, and you go in your office, and I don't see you all day."
+
+They went back and forth, and I said, "Okay, this is not what this conflict is about. We're not here to spend the day talking about how you say good morning to each other. What's really going on?"
+
+When it came out---I remember it was very sensitive---but the very hard-nosed, hard-to-work-with person said, "It all started a while back when I had a seizure at work." And I thought, *Oh my God! She's prepared to be vulnerable here.* The supervisor had discovered her having a seizure, had dealt with it immediately in the break room I think, and called 911, and she got taken away, and they stabilized her, and it never happened again.
+
+The supervisor had this narrative of "I was a hero. I rescued her." Her story, though, was, "I came back, and everybody knew about it." And the supervisor said, "Oh wow. I was really shaken. I guess I told some people because I needed to process it, and I am really, really sorry." The person looked at her and said, "Apology accepted."
+
+I didn't do much other than to say, "What the hell is this really about?" And it only could have gone that well because they really were ready for something to change. But it does show, I think, the importance of sometimes saying, "I don't buy it. I don't buy the stories you tell." One of the things you do is listen to every person's narrative. In conflict, they don't seem to overlap. What you're trying to do is expand each person's story enough---the Venn diagram, if you will, of the story---to overlap, and then begin to have a different kind of conversation. Those are some patterns, I guess.
+
+*One thing that stuck with me earlier is what you said about  the systems that expect people to speak in particular kinds of ways, and how you want people to speak in their own way. That resonated with an experience I had with trying Nonviolent Communication in a relationship, and I found myself just policing the other person's speech the whole time, and it made everything worse. I'm curious how you are able to push people into a different way of hearing or speaking, while at the same time ensuring the process is really theirs---it's not pushing them into an artificial box.*
+
+Yeah, as my kids have said from time to time, "Don't do that social work shit with me" or "that mediator shit with me." And I would feel that too. That's a problem. I think Nonviolent Communication has a lot going for it, and I think active listening has a lot going for it, but it's prescriptive.
+
+In fact, for every person we interact with, we negotiate a communication pattern in a subliminal way, and there's power in that negotiation. You have to be aware of your own power, or you could very well bully people into doing something. That's another thing you always have to look at---power dynamics.
+
+I don't ever think you should push people or pull people, unless you're really going to power over them and they're okay with that, and if their natural communication isn't so far away from your style. There are significant gender issues here, and there are significant cultural issues here. I spent a lot of my life having to work across different cultural lines. You can do it---I don't think you can ever work cross-cultural conflict with sort of the perfect match of the two cultures. You have to be aware of your own power.
+
+One approach is to give people the communication problem to solve. You can't solve the problem yourself---it has to be a joint effort. And if it's a three-person thing, it has to be a joint thing. In most circumstances you can start out by being a good listener, but not always. Sometimes people have to say, "You've got to make yourself vulnerable. I've got to understand who you are better before I'm willing to engage."
+
+Let me tell you another story. I did some work once, Mary Margaret and I, with a large Native American group and a large Fortune 500 company. It's written up in some book or other. The company had a big energy-producing facility on the reservation, and they had a lot of conflicts around it. We got called in because of questions about who got to control the complaints around workplace stuff---was it the state or was it the tribe? There were a lot of sub-conflicts.
+
+We got called in to work with them, and it was very interesting because you had these suits from the Fortune 500 company and these very sophisticated negotiators from the tribe. We started out with a smudge ceremony and prayers, and you could sort of see that the suits were really used to having to do this, but they were eye-rolling---there was a lot of eye-rolling going on, even if their eyes didn't really roll. The tribe negotiators were very identity-based, value-based in their approach---what gives meaning to them, their dignity, and the dignity of their culture. And the language of the suits was all business-like: "Well, how are we going to work this out so we can each have predictability in our relationship? We can know how to plan." Whenever they spoke like that, the Native American group felt disrespected, and the people from the company, who were good people, were saying, "Yeah, yeah, we're trying to do all of that respectful stuff. We've got to talk about business, though."
+
+I basically looked at them and said, "All right, here's what I think is going on," and I just described to them what I described to you. I said, "Is that right?" And I said, "I'm not here to tell you what to do about it, but I think that's what's going on. What do you think we should do about it?" And I did it with enough humor that they could laugh a bit about it.
+
+*You helped them develop a shared meta-story about what was going on between them.*
+
+That's exactly it. And it worked. I'm sure to this day it still is a striggpe, because I think it's a long-term relationship--- and they're probably completely different players, but the structure is still there. They probably still struggle with that.
+
+*Have you had experiences where ideas or practices that you've developed have been used in a way that you were not comfortable with?*
+
+I have, of course, seen people who I've taught or tried to mentor---I don't like sometimes how they're quoting me. But I used to say that the thing that really scares me as a supervisor or mentor is somebody who will do exactly what I tell them to, because that's not them, that's me. "What would Bernie do?" No, no, no! What would you do if you were really being your best self?
+
+*Do you see lessons from your experience that you just wish you could share more widely, particularly as political conflicts intensify in the United States?*
+
+I don't feel there's equal validity right now to all sides. I don't think that's the answer. I think that's a very liberal answer, actually---"you just have to listen better." And we're seeing that in the response to this election, which is, "Well, the Democrats just need to really listen." We heard that when Trump was elected in 2016. We're hearing some of that now, but it takes a little bit more of the flavor of "let's listen to the working class."
+
+I do think the Democrats have abandoned the working class. But if you go up to a bunch of working-class people and say, "We just want to listen to you better," then you're being another elitist, white liberal. I think oftentimes the mistake we make in response to this is to think, "What can the Democrats do better?" In the face of really hard reactionary movements in the past---McCarthyism, or just racist movements all over---changes occurred not through parties but through building movements. I think that the most important question for me right now is, how can I help with that?
+
+*Is it because movements sometimes take us deeper into conflict, because they escalate conflict?*
+
+I have to think about whether I'd say it like that. I mean, I think that's more a tactic that movements have to decide. The subtitle of my last book, *The Neutrality Trap* with Jackie, is *Disrupting and Connecting for Social Change*. And I think that's more how I think about it now. Change happens---you have to disrupt the systems that need disrupting, but you also have to make connections. And the strategic question is, how do you do both? Or how do you do it in an effective way?
+
+If you look at movements that have been successful like the civil rights movement, there was very calculated disruption that raised conflict. But there were also efforts to build coalitions and reach out to people who were ready to be reached out to.
+
+If you look at the movements I've been part of in my life that have been somewhat successful,  party politics was in the background. You voted---you voted for the people you thought would most move your agenda forward, but you didn't put all your energy there, and you didn't put all your analysis there. So the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the environmental movement, the peace movement, the working people's movements---all put their energy into supporting candidates, but that was not  their central focus. And I think that's a lesson I feel for this time.
+
+I mean, I hope the Democrats do think about what they've done to lose their base so badly---although you can argue how badly it really is. And I hope they listen, and I hope that we work very hard to press ahead. But I think the one thing Trump really got right was that it's a systems problem, and that people don't feel the system's working. He got that, and he said it over and over again in different ways, and he's trying to disrupt the system now. He's doing it in a totally chaotic, counterproductive way, I think. But he got the problem right.
+
+I mean, you can say, "Oh, look! Our economy is better than others in the world, look at employment." But people your age and younger have a hard time buying a house. The living standards of your generation are lower than my generation's was---first time that's happened in a long time. Something's not working. And we're not solving climate change. And we're not solving income disparity. Systems change means disrupting and connecting and building movements, and seizing opportunities and learning lessons, and licking your wounds when you have to.
+
+*Is there anything else you'd like to share before we finish? I mean, I think that's actually a good, full-circle way to end---we started with social movements and end with them.*
+
+The only thing I feel like when I talk like this---it sounds like I've got it all figured out, and I sure as hell don't. I'm sharing with you how I try to think about things now. It's way beyond me in terms of how we're gonna get out of the mess we're in. One of the chapters in one of my books is called "Optimism and Realism." And I think genuine optimism or even hopefulness doesn't work if you don't have any realistic basis for it. And we're facing that crisis right now.
+
+If you don't maintain some optimism or hope for change, then you may as well just pack it in, and I refuse to do that. That's a lesson I've also learned in my personal life---my wife has struggled with cancer for fifteen years. So I guess I feel like this, too, shall pass.
+
+I don't know how. I want to stay hopeful for change, and do my very best to do whatever I can to be a good player in that from where I sit now. But it has to be tempered by realism, by just how hard it is and how bad a situation we're in right now.

content/interviews/mayernik-disegno.md

@@ -0,0 +1,208 @@
+---
+narrator: David Mayernik
+subject: Disegno
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2025-06-18
+approved: 2025-06-18
+summary: "An artist and longtime professor at the University of Notre Dame's School of Architecture practices a kind of design that reaches across time and space."
+location: "Lucca, Italy"
+headshot: "david_mayernik.jpg"
+topics: [architecture, art, urban planning]
+links:
+  - text: "Personal website"
+    url: https://www.davidmayernik.com
+  - text: "The Meaning of Rome: The Renaissance and Baroque City"
+    url: https://www.edx.org/learn/humanities/university-of-notre-dame-the-meaning-of-rome-the-renaissance-and-baroque-city
+---
+
+*Your body of work includes oil painting, frescoes, opera sets, architecture, and more. How do you describe your practice, primarily?*
+
+I would say I'm an architect only because architecture incorporates all those other things. If you say you're a painter, it's harder to pull architecture into it. Architecture can incorporate the other arts, while the other arts don't easily weave in architecture.
+
+The people who were exclusively architects in the Renaissance in Italy were the exception. An architect was often someone who knew how to paint or sculpt. The Sangallo family—especially Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, who did a lot of palaces in Rome and was in charge of St. Peter's for a while—were thought of as architects. They came out of a woodworking tradition, and they weren't painters or sculptors. But most of the architects of the Renaissance were painters or sculptors first. Bramante was a painter before he became an architect, like Raphael and Leonardo—most people we think of as famous architects of the Renaissance were trained as something else.
+
+Architecture was an extension of the other arts, and that had credibility because the fundamental skill that underlay all the arts was drawing. If you could draw, you could design anything. It was Bernini who said in the seventeenth century that architecture is pure *disegno*, pure drawing and design. Architecture is a manifestation of drawing more directly, but also in a more abstract way, than painting or sculpture.
+
+Drawing is the thing that allows artists to migrate and do different things because it is conceptual. In Italian, *disegno* means both drawing and design, so beyond delineating it also means the ability to conceptualize. 
+
+*What does that mean for the relationship between the drawing and the building? Is the building just an expression of the drawing, which is the ideal form?*
+
+That's a really hot debate. A lot of people lament the fact that, in the Renaissance, building became the execution of somebody else's drawing. The romanticized idea about the Middle Ages is that there was no such thing as the architect—there was a master builder, and while they could draw, they were building their own buildings. They were both the executor and the conceiver of the building.
+
+In the Renaissance that process gets segregated into the person who conceptualizes and somebody else who executes. It's not that the person who drew the building didn't have experience with materials—every painter in the Renaissance knew how to paint fresco, which is basically working with plaster, what most buildings were covered with. Understanding plaster means you also understand the masonry support for the plaster. In the modern era, architects rarely get their hands dirty with any material participation in the building process.
+
+*Is there a particular time and place where you center your practice?*
+
+I don't want to say I live in the past—I'm very much a modern person—but I do think people were very good at what they did in periods in the past that I aspire to. I would like to be as good as them. I'm not interested in replicating what they did or living in the past. My life would be completely different if I lived even one hundred years ago; I wouldn't be married to the woman I'm married to. I don't want to return to the past. But there's a lot we can learn from it.
+
+My happy place—as much as I love the Renaissance—is that I'm really a Baroque guy, because I was formed in Rome, and Rome is a Baroque city more than anything else. My way of approaching things comes out of the late seventeenth, early eighteenth century—a time when things hadn't gotten too ideological as they would with neoclassicism. Somewhere in there is probably where my natural hand is, my way of working.
+
+*How did Rome teach you?*
+
+I tell my students now—which is not exactly how it happened for me—that you can't learn from Rome. You can learn from the people who worked in Rome. Rome is this overlay of accomplishment and transformation over thousands of years. You can't take Rome and transplant it elsewhere. It's such a unique response to its own position and history. But you can learn from the  many great architects who worked there. You can learn from Bernini or Raphael or Bramante.
+
+There's a kind of romantic idea about *romanità*, a Romanness that you can bring to your work—a gravitas, a sense of seriousness, a weightiness that's very Roman. But there's a light, graceful side to Rome as well. You could take away a sensibility from Rome, but I think you can more directly, as an architect, learn from the architects, not from some vague feeling about Rome. I don't know how to take that and transplant it.
+
+One of the things I tend to teach—which was controversial in my school—was that if you want to analyze something, you can only analyze something that was done intentionally. You can't analyze an accident or induce principles from a series of accidents, and a lot of what we have in Rome are accidents—things that happened without any design intent. The things you can actually apprehend and understand and learn from are the things that were done on purpose.
+
+*As you're developing your practice in relationship to this place and its intentions and accidents, what kinds of rules or disciplines did you start adopting for yourself that, perhaps, other architects weren't adopting?*
+
+When I was teaching at Notre Dame, a big part of the loose community of people who are roughly aligned with me—though we're actually more factionalized than many people understand—was a strong emphasis on urban design. By urban design, I mean the ways in which buildings play well together and contribute to something bigger than themselves, the making of streets and piazzas, the public realm.
+
+One of the things I took away from Rome and emphasized when teaching was the role of buildings in shaping public space—that is one of their primary jobs. The role of buildings is to collaborate with other buildings to make public space. Unless you're building somebody's house in the middle of a field, anything in an urban context or even loosely related to an environment with other things around it has a responsibility to articulate and shape space and collaborate with other buildings.
+
+*What are some of the ways that you do that, especially if you have buildings being built by different people at different times? How do you create the framework in which buildings collaborate around public space?*
+
+If you're building in an existing urban context, the street system has already been determined, and unless you have some license to change how the street system works, your job is basically to reinforce that street system.
+
+Creating public space in the American grid is challenging. If you want to create a plaza in an American city, the easiest thing is to remove one block of buildings and make it open space. Philadelphia has squares like that. Chicago has squares like that. One problem with them in terms of spatial definition is that usually the grid passes along the outside edges, making the corners kind of open. They don't have the same sense of containment with a closed corner that you have in European spaces, where streets often pass through the middle of the piazza. In Europe, you enter into the space rather than passing along its flanks.
+
+For the TASIS school in Switzerland, I'm the master-plan architect, so I decide how the buildings relate to each other. If you're planning a campus, you have the responsibility and opportunity to organize buildings in ways that contribute to shaping space.
+
+Some familiar campus plans include the college system at Princeton, Oxford, or Cambridge. The colleges are relatively self-contained, organized around a courtyard made by a grouping of buildings, like a monastery. They're all contiguous and collaborating in shaping a unique space. In that case the university is an accumulation of those colleges. A campus like Notre Dame is more like Harvard's, where it's an accumulation of individual buildings loosely organized around open quadrangles.
+
+The TASIS Swiss campus is on a hillside, so it's really hard to connect the buildings and shape space in that monastic way. Because we're building it over time and the campus has evolved, it's an accumulation of discrete buildings that define and shape space, looser than a monastic model. The campus in Switzerland is more like a village.
+
+I've tried—and it's actually been somewhat problematic for some people in the local planning department—to not make the Swiss campus look like there's a monotony of style. I've tried to particularize every building, give each their own unique character, but also respond to their specific type. The theater doesn't look like the gymnasium, which doesn't look like the library, so you can read the campus. As much as you want harmony between buildings, you also want special things to stand out or unique buildings to be legible as what they are. You can tell a church is different from a palace.
+
+*When you're walking through the streets of a city—like here in Lucca—how do you see buildings interacting with each other?*
+
+A city like Lucca is pretty harmonious. A lot of that happens in Italy because historically, people were building with a palette of materials that was constant over time. Masonry bearing wall buildings, mostly covered with stucco, are all going to harmonize almost by nature because of the constraints that masonry construction imposes on you—how big you can make openings, how many floors you can make a building. If you put a roof on, there are only so many ways of making eaves. There's a kind of natural harmony in most Italian cities, even if they're built over long periods of time, because the palette of materials was local and constant.
+
+Lucca has a lot of brick because it doesn't have a lot of stone natively, while other cities are made more of stone because that was the indigenous building material. In the Italian tradition, brick is often just thought of as the structure, but the skin is stucco, and you can paint stucco any color you want.  Historically those colors were earth pigments, so you have a natural palette that's already harmonized.
+
+In Lucca, there's not the same kind of coordinated spaces that we have in Rome. Some of the great piazzas that I loved in Rome are designed to be coordinated. Lucca doesn't have that—it's kind of a looser gentility. The buildings are all polite to each other, but they're not all cooperating in an orchestrated way.
+
+*When you're working in relationship to these traditions, do you impose particular constraints on yourself or on people working within your master plan? Is there a sense of accountability to the tradition? Are there lines you try to avoid crossing that another architect might not?*
+
+I'm the master planning architect for the campus, but I'm also designing all the buildings, so I'm true to myself in that sense. The project has stretched out over time—it's coming up on twenty-nine years I've been working for them, and we're still not done yet. Their needs have changed too.
+
+What has held the project together is the idea of it as a village. The actual form of the village has changed; we've done a variety of master plans, and we've resubmitted the master plans for a variety of reasons. The core principle isn't the form, it's the intent—the idea that it wants to feel like a harmonious village. The form is evolving and changing, and I'm evolving and changing with it.
+
+It's been interesting. I've had to adapt. I'm designing buildings now that are different from the ones I had imagined before. It's almost like I'm working in my own historical context, which I'm responsible for. I'm responsible for negotiating with my own buildings, with different needs and purposes that I didn't see coming twenty years ago.
+
+I've imposed on the process—and it's been a long struggle and we're still battling with it—that all buildings would be built in masonry bearing wall construction. I personally want my buildings to be made the way they appear to be made. Not all architects care about that. Most buildings on the Notre Dame campus for the last half century look like brick buildings but are really steel-framed buildings with a brick skin.
+
+I imposed on the school that the buildings should be what they look like, masonry bearing wall. We've more or less been true to that, with some recent compromises that bother me, but basically the buildings are what they appear to be. That process is slower and can cost more, which means you can't afford to do other stuff like use fancier materials, or have more columns or carvings.
+
+They're pretty simple buildings, and I'm prepared to live with that. I would like to do more elaborate stuff, but I made a choice that we were going to build these things in a solid, durable way, and I had to give up other fancier elements that we might have been able to do otherwise. That's the choice I made—not every architect would do that.
+
+At the school, I've done frescoes on the outside of the buildings. The theater has an iconographic program, and so does the gymnasium, which I interpreted in a more ancient, holistic cultural way as a place where you form the whole person, not just the body. I gave the gymnasium an iconographic program, but not all the buildings really need that or merit it.
+
+I would love to do a chapel or a church someday, because it's a space where all the arts can collaborate. I think architecture is limited in terms of what it can say rhetorically or poetically. In order to say something specific, it needs painting and sculpture, and not all spaces need that.
+
+*How does working in a context like a school compare to religious spaces that you've also engaged in? How do you approach the craft when the job involves a church?*
+
+What I've done is paint a cycle of frescoes in a historic church in Tuscany. There's a whole story—there was an amazing unfolding of events, a consequence of preparing the wall to paint a frescoed crucifixion; they discovered an eighteenth-century fresco under the whitewash, so we had to move the crucifixion. It resulted in a whole other series of paintings in response to the one that they discovered.
+
+While I was painting the crucifixion, the people who took over the school where I'd studied fresco technique were restoring the eighteenth-century fresco. It was super interesting because the past was coming back to life.
+
+*What was the exchange like with that older painting that was uncovered? How did it affect what you were creating?*
+
+The chapel had an oil painting of Mary and John at the foot of the cross from the late seventeenth century. They were two canvases that were meant to be together, the same size, mounted in a simple frame with a seam between them, and mounted over the seam was a wooden crucifix. This church happens to be next to the Tuscan home of my Swiss client. She paid for the renovation of the chapel and said, "My architect paints frescoes, and I think you should have a painted crucifix."
+
+I made a choice that I did not want to imitate the oil on canvas historical paintings. I would paint the crucifix in fresco so that it would not be confused with the historical paintings, but would also complete the narrative of Mary and John at the foot of the cross. I wanted to paint the cross on the wall with the canvases hung on either side, so it would function as an ensemble in two different media.
+
+It was supposed to be at the end wall of the chapel. But as they were scraping down the whitewash on that wall, they discovered there was an eighteenth-century painting, an Annunciation. So then the Belle Arti had to come in and decide what it was and how important it was. We decided to move the crucifix to the middle of one of the long walls.
+
+Because the church is dedicated to a local saint who was the evangelist of that area in the early history of the church—the third century—and his martyrdom happened on the spot where the church was built, I was going to have an oval of the martyrdom of that saint over the crucifix. Because we had to move the crucifixion to a long wall under a pitched roof, that wall was shorter, and I couldn't fit the oval over the crucifix. I decided to slide the oval down behind the crucifix, like a window, and paint a series of five ovals around the rest of the upper part of the chapel, showing the whole cycle of the martyrdom of the patron saint.
+
+By sacrificing something where the fresco was originally intended, it actually sponsored the creation of a richer narrative cycle about the martyrdom of the patron saint. I didn't actually show the martyrdom itself; I used the crucifixion where the martyrdom would have happened in the cycle. On one side of the crucifixion is the moment when the saint and his companions are captured by Roman soldiers. The moment after is where his decapitated skull is set up as the site of an altar that then sponsors the church. We lost the actual martyrdom because I thought the crucifixion, the paradigmatic martyrdom, could take the place of that scene. 
+
+*What is the state of fresco painting today? Who still does it? Is it at risk of being a lost art?*
+
+It was almost lost in the twentieth century. I got interested in it because of studying in Rome and wanting to paint and be an architect. I thought fresco was the perfect way to integrate the two. I knew someone who later became the Chairman at Notre Dame, an architect who dabbled in fresco; I asked him how he learned, and he said he read WPA manuals. During the 1930s, when they were trying to give work to artists and had artists painting murals in post offices and elsewhere, the fresco technique had sort of disappeared, so the WPA actually put out  manuals on how to do fresco painting.
+
+I  found those manuals in the University of Pennsylvania Library, but I didn't really get it. Eventually I had the chance to study with a great restorer in Italy, Leonetto Tintori. He was one of the vehicles in Italy for continuing the fresco painting tradition.  He was an artist who, during World War II, got involved with preservation of frescoes in Pisa and then made a career out of it.
+
+The other conduit was an artist named Pietro Annigoni, who was a portrait painter from Florence. He got wealthy painting portraits, including the Queen of England, and then essentially dedicated the rest of his life to painting frescoes pro bono for churches. He trained a whole generation of people, and one of them is a guy named Ben Long, an American who went back to North Carolina, and has done a whole series of frescoes there. Ben Long is probably the most famous fresco painter in the United States.
+
+There was a vogue for it in the 80s and 90s, I think because of postmodernism in architecture. I feel like it's fading away now—there aren't a lot of people that I'm aware of doing it. In Italy, there are some people painting frescoes, including some of the students of Annigoni's students.
+
+There's a Russian artist who painted the dome of the cathedral in Noto, Sicily, which was damaged by an earthquake. When they restructured the dome, they hired him to paint frescoes of the apostles—over life-size, super realistic, very impressive frescoes.
+
+Fresco was practiced all over Europe historically. Here in Italy people are very cautious about introducing new things into old contexts. It's one of those things that's just not thought of mostly unless you're recreating a historic fresco for some reason or you're allowed to reintroduce a fresco in a damaged historic context. Most people don't think about frescoes in new building projects.
+
+The onus is on architects to bring it into the discussion, but most architects don't have training in that kind of thing. They're not figurative artists themselves—they don't think that way. I've hired myself to do them for the school in Switzerland. I bring them into my own projects, but a lot of architects aren't thinking that way. They're thinking about just getting the building built.
+
+*How do you see the overlap between these traditions and practices and the institutional authorities that set rules for preservation? How do you relate to the rules they impose?*
+
+It's a pretty intense discussion, and the fact that it's actually softened a little bit recently is interesting. Italy has a hang-up—it's not unique to Italy, but it's really strong in Italy: this fear of something they call *falso storico* or "fake history." Essentially, doing new things that look like old things and creating ambiguity about what really is old versus what is new. That is a modern art historical or preservation mentality.
+
+We have it in the United States too. The Secretary of the Interior's guidelines for historic preservation also essentially mandate that additions to historic buildings have to be in a distinctly different style, which is a very modern thing. It's a kind of obsession with imposing the zeitgeist.
+
+Williamsburg is an interesting case of rebuilding, but Williamsburg is essentially a fake—a recreation of a city that was virtually non-existent. But mostly there's an aversion to doing that. In Italy it has been very much frowned upon to work in a traditional mode.
+
+Pietro Annigoni was called in to paint the frescoes when they rebuilt Monte Cassino, and they decided not to replicate the old paintings that were there but create new ones. Annigoni's style does not look old-fashioned. There's something very modern about his work. I think self-consciously he didn't want to look like he was painting neo-Renaissance paintings. They're figurative, but there's a dark, almost menacing quality to a lot of his paintings—like somebody who lived through World War II and seen the worst of humanity and just can't paint happiness. There's a dark underbelly to a lot of his work. I don't think there was ever fear that his stuff would be confused with historical paintings, so he was allowed to do that in the 1960s.
+
+Otherwise, working in historical contexts and painting new frescoes—people would rather do nothing. I think that attitude is softening. I was recently asked to do a big fresco for a monastery in the Marche. We had to get approval from the local Belle Arti, and we did get approval because it wasn't in the church. It was in a space that was basically kind of neutral—a whitewashed, vaulted historical space that didn't have any old art that could be confused with it. It was a new thing.
+
+I think anybody who does something traditional in art or architecture in Italy is often thought of as being a forger or a falsifier. Restoring instead really means that you have something existing to restore.
+
+The guy I studied fresco with had a philosophy about restoration: if you have a fresco that's missing something, you do not fill it in—you plaster the wall and leave them unpainted. You do not fill in the gaps, even if it wouldn't take a lot of imagination to do so. He was rigorous about not replicating or filling in missing bits in frescoes. But I do not share that philosophy.
+
+There is also a tradition in Italy that when you have a missing bit, you can fill it in if you're pretty sure about what was missing; but you're supposed to do it in a technique that's distinguishable—not in true fresco. Let's say you have a purple drapery. The Italian technique is what they call *tratteggio*—it's hatching with little fine brushstrokes. You paint red, blue, red, blue, red, blue, and your eye from a distance reads it as purple. But up close you can see it's a hatching technique, so that future restorers a hundred years from now can distinguish what was original from what wasn't.
+
+*Why do you disagree with your teacher's philosophy about filling in gaps?*
+
+Historically, no one had a problem painting what was missing, scraping off a damaged fresco and painting a new one. That's how we have the history of art we have today. Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling was painted over a decorative blue sky with stars on it. Raphael came into the Stanza della Segnatura, where the School of Athens is, and there were already frescoes that had been begun, but they got rid of them, and he was allowed to start from scratch and repaint everything.
+
+That fear of the past being something we have to cherish to the point at which it becomes untouchable is a really modern idea. I think it's because we have ruined so much stuff. There's a fear now that all we can do is something bad—we're so afraid of our own interventions in the modern world that there's a deep cultural assumption that we're focused on preventing the worst. We're not really interested in encouraging or allowing for the best because we don't trust ourselves.
+
+*We also assume there's a kind of discontinuity or break—that we can't understand what people were trying to do in the past because we are modern now, and therefore we have no ability to be in relationship to that tradition.*
+
+L. P. Hartley said that "the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." I think there's a problem with the idea of going back to the past. The Renaissance—even though it was a renaissance, which means a "rebirth"—was not a recreation of antiquity. They didn't do neo-antique buildings. They did new buildings using the knowledge of the ancient world as they understood it, but to make new things for new purposes. Neoclassicism is something different. Neoclassicism was really an attempt to recreate antique forms. Everything looked like a temple. The Renaissance didn't do that.
+
+I think we have to have a richer conversation about how you can learn from the past without replicating it. To not learn from the past is to impose on yourself a kind of cultural amnesia that I think is quite destructive. We should be capable of continuity without being afraid of doing a bad version of the past.
+
+I had a professor who was a famous architectural theorist, Colin Rowe—a major theorist about architectural form and urbanism. When I was at the American Academy in Rome, I did a project to fill in the street that leads to St. Peter's; historically, it had been two streets. I presented it, and Colin came to my presentation. He said, "Isn't the problem with doing this kind of architecture that all you'll ever be is a mediocre version of the past?" I said that no, the onus is on us. I don't think there's something in the water or the air that keeps us from doing things as well as they did. It's just that the onus is on us to be as good as we possibly can be—to learn as much as we can. I don't think it's impossible to equal the past.
+
+A lot of modernists assume that the past is so great, they revere it so much that they won't even try because they're afraid of failing. There's a cultural assumption in our world that if you really value the past, it's so great you can't ever achieve what it did, so you should just let it be its own thing and we do our own thing. That's deep in our culture.
+
+*With that in mind, how do you teach your students to develop an architectural sense in cities with many layers? How do you teach them to see a historic city and understand their relationship to it?*
+
+You have to teach principles. You shouldn't teach students to be mimics. You want them to be analytical and try to understand how the thing that they're looking at got to be the way it is. From that, you can induce principles—you can look at a series of particular cases and try to discern what was operating behind them. Those are the things that you can then apprehend and take with you and apply elsewhere, as opposed to mimicking a thing and replicating it.
+
+You have to be able to peel away all the stuff that you see on the surface and try to figure out what the architect was thinking when they first started sketching. Design analysis is design in reverse—you're trying to unwind the process and get back to what was informing it. If you can do that, then that's where you can take the process with you, not the product. That's a big distinction. It's easier to copy—copying is pretty easy, actually. Analytical work, and apprehending a process, is a lot harder.
+
+*How much do students have to know about history in order to understand historical work?*
+
+It's definitely true that you get better at it the more you know. At some level, when you're a raw student and don't know much history, all you're doing is a kind of reacting to what they see. It's my job to give them a little bit of a backstory.
+
+My sense of what schools should teach you is how to continue to learn after you get out of school. Not a repertoire, not a kit of parts or some tricks, but how to learn. That's a lifelong process, and you get better at it the longer you do it.
+
+The more you do things of your own, the better you're able to understand what other people have done, and so that kind of iterative back-and-forth between practicing and studying and practicing and studying makes both of those exercises richer and better over time. I'm still a student—I'm still learning stuff—and I'm better at learning because I've done more things myself.
+
+*Is there a particular building or place you keep coming back to that exemplifies the traditions and creative practice you've been trying to develop?*
+
+In Rome, I think the most sophisticated piazza is Santa Maria della Pace, which was all designed by one architect, Pietro da Cortona, but dealing with existing urban conditions that were imperfect. He tried to mask or transform them into something that is more whole and perfect and woven together. It's almost  symphonic. It's this unbelievably rich dialogue between the church and the fabric of buildings around it. You can't extrapolate that or take that and transplant it elsewhere, but you can definitely try to do that kind of weaving and stitching of things together.
+
+At the Swiss campus, it's a little more call and response. There are ways in which certain things in certain buildings talk to or say things to other buildings. In the gym I painted a fresco at the top of a flight of stairs that climbs about twenty-three feet; when you get to the back there is a loggia. The  fresco I painted in the loggia is the Choice of Hercules, which is supposed to be this idea that he's visited by two female figures that represent virtue and vice. Vice isn't a dissolute life. She offers him a life of ease in the shady grove, but Virtue shows him the hard, rocky, uphill path to fame.
+
+The rest of the hillside was the harder part of the campus to be built, and I didn't know if they were ever going to build it because it was challenging. So I have Virtue pointing uphill with a trowel, basically an admonition to the school to build the rest of the campus, the hard part. And eventually they did, within about ten years.
+
+On the facade of the building at the top of the hill—I designed it and had somebody else paint it—there are two big cornucopias with this great bounty flowing down. The reward for the hard path of climbing the hill is all this good stuff that cascades down on you. When you get up to that building, there's a big arched passage in the stairway, and from there you look out over the Alps and Lake Lugano. It's definitely a reward for having climbed the hill.
+
+I set up a dynamic and told the end of the story when I had the opportunity to do that. But mostly people don't know those stories are there. The students don't know it unless somebody reinforces it or tells them that it's there, as the current headmaster has done. It can be read like a text, even if not everybody has the tools to read it.
+
+*What kinds of responses have you experienced to what you're trying to communicate in architecture? How do people respond to your work? How does it surprise you?*
+
+I think people respond to stories. I had a great professor who taught me a design process but was also really big on the idea that architecture could be narrative—that it can unfold or tell stories—and I think people are really captivated by that. I think the extent to which you can treat your environment as a place that you can read, like it actually has messages—not every environment has it, somebody has to put them there. Most places have a history, and so there's a kind of unspoken story that's often the history of a place.
+
+I do think it's one of our jobs, apart from making buildings behave well together, to tell stories in some way or to contribute to some larger story that our society wants to tell about itself. I think we're desperate for it, actually. We want to believe our world makes sense somehow, and I think we need that. Sometimes people have said you could read our Constitution in the layout of the National Mall and the disposition of buildings in the center of Washington, DC. I think the extent to which our environment, especially in the United States, could do more of that—it could be one of the things that gives us a sense of shared purpose and a sense of what we have in common.
+
+We have enough in common that we can tell some stories. One of the things I get when I present the idea that architecture can be narrative is a lot of people say, "Well, we don't have enough shared stories that everybody could agree on." I don't think that's actually true. I think we have more in common than we think. Often it's the interpretation of our stories that we argue about. If we didn't have some shared principles that allow us to deal with each other every day—those are maybe the protocols, the things underneath who we are—instead of using them as partisan divides, we could be using them as ways of unifying us.
+
+*You can imagine the stories in a village where everybody's going to the same places all the time and everything is marked with meaning—this happened there, this happened there. On the opposite end is this kind of fascist propaganda, which is like the looming building that's telling you exactly one story and you know what's wrong in some way. There has to be something in between.*
+
+There's a difference between iconography and propaganda. I think, historically, most societies talked about who they wanted to be, not who they were. I don't know if you know the _Allegory of Good and Bad Government_ in Siena in the Palazzo Pubblico. It's amazing. It's sometimes called "The Allegory of the Effects of Good and Bad Government in the City." It doesn't really talk about how the government worked. It talked about the ideals that allowed the government to function.
+
+In the allegory of good government, what seems to be a ruler—it's a guy who looks like a king with a sword—is actually *bene comune*, the common good. The ruler of the city is the common good. Through a whole series of connections, he holds a sword that is ultimately tethered to a rope that's being carried by citizens from the figure of Concordia, who's taking two ropes that pass down from the scales of justice. Concordia weaves the rope together and passes it on to the citizens, and the citizens hand it on to the Common Good.
+
+Nobody's going to argue with that. Basically, social concord comes from justice, and it's conveyed to the authorities—who really are themselves just representatives of the common good—by the civic body, by the people of the city. We all want that. That's fourteenth-century Siena, but at some level that's how good, healthy societies operate today, I think.
+
+So I think allegorical messages used to be more based on principles and values, rather than mandating particular kinds of behavior. They were basically shared senses of purpose, and they were aspirational. They tell you, "Here are the virtues, here are the things we need in order to be able to do this," but then the actual mechanics of governance—who knows if Siena ever was like that? They were obviously saying, "We believe this is who we are," but it was probably better than who they were, and it didn't impose anything on anybody other than a shared sense of responsibility.
+
+We shouldn't have a hard time doing that today. I think everybody's too vested in the idea that we're slugging it, out instead of trying to figure out what we could actually share. Ultimately, iconography shouldn't be that mechanistic and specific—it should be more broad and general. You shouldn't be able to argue with the principles; if there's major dissent about the principles, something's wrong.
+
+The statues of Civil War leaders—that's problematic because there is all kinds of stuff behind that was wrong. Whereas celebrating justice—who doesn't want justice? A statue of truth—we should all want that. If we didn't want a statue of truth, that would be a problem.

content/interviews/mwaselela-saving_circles.md

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+---
+narrator: "Alinagwe Mwaselela"
+subject: "Saving circles"
+facilitator: "Nathan Schneider"
+date: 2025-05-02
+approved: 2025-05-04
+summary: "The practice of collective savings and lending takes many forms, from women-led community finance to mobile-money software."
+location: "Dar es Salaam, Tanzania"
+headshot: "alinagwe_mwaselela.png"
+topics: ["family", "finance", " gender", "software"]
+links: 
+  - text: "Jukumu Tanzania (X)"
+    url: "https://x.com/JukumuLETU24?t=A7YYfGJUZ3QVJfeh2dVgTA"
+---
+
+*How do you like to introduce yourself?*
+
+My name is Alinagwe Mwaselela. I'm not from Dar es Salaam, but I live in Dar es Salaam. Tanzania is very big. It has over 25 regions, and I come from the one called Mbeya. Our tribe, we call ourselves Nyakyusa. I don't know if you ever heard of it. But it's a beautiful place. It's among the places where a lot of food comes from.
+
+I'm in Dar es Salaam now. I did my primary school in Dar es Salaam, then I did my secondary school back home, then I came back again to Dar es Salaam for high school. For college, I went to a different region called Singida. So I did a lot of moving around. But it was quite a good experience.
+
+For a while now I've been working with NGOs—civil society makes up about 80 percent of my life right now. I'm a community guy, always moving from one group to another group, from one place to another. I got this experience from working with different companies. I was employed back then in a marketing department.
+
+I gained my whole experience and methodology of working with these saving circles when I was on a marketing team, because for me it was the easiest way to engage customers and to find an easy way to sell. You can come up with different ideas of how to engage them.
+
+And now it's been about 6 years working with Jukumu—that's the name of the NGO. We've been doing so much in Dar es Salaam and around Tanzania in general. In Dar es Salaam, we work with different people in different districts and streets to get the best information we can from these people that we're trying to help or bring solutions to for the challenges they deal with in their daily lives.
+
+Jukumu generally tries to build relationships between different communities to find solutions. We believe these communities face challenges because they don't know who to connect with, who's the best advisor, or who's the best teacher for what they need. So we create connections from one group to another to find solutions and engage groups with each other. These could be financial relationships or technical relationships.
+
+*So you first encountered the savings groups as clients when you were marketing products, and you thought, "This is an easy way to access a group of potential buyers."*
+
+Yes, exactly. This happens in a lot of developing countries, I would say, especially in Africa.
+
+For example, back then I used to work with a company that had digital solutions. I was the marketing guy, the one meeting with these people every day, engaging them, explaining what the solution was and how they could use it. People would get excited when they received the solution, but it was too hard for me to ensure that solution would last to the point where these people were satisfied.
+
+Sometimes, if I represent a company in a market or community, I don't know when a CEO or founder might come up with changes to the product the next day. That affects the community, but it affects me more because everybody knows my face in the market, not my boss or anyone else.
+
+So I realized it would be easier for me to engage people by having them under one umbrella to make sure they receive the best products they're supposed to get. I wanted to ensure that if a product comes to the community, whatever was brought in was needed, and the community was actually satisfied with what we were trying to provide.
+
+I got the idea from to create a network of groups. At first, it was just a marketing network—I would find different products that I knew these people liked, and I'd distribute the products and give them payment terms. They could pay by installment rather than cash, because I knew I'd find them in their group. The group would be the guarantor for anyone who wanted the service.
+
+Then the NGO concept came to mind: we could have this umbrella that would protect the groups and make sure they get the best education and the best providers. We connect them with other groups, because they produce different things. We have groups of farmers, livestock keepers, and small business entrepreneurs.
+
+So you can imagine, if we have farmers groups, we can get tomatoes from them and connect them with small business groups who can get the tomatoes under the supervision of the NGO. This ensures that nobody loses out and everybody gets what they're supposed to get. It's the easiest way for them to connect and be in a safe zone. They can produce, and they themselves can be a market too, apart from anybody else outside the community.
+
+*And so these groups were already formed? Or were you helping form them as well?*
+
+As you start working, you find groups that are already formed. Then you see their weaknesses, learn, and start to reform them and create other groups as you go on. I found some groups that were already formed, and then we started creating other groups depending on what people were doing.
+
+We went to farmers and formed groups specifically for them. Before, we didn't have specialized groups of farmers—we would find farmers in various groups that were dealing with different activities. Then we started creating farmer-specific groups so they could benefit from working together—people growing cucumbers, tomatoes, fruits, and other vegetables. If they're all in one group as farmers, we can see what each person produces and then, as an NGO, we can ensure that at least 40% of what they produce reaches the market, as part of our effort to help them reach their targets.
+
+*Did you grow up in any of these groups? Were savings groups like this part of your upbringing or family life?*
+
+Yes, my mother used to save in one of the *chamas* she belonged to. I would see her struggling, and after every certain number of days she would save a certain amount in the group as a form of security or insurance for anything that might happen. So I've seen that lifestyle in the neighborhood where we were living, and I've been in some of these groups myself. They are all over Africa. I've been to Uganda and Kenya and seen they have *chamas* too.
+
+*Tell me more about how these work—how the one your mother was part of worked, and how the ones you've been involved in work. What does it feel like to be part of these groups?*
+
+Generally, in Tanzania, I believe about 80% of women are in groups. This includes rich women, middle class, or poor women—they're all in groups, though what they do varies. The experience has changed with time and technology.
+
+Back then it was different. I remember seeing some of my sisters in chamas. These chamas differ in how they set their targets. For example, my sister used to be in a chama where the target was saving for just one year. At the end of the year, they would distribute all they had saved. While they were saving, they would give members opportunities to get loans from the savings. That could be the first business of the group—the interest paid on top of the loan benefited the group. At the end of the year, they would share that profit with all who had been saving.
+
+The profit at the end of the year would depend on how much you had been saving. The more you invested, the more profit you'd get because your money had been rotating through many hands, as people asked for loans from January until December.
+
+They used to have these small books—I remember these books were full of marks. Not everybody in these groups knew how to write back then. So they had these books where they would just put a mark to show "I've paid today." It was like a counting book that showed how much you had invested and how much you could expect by the end of the year.
+
+Every time someone would go to save money or receive money, they'd have to go with the book to mark that they had paid or hadn't paid. They used to have this big iron trunk, and that trunk kept the books and the money. That was the bank. After marking, all the books stayed there to make sure nobody could mark anything until the next meeting.
+
+Sometimes it happened that someone stole the books, or on the day they were supposed to get their money, they found there was no money in the box. They trusted the chairperson and the secretary of the group, and they normally even had an accountant. But none of it was as transparent as they are today.
+
+Some groups work smoothly, some have faced challenges. But that was the experience back then. Now things are changing. Now we have different practices in these saving circles.
+
+For example, in Tanzania we have a concept called *mchezo*, which means "game" in Swahili—so we call it "money game." What they do with the money game—now that people are afraid to have a box that somebody might steal or misuse—is that every day, let's say in a group of 20 people, each person saves 1,000 shillings. That means 20,000 shillings total, which they don't keep in a box—they give it to one member of the group. So every day, someone is getting money from all the others. It's a rotation of money.
+
+This depends on the priorities within the group. They know what's happening with everybody—who needs to pay rent in two months, who needs to pay school fees, who needs to buy certain things. So you put your name on the game list for the dates when you're sure you'll need the money. With 20 people, it will be a 20-day game. After 20 days, it rotates back to the first person. It continues like that from January to December.
+
+That's the solution these people have developed to address the challenges they faced with using the box. They're trying to reduce the work they were doing before. Who do you trust to keep all the money? The box stays in somebody's home, not in a bank. Something might happen—somebody might have a child who runs away with the books. So these people are trying to create solutions.
+
+Now, beyond just the box and the game in this saving circle, we have groups who invest money for bigger investments. For example, at Jukumu we have communities with 30 to 70 people. With technology, they don't use books anymore—they might use a bank, mobile wallets, and different digital solutions to accumulate money.
+
+The money they accumulate is for investments they want to make. Let's say a group wants to buy materials for catering, or they want to do different activities requiring capital investment. They might accumulate money for two years, and then open a small business. They could be tailors or anything else, and then they create a way to share profits monthly from what they earn in that investment. So it could last for a long time while continuing to produce income, rather than just distributing everything at the end of the year.
+
+*Are these contexts where people don't have access to banks? Or is do people find there's something better about saving this way? It sounds like a lot of work and management. Why not use banks?*
+
+One thing I've found in these saving circles is that many people don't have knowledge about banks, even though they see them. They don't have financial education. They don't know the value of money or have any education about loans. For them, a bank is a scary place.
+
+The *chamas* are how they've become accustomed to doing what they need to do. We do have groups that use banks and find it fine, but not many groups use banks. We're encouraging our group members to use banks for convenience. We have a monthly fee that these groups pay to the NGO as a membership fee because we provide them with knowledge, seminars, and different products. What we've come to understand is that it's mostly a lack of knowledge and education. They don't know about banks or many of the financial services they could access for savings and money management.
+
+*How do the groups compare between, say, the groups your mother was part of when you were growing up as opposed to the groups of farmers you mentioned who are running businesses? Are they very different, or are they basically the same kind of structure?*
+
+I don't think they differ a lot. The main difference is the technology they have now, and probably they have more knowledge. Back then, my mother and others didn't have smartphones—they didn't even have phones. So things were quite different, but in terms of how they engage and how they operate, it's almost the same. They're still Tanzanian, so they still have that kind of formula—there's a formula that doesn't change. You can tell this is Tanzanian.
+
+*Let's talk about that formula a bit more. What kinds of skills and knowledge go into that? Because in my part of the world, people do not know how to do saving circles—that's not something people do around here. If people started, they wouldn't know where to begin. What are the skills that people have in these communities, that your mother had, that makes them feel like they know how to get these things going? What specifically are the everyday life skills that enable people to run these groups?*
+
+I was surprised when I started working with groups in Tanzania. One of the biggest challenges is that people are very far from technology. I don't think they're afraid, but the education level and awareness are quite different. Tanzania is quite different from Kenya when it comes to how people engage with technology and change.
+
+These groups, from my experience, mostly started with women. Women were the special group that initiated this, especially because in the community, people didn't have time for women. It's like people didn't try to engage women in direct control of financial issues, as they used to engage men. You can see even in education levels back then—most young boys went to school, not girls. Girls didn't go to school. So we had a lot of sisters and mothers who were just farmers, far from all kinds of access, far from bank awareness, far from technology.
+
+What happened is that these women started to form their own groups to save what they got from their men. If a man left 10,000 shillings for household expenses, a woman might take 2,000 out of that 10,000 and save it in her group without her husband knowing. It was confidential—men didn't know their wives had groups where they saved money, because many men didn't want their women engaged in any financial issues. So many of these groups were due to women's efforts, especially in Tanzania.
+
+Communities in our society that are very far from services like banking had to find ways to save and have some insurance for what might happen. They formed their groups. It's like the point where all these people who are missing everything they're supposed to get found a solution. It's like they're small banks. We call them VICOBAs—Village Community Banks. 
+
+People started these because they found themselves very far from all aspects of technology they were expected to access. And I don't know why, but even today, technology doesn't flow as it's supposed to flow to reach the people who need to understand it. It ends at a certain level and doesn't go down further. So certain groups of people enjoy the benefits, but not everybody.
+
+It's still hard to engage with digital issues in Tanzania directly. You need to put in a lot of work, go to many places, train people extensively because many don't know how to use basic digital tools. Someone with a smartphone might not know how to create their own email address. These are things that should be easy to understand, but they're not.
+
+The level of education of these people is not that high, and their engagement with digital aspects is not that strong. So they've created their own way to save, their own banks that they can turn to when they're in trouble or when they want to do anything.
+
+They've seen this from government employees. In Tanzania, we have many government employees—about 70% of working people are employed by the government. These government employees get health insurance, some get property insurance, they get social security funds from the government. So people have learned the concepts from these employed people—they can get insurance too. But for those who aren't employed, who have small capital, who sell vegetables by the roadside, how do they create their own insurance? How do they save for unforeseen issues? How do they save to pay school fees next year or to pay rent?
+
+They don't use banks. The first people to use banks in Tanzania are those employed by the government. So the first experience any Tanzanian has with using a bank is either when they're in government office, employed somewhere, or in university getting a government loan. Most Tanzanians only open a bank account when they're employed. Before that, nobody uses a bank.
+
+People now use mobile wallets because everybody has a phone, so it's easy to use mobile wallets. But if you count people living in the streets who aren't employed, 80% will say they don't have a bank account. And if they do, they don't know how to use it—they might just have a bank account because a certain bank came around and made them open a free account. So they got a bank account but never used it because they don't know how to use it or the advantages of using it. The only group that knows about bank accounts are the employed, university students, or those doing very big business who need a bank to get loans. Apart from that, the rest of these people use mobile wallets, and some still save in their groups.
+
+The best ideas these people came up with were while trying to ease their lives in light of what they saw employed people doing. It's like they're trying to establish their own lives compared to employed people—to reach the same standard of life. "I can have insurance too with my group. I'm very sure that in case I need anything, I can just go there and ask for a loan, and nobody will say no because that's my group and I'm a member who normally saves there." It's the same thing as a government employee being sure to get a loan from a bank because the bank sees the salary and can easily deduct payments. For others, their saving groups provide all of what they're supposed to have.
+
+*Do you think of these groups as being very old, going back many generations? Is this something that people have done in these communities for a very long time?*
+
+I've seen groups that have existed for 20 years, 15 years.
+
+*I mean many generations—is this something your great-great-grandmother was doing?*
+
+It could be, but I'm not sure. If I go back to when Tanzania gained its freedom, the first thing our late president introduced was similar to what China and Russia tried to apply—a communal system where everything was owned by the community. Everyone had to work, and everyone ate what they collectively produced.
+
+I think that was the method the government used for government farms and industries. They created communities where everyone earned the same amount—nobody earned more than anyone else. It was a style introduced by the government back then to organize people to work and trust each other. Nobody was above anybody else, only the government.
+
+The rest of the people working there shared what they got out of what they produced. You could easily get help within your community if your child had an issue—anyone in the community could help because everyone was on the same level. So maybe this comes from back then, from how people would work in groups—as farmers or whatever, but working in groups rather than individually.
+
+This has evolved with the changes in technology. And now, with capitalism, it has created boundaries between those who know and those who don't. The people who don't know, in order to achieve what they need, have started to use the same formula—using the energy of their own community to create wealth, safety, and insurance for everything they need.
+
+*Does technology make anything harder? For instance, if you have the money in a box in somebody's house, you have to trust that person. You know who's keeping the money, and that trust maybe helps strengthen the group. Is something lost when you can just rely on a mobile wallet? Do you lose some of the trust that might be important to these groups?*
+
+From my experience engaging groups with Jukumu, I don't think technology makes things harder, except that people don't know the technology. They don't have the knowledge, so they just operate based on what they believe in, what they know, what they trust. It's not that they don't believe in technology, but they don't know how far technology can assist or support or benefit them.
+
+If they get to know, they'll move to technology. We had groups that didn't use technology for financial issues, and we went through many challenges because we'd find the chairperson and secretary conspiring to take the balance, and no member would know exactly what they had—they only had trust. We might all know where the secretary lives and meet at the secretary's house every 10 days, but we just trust that the secretary will keep the money. We're not sure, but we trust.
+
+If something happens, it brings them to a different challenge, and they start looking for a solution—which could be a digital solution. We speak with them and try to introduce different solutions. The good thing is that now many of the mobile wallets in Tanzania have features that can help saving circles save using the wallet. We have different solutions that groups or families can use to save, and everybody will know what's happening—if anyone deposits or withdraws, every member gets a message.
+
+We have these kinds of solutions now, and many groups are turning to technology. I don't think it was that they rejected technology—they just didn't have a chance to experience and understand how far technology could take them. This has become very beneficial for the NGO, because we were lucky to partner with an organization that works in digital solutions. We can easily do pilots in our community, see how they work, and then develop solutions. We're trying many pilots to make sure people understand that with technology, we're saving time and reducing risks they've been struggling with. Now we have groups that have saved a lot of money in their wallets, and things are going smoothly. They're coming to understand.
+
+*So the mobile wallets that most people use now have features for saving circles built into them?*
+
+Yes. For example, two days ago I had a meeting with CRDB Bank, one of the very big banks in Tanzania. They now have the CRDB Foundation, and what this foundation is trying to do is bring in the saving circles. They have a project called Mbegu, which is a Bantu word meaning "seed." They're trying to help saving circles start and learn how to use a bank—what money is, what loans are. They give them this knowledge, and after they understand, they give them a chance to get what they call *mbegu*. It's not really a loan because you don't pay interest—you pay operational fees and such.
+
+What I found is that banks in Tanzania know there are many saving circles, and they're missing a lot of customers because they're just dealing with employed people. They know these motorcycle taxi drivers, these small food vendors selling in the streets—none of them use banks. They all work in their saving circles. So now CRDB is trying to find these saving circles and bring them into the banking system. They don't even care if these groups are registered or not, as long as it's a group. They find ways to train them, encourage them to register, and work with them.
+
+That's why we had a meeting with CRDB—they want us to connect them with groups. They know there's a lot of money they're missing from the community. Almost every digital solution now has features that these saving circles need. It's like a wake-up call—saving circles are a very big thing in Tanzania, and banks and mobile networks are rushing to invest in them.
+
+*Have you seen these groups be taken advantage of? What are some things that can go wrong?*
+
+A lot can go wrong in these groups. First, you should understand that the people in these groups often don't know the risks of many things. They might not even know the risk of using a different Gmail account on their smartphone. You need to have accurate information from these groups to be sure that if they want to invest in anything, it doesn't go wrong. You need to be sure because many of these groups have people who didn't go to school, who don't understand the risks—like, if I lend you money and don't know you, you could just run away with it. These are people going through hard times every day, so they have many challenges. So the first thing we do is educate and find the best approach for the community.
+
+We had a digital project that's still ongoing in one of our communities, which has almost 120 members all living in one district. We've created our own community currency called Nyota, which means "star" in Swahili. They're using it for payments within the community—it only applies in their community.
+
+Before, they didn't know how to download or install applications. They didn't know the risks of having different Gmail accounts or someone knowing their Gmail password. Now we're trying to change that, and after two years, we're seeing it's working out. But it has taken effort for two years to get these people to understand how to use a smartphone—not just applications. The most they could do before was WhatsApp and social media. Everyone can use social media, but they didn't know how to benefit from technology in other ways.
+
+Now they see the difference. With just their smartphone, they can have a digital token, they can convert it, they can get normal currency. This is new for them, and these people didn't go to school to understand what a digital token is—it's just a lifestyle and experience they've gone through every day. Now they have shops in the community where they can buy things using their community currency.
+
+With these saving circles changing from traditional methods to moderm technology, it has brought something different. Now we know at Jukumu that if all of them understand how technology can change or increase their production level, nobody will go back to the lifestyle they had before.
+
+*What does creating a community token enable them to do that they couldn't do otherwise? Why is that technology useful in these communities?*
+
+We've tried this in just one district out of all Tanzania because it's too hard to engage widely. We started this as a pilot, but now it's working and has become a lifestyle.
+
+First of all, it gives them an easy way to purchase things at a lower price compared to what they would pay using the local currency. With regulations, we're not allowed to use tokens directly for payment freely—Tanzania doesn't have regulations allowing that. But what we're trying to do is use the digital community currency as part of payment as a price reduction.
+
+We've given a value where one Nyota equals 1,000 Tanzanian shillings. In the community, we have people selling different things. We've connected community businesses with every community member so that if you're a community member buying rice every day and you decide to buy from another community member, you'll save 2,000 shillings on each kilogram. So if one kilogram is 4,000 shillings, when you're buying in the community, it will be 2,000 shillings plus 2 Nyota.
+
+So 2,000 shillings plus 2 Nyota equals 4,000 shillings, but they find it easier to pay 2,000 shillings. I don't have to pay 4,000 if I can pay 2,000—I can save 2,000 and use the Nyota to cover the other 2,000 that I have in my pocket. For the person receiving the 2 Nyota, it counts as 2,000 shillings. They will use those same 2 Nyota to buy something from a different community member or from the same person who gave them the Nyota.
+
+It engages them all in one community—it gives them an incentive to receive regular customers because now a community has 100 members, and everybody wants a discounted price. Everybody wants something that will be easy to afford.
+
+It has increased relationships in the community—everybody knows everybody, everybody knows where to get cooking oil. If I go to a normal shop to buy cooking oil, I'll spend 5,000 shillings. But if I buy from a community member, I'll spend 2,000 shillings plus 2 Nyota. It creates the understanding that if I am your neighbor, there's a way I can help you, and there's a way you can help me if we are in one community. You might have rice, I might have corn flour—we use corn flour for making *ugali*. If you have rice and need to buy corn flour, you come to me and pay 2,000 shillings plus 2 Nyota.
+
+The 2 Nyota you pay is the key to our business, to our cooperation, to our engagement. This tells me that I have to come back to you again to buy, because I have nowhere else to spend this Nyota except with you. And if I spend with you, that means I'm giving you the same Nyota, plus whatever other amount I'm supposed to pay. The good thing is, it will be less compared to what I would normally spend. But it doesn't affect anybody's balance, because I'll still have some change. You'll have the Nyota, but when you need to buy something, you come with the Nyota to spend, so you save your money as you spend on me, and I save mine as I spend on you.
+
+It increases the value of the Nyota because now everybody needs to get Nyota. And how do you get Nyota? Either you do business, or you attend the community meetings, because that's when we scan and create our own tokens.
+
+*So participation in the community is how issuance happens?*
+
+Yes. I don't know if you've heard of the Encointer Association from Switzerland. It's a blockchain platform that mostly tries to enable a community token or community economy by creating business circulation and cooperation. People learn the value of money through that—they learn through the value of doing business with each other, so nobody misses out on business every day. If I'm selling anything, I might get 2,000 or 3,000 shillings a day. It will never happen that I end the day without doing business because there are 100 members in the community, and everybody needs to eat. If they don't eat, they might use a bike to go somewhere. They might go to the salon—we have members who run salons. They might need to buy charcoal or cooking gas. These transactions are always happening because that's daily life.
+
+We believe if we find solutions for these daily needs and daily spending, we're giving people a chance to save more and be more active in their groups. That's why this is famous where it's happening—it's a very popular project.
+
+*How much do you think people's willingness to participate in this new technology is because of their experience with the saving circles?*
+
+I think that was number one, but number two is it wasn't easy to engage these people in this kind of technology, for them to see the value of cooperation or the value of working together. We did research before in the location where this project is happening, and many people in that community didn't know how to bring money into the community. If we want our community to be safe, we need to be sure that we'll eat comfortably in our community. Everyone should be able to help others in the community. People need to be sure they can afford to buy food, go to the salon, and do whatever they need to do daily. This gives them an opportunity to save more.
+
+Before, nobody understood how this would benefit their community. I remember we started with only six people in the whole community, and then from six, only two remained. It was a journey. But people came to find out that the people in this community—the few we had, six to ten people for almost four or five months—had created businesses covering everything they needed every day. So others became curious: These people in this specific community have a very easy life—they have everything in the community, they can easily buy and sell to each other because they are both buyers and sellers. What I'm selling, you don't have, but what you're selling, I don't have, so I can sell to you, but tomorrow I'll have to buy from you.
+
+So we created a situation where people could understand that if you're in a community, you can have everything you all need. You don't need to struggle—you can just tell somebody what you need, and then you can get it the next day. With that particular knowledge, people started to understand.
+
+After every meeting, they would see people leaving with packages. "How much did you spend?"
+
+"I spent this amount and this many Nyota."
+
+"But you know I spent 15,000 shillings to buy that sack, and you spent 10,000 shillings plus 5 Nyota. So you saved 5,000 shillings." 
+
+That kind of pattern motivated the community. You can easily do business if you're working together. So we had different events, marches—marathons to educate people and bring knowledge. Luckily, now we have about 120 members, 70 active members, and they meet every 10 days.
+
+Now it has become established. With this, we've introduced a digital currency that's very famous in the community called Kusama, which is on the Polkadot blockchain. It has become another big thing in the community. Now people know how to send Kusama. People are paying with it. Someone will Google how much one Kusama is worth today compared to TZS or USD, get the amount, and use Kusama to pay for anything they want in the community because they know Kusama is real money.
+
+Now they have wallets on their phones. They can download wallets and easily connect them. None of this existed two years ago—people didn't know what a private key or mnemonic password was. People didn't know what a public key was. But now everybody is saying, "Send me your public key," and someone just sends you a public key.
+
+These people enjoy technology when they decide it's the best thing to use. Now everybody wants to be involved because they like the experience. They see how it helps their lifestyle. It gives them something new they didn't have before, and they didn't pay school fees to get it—they just had to be in a community and work together.
+
+*What lessons have you learned building these different kinds of groups—the savings groups as well as the currency communities? If somebody else came to you and said, "I want to do the same thing you're doing," what lessons would you share?*
+
+You need to have a very contemplative mind. You don't have to rush anything. It's too hard to change people's perceptions—to make them understand this could be a solution to what they've been struggling with for the rest of their lives. One of the very big challenges is that you're dealing with different people who don't know what exactly they're looking for. These people believe they have everything they need—they have their lifestyle, they still eat, they still do what they're doing.
+
+So if you go to this kind of community and you're trying to do this, the first thing you should understand is that these are different from you. What you're thinking might be a solution at the time will not work unless they come to find that it is a solution for them.
+
+The rest is easy to catch up on. These are human beings too. There's the part of being a friend—you need to have a friendly heart. You need to be like family because they're dealing with family issues. They're dealing with so many things that you need to understand. So you need to have a mind for connecting with everything a human being deals with.
+
+At Jukumu, the NGO, we know this is hard, but we believe in humanity. We think everybody can have a better life, wherever they live. A better life doesn't need to involve a lot of money. You just have to know the solutions to your challenges and how you can live with them.
+
+I was just talking with my friend about this: *chamas* are the first Web3. Whatever the technology is, the skills are the same.

content/interviews/xavier_rodrigues-beekeeping.md

@@ -0,0 +1,208 @@
+---
+narrator: "Manoel Xavier Rodrigues, Glaicon Nei Ferreira de Sousa, and Dionizio Jansen"
+subject: Beekeeping
+facilitator: Júlia Martins Rodrigues
+date: 2025-01-18
+approved: 2025-04-28
+summary: "Meliponiculture—the practice of raising stingless bees—represents a vital intersection of environmental conservation, traditional knowledge, and sustainable agriculture in Brazil."
+location: "Minas Gerais, Brazil"
+topics: [ancestors, food, friendship, indigeneity, organizations, science]
+---
+
+*How do you introduce yourselves?*
+
+**Glaicon:** My name is Glaicon, I am a meliponiculturist and beekeeper. I have been working with bees for 30 years and professionally for 11 years.
+
+**Manoel:** My name is Manoel Xavier, I'm also a meliponiculturist and beekeeper, and I've been working with stingless bees for approximately 8 to 10 years.
+
+**Dionísio:** I'm Dionísio Janssen, also a meliponiculturist for 8 years. I feel responsible, along with my colleagues, for spreading this practice, given that 70% of the food that reaches our table requires our bees. For those of us living in this neotropical region, stingless bees are our main pollinators.
+
+*How is meliponiculture knowledge transmitted today, and how do you participate in this network?*
+
+**Glaicon:** When I started in meliponiculture, I saw the need to share my knowledge with others. I began studying more and building capacity. I saw the need to raise bees in a more organized way. Over time, I realized the necessity of creating a group so that more people like me could spread the idea and transform it into environmental protection. Today, our group---which has a presence throughout almost the entire country---has done good work with students who started with ten hives and now have 400 hives. Our environmental protection work has become family income, and all this was accomplished through creating a group for training new agents.
+
+*How does this group and network interact?*
+
+**Glaicon:** This network interacts through shared knowledge. We have small, medium, and large meliponiculturists who have doubts and teachings. Our information sharing enables us to build capacity for healthy meliponiculture and strong, focused environmental protection.
+
+**Manoel:** To add to that, we believe that to protect bees, we have rational management techniques that respect nature. We try to disseminate this knowledge so people can expand the number of hives and bees being raised rationally and sustainably, respecting nature.
+
+*What role does this network play in transmitting knowledge?*
+
+**Dionísio:** It's about bringing responsible, quality knowledge not only to group members, but to all people interested in species conservation, biodiversity, and especially our stingless bees.
+
+*Are these exchanges informal? What is the group's purpose and which platform do you use?*
+
+**Glaicon:** We use WhatsApp. We have a group among us that's available 24 hours a day to obtain information, management techniques, and learning---always interacting with each other and learning more each day.
+
+*So it's a space for sharing and exchanging experiences?*
+
+**Manoel:** Generally, people don't start with this as their primary source of family income. So obviously, all this is done during free time, when each person is available.
+
+*What are the criteria for participating in these groups? What rules and protocols are adopted?*
+
+**Glaicon:** Our group is very selective. We cannot address any topic that doesn't relate to meliponiculture. We keep our group well-focused on our perspective. All people there share the same idea and profile. There are people in the group who administer it, creating protocols so everyone can freely come and go with their questions and teachings.
+
+*How are conflicts addressed when disagreements arise?*
+
+**Manoel:** Conflicts always have a moderator who will calm the situation. The group administrators are responsible for this moderation and ensuring harmony in experience exchanges, question responses, or posts that some might find inappropriate for the occasion or the group's purpose.
+
+**Dionísio:** These decisions are deliberated among administrators, and before any action, we first discuss what measures to take. Whether it's excluding a member or simply making a private call to get them to retract, or if it's less serious, perhaps just a correction on the topic is enough to address the issue.
+
+*Glaicon, you're an administrator of one of these groups, correct?*
+
+**Glaicon:** Yes, Grupo União (Union Group).
+
+*How are these moderators chosen? Based on what criteria?*
+
+**Glaicon:** They're chosen based on their commitment to the subject. People who truly believe in environmental protection and pollinator conservation. These people are chosen carefully. They must fit the profile to provide answers to everyone present. The people in Grupo União are handpicked based on their commitment to healthy culture and environmental protection.
+
+*Do you have examples of teachings or exchanges that happened through these groups that modified your practice or bee protection?*
+
+**Manoel:** May I share an example? Our main concern is: how do we save bees from extinction? By multiplying hives. Often, people go and extract a hive from nature thinking they're helping, but they're actually causing harm. One method we found for hive multiplication is division. You take a box, like this yellow *uruçu*, and divide that hive into two. Previously, we would take the daughter or mother box and move it to a distant location for division, to prevent the forager bees from the separated box from returning to the original location, leaving the other uninhabited. A great teaching we learned in the group is that we can divide the hive by placing the mother box and daughter box side by side. The forager bees will find each other and divide between the two boxes. We quickly have two hives. This is knowledge we acquired in our group.
+
+*What do you understand as protocol?*
+
+**Glaicon:** I understand protocol as an action. My protocol today, which directed me to reach my current state, was my daily training, learning from friends, and resolving consistent doubts. Starting to work with facts and forgetting assumptions. After I began studying Paulo Nogueira Neto, whom we lost two years ago and who is considered by the UN as one of the world's greatest biologists---he studied and taught about stingless bees at USP in São Paulo for 65 years. I’ve built capacity and directed myself with the protocol of learning from USP, from Paulo Nogueira Neto. Today I can teach what is truly factual to all people. I have students who started with ten hives and now have 400. Meliponiculture has become family income for them.
+
+*Beyond this knowledge from the University of São Paulo, how did your journey with other communities happen? In other networks and groups?*
+
+**Glaicon:** What happened during my journey was the opportunity to know different types of places, like indigenous villages and large companies involved in extractivism. We managed to be present in various university courses, participating in university theses in anthropology and agroecology, which somehow built our capacity and taught us, enabling us to disseminate this wonderful idea of environmental protection and meliponiculture.
+
+*Could you tell us more about the indigenous communities?*
+
+**Glaicon:** The indigenous communities I work with today, in Espírito Santo and Bahia, have undergone significant cultural changes and no longer live as they did before. But they still carry in their veins, in their blood, love for nature. They taught me a lot about dividing hives and caring for bees, and by caring for the village and community, I learned much from them.
+
+*Did you visit these villages?*
+
+**Glaicon:** I visited them and we're still friends today.
+
+*Did they also teach you some of these techniques?*
+
+**Glaicon:** I learned much more than I taught them.
+
+*Today, how do you transmit this knowledge acquired from various sources?*
+
+**Glaicon:** I’ve built capacity so I wouldn't speak from my personal perspective. I teach everything scientifically. Taken from books by great biologists, from universities, from studies. I teach what has been thoroughly studied. I'm very careful to limit myself when teaching, to ensure I'm doing what has been extensively studied.
+
+*And you, Manoel, your path was different. How was this learning process?*
+
+**Manoel:** My learning process---I used to work more with stinging bees, which are exotic in Brazil. I had my first contact with a cousin's meliponary. I was enchanted by the bees and ended up joining Grupo União, where I gradually acquired knowledge about each species and how to manage each species, the type of box, which box is most suitable, the dimensions of each box, the type of division, the type of hive modification, how they're fed, what type of flowers they prefer. Gradually, we solidify our knowledge. With this knowledge, we can share this information and disseminate this knowledge to other people interested in bees and nature in general.
+
+**Dionísio:** We also have in Brazil a federal institution that's over 100 years old, INPA---the National Institute for Amazon Research---where there's work with these pollinators involving biologists from Asia, Europe, and South America. As a result, they taught us much about raising these pollinators. This greatly facilitated our work in the beginning. To this day, we share the idea of raising our bees with boxes developed by this federal agency, INPA.
+
+*After building this knowledge over the years, learning from scientific sources and indigenous sources, what protocol was created to transmit and disseminate this knowledge through networks?*
+
+**Manoel:** The protocols are actually rules we created to allow the group to be homogeneous and have a consistent form of knowledge transmission, always focused on the group's objective. We use the União meliponary groups to transmit what we know, as new people are always arriving. Sometimes, knowledge that's basic to us is fundamental for them to start from the beginning---learning in a guided process to practice sustainable stingless bee raising.
+
+*Why this concern with transmitting meliponiculture knowledge?*
+
+**Dionísio:** We feel obligated, so to speak, to be facilitators of this process. Why? To have the opportunity to share with people the importance of maintaining this biodiversity, keeping bee species alive that, as I said at the beginning, are responsible for bringing food to our tables. Most people don't know about this potential or importance that bees have for our lives.
+
+*How is leadership in this group? Is it individual or collective leadership? Why did it happen this way? How have these dynamics evolved?*
+
+**Glaicon:** In the beginning, it was practically the founder---me. Over time, I saw the need to let others also become administrators based on each person's capacity and effort. The group grew wings and evolved very satisfactorily. We became a group, and today, as Manoel emphasized, new people arrive daily, which for us is sometimes common---those arriving need that information.
+
+*The group plays a fundamental role in training new meliponiculturists.*
+
+**Manoel:** Yes, largely due to knowledge mastery. Sometimes a person has knowledge mastery but has difficulty transmitting it. But just by showing in the group, making a little video of how their hive is doing, what management they're doing, they're teaching a lot without even needing to speak sometimes. We perceive that their management and mastery is captured and perceived by group members, and they manage to transmit this knowledge.
+
+**Dionísio:** Another thing I find relevant is this information exchange, because each creator's objective, each bee multiplier, can be different. You might have bees for a collection, for distraction, therapeutic treatment, or to have healthy foods of the best quality through these bee products. This is very important to highlight because these are different objectives within the same group that need this knowledge exchange for growth in each area where a person chooses to engage.
+
+**Glaicon:** Something very interesting is that humanity---the first human communities, the first peoples---already directed themselves toward copying bees. If you go to Sumeria, back to Egypt, you'll discover that bees are present in all ancient peoples. This is scientifically proven. Communities were formed because they had a king, guards, foragers---all copying a bee hive. This is a structure humanity has been trying to copy from bees. It's very important today that we emphasize this magical bee creation, this bee's influence on human life---not just for the entire planet, but especially on human life and organization.
+
+**Manoel:** It's also important to highlight that this group enables us to better know the bees. Sometimes we're valuing only the bee, concerned with environmental and preservation issues, but we need to explore each bee type's potential. We learn about the diverse types of honey they provide, diverse types of propolis. Friend Dionísio, for example, just taught me that yellow *Mandaguari* propolis is wonderful propolis. Could you explore *Samburá* a bit for us, please?
+
+**Dionísio:** *Samburá,* which few people know about, is pollen produced by stingless bees. It's a food classified today as one of the world's best, so much so that it's the food source for future bees. This *Samburá* is nothing more than pollen enzymatically processed by bees and deposited in pots within colonies. Besides this, we also have honey and propolis extract---all wonderful foods that humans should consume periodically. None of this knowledge would be possible if we didn't have a tool like our group to transmit this knowledge to each other. It's no use researching this and keeping it within a university, in books, if it's not disseminated to the population, to creators who often have little information and limited access to books and universities. This is the great importance of having a tool like this group, plus we make excellent friends.
+
+**Glaicon:** Yes, the group is focused with direction as Dionísio just mentioned---honey, an energetic food that bees produce through sucrose, and stingless bees through fructose. Then we have pollen, which is the male gamete of all vegetation in our biomes. It's the most relevant protein source in nutrition, not only human but animal. We also have propolis, which is extracted with antifungal, antibacterial, antibiotic enzymes that when consumed by humans, help us elevate our physical condition and significantly increase our immunity. The group is ready and able to do work not only in environmental preservation, but as Manoel said, we learn a lot from our União group, studying meliponiculture and bees.
+
+**Manoel:** And their products too.
+
+*You mentioned there was evolution---it began with individual leadership, then moved to collective leadership. How did these community rules and protocols evolve? What were the inspirational models and lessons learned?*
+
+**Glaicon:** Actually, it's nothing more than our own learning from studying meliponiculture. What was created was cutting out everything that doesn't relate to meliponiculture. As things appeared, we created a protocol to maintain our focus on what represents the entire group's profile. That's how rules emerged, because we didn't know various types of problems that could arise. When they came, we created the protocol---the need to direct everyone toward healthy meliponiculture.
+
+**Manoel:** These protocols are important because there are many beginner, adventurous people who want to enter meliponiculture but sometimes don't understand there are rules. For example, box types. We talk a lot about rational use, rational creation. What is this? You have a box for each bee type, with adequate dimensions, and adequate dimensions for each hive size. Sometimes people don't know and put a tiny bee in a very large box. It goes well, but come winter, during the rainy period, it will weaken and that hive will die. We must guide people to follow these rules to ensure meliponiculture continues progressing as it is.
+
+**Glaicon:** What Manoel is saying is very interesting because each bee type has a specific management approach. Bees come in various sizes with different characteristics from the Apidae group. The Apidae group develops in two different segments: trigonines and meliponines. Trigonines divide by royal cells, and meliponines by cells. Understanding this bee subdivision and each specimen's pollination capacity, how they live, how they need to be treated so we can achieve comfortable meliponaries---these are fundamental ideas we share in our group for responsible, focused meliponiculture.
+
+*What other examples of rules govern the group, for instance, regarding commercial use and informal exchanges?*
+
+**Dionísio:** These rules are well-defined. In our main group, commercialization or advertising of products or anything commercial is not permitted. It's exclusively for information exchange and clarifying doubts. Commerce is prohibited in this group.
+
+*How do you attract new members and participants? How do you search for new meliponiculturists?*
+
+**Glaicon:** We believe our group would be and is much stronger when it has concentrated, focused people. Having large numbers of participants can sometimes take us off our trajectory. When we receive a request from an administrator to add a new member, we first call them privately and ask where they are in meliponiculture, what their perspective is. We study the person. If administrators think they're suitable for the group, we admit a new participant.
+
+*What are your expectations for improving and evolving this protocol, knowledge transmission, and group interactions? What lessons have you extracted from this process that you plan to improve over time?*
+
+**Glaicon:** Each person teaches us the way. Daily work, management, and knowledge create new situations where the group finds itself in a better place each day, with more knowledge.
+
+**Manoel:** Correct, because this is very dynamic---we can't leave fixed rules. These protocols can mature according to group dynamics, with new people entering and the needs of each moment. The world is in transition, so we can't stand still. We must edit rules daily for each situation.
+
+**Glaicon:** That's a beautiful statement, because if we observe, when we started the group, many management practices were very common that we don't use today because they've been modified. We have to change rules to accompany this.
+
+*How did these modifications happen through these exchanges?*
+
+**Glaicon:** Exactly as I said---observing each other, establishing management rules, knowledge, observations. I recently went to Bahia and saw a tree there. I had the opportunity and was dazzled by such grandeur, such beautiful things. I observed the flower clusters of this tree, a schefflera, loaded with pollinators---wasps, butterflies, bees. I couldn't miss the opportunity to share this new discovery throughout Brazil---this find in Abrolhos, on the Bahian continent, 70 kilometers away. This is how we form and strengthen ourselves, and the protocol always receives new directions and forms, creating a strong group. Grupo União today is a strong group.
+
+**Manoel:** We need protocols not to be unpleasant or authoritarian, but because more people are participating---people need to know the rules to continue preserving group harmony.
+
+**Dionísio:** Exactly. To maintain focus on what really matters to the group.
+
+*Is environmental education focused exclusively on bees?*
+
+**Glaicon:** No. Bees are inserted in an environment where everything is connected. For example, reforestation. Bees are very responsible because by pollinating, they don't let any type of native forest in any biome go extinct. It's fundamental to know that bees aren't only directed toward producing honey, but maintaining native biomes strong, healthy, and natural. Consequently, our springs will be suitable, flowing water, because where there's native forest, there are springs. Bees are somehow connected to springs, mangroves, seas, lakes, lagoons, dams, rivers---our entire water chain. Most interestingly, the union of this reforestation with protection of our water sources results in purer, better air and a healthy planet. This is the meliponiculturist's greatest objective---maintaining all this influence that bees give us and that keeps us alive.
+
+**Dionísio:** It's interesting to note that because we know bees, we need to know much about what they feed on. Starting from this premise, the biggest discussion in groups I've observed lately, and it's always been this way, is the type of vegetation they visit, the type of flower they like, the type of tree, the type of resin they need. We end up discussing this a lot. Naturally, everyone will want to have near them the type of vegetation, flower, tree, plant. So we are vegetation multipliers.
+
+**Glaicon:** Exactly. We are reforesters, just like bees. We must always think that before a bee, you must have a tree, a plant that produces food for these bees. Consequently, a producer of food for our table, for all world inhabitants. A concept our group in Juiz de Fora talks about, which I find beautiful and old: "Bee doesn't do harm, bee makes honey."
+
+*Could you give an example?*
+
+**Manoel:** Following this line of reasoning, I could mention that I have a farm in Leopoldina, in Piacatuba, and we're always concerned with plants that will improve bee nutrition. We're very concerned there with increasing basil, basil plantations, coffee vine, clove vine, and various other trees and plants that will support these bees' nutrition.
+
+**Glaicon:** What Manoel is saying is so interesting---some trees are very relevant compared to others regarding melliferous pastures. For example, *pitanga*. Our meliponine bees are ready to fly up to 120 meters high, so they don't forage far. There are smaller bees, but when it comes to low trees that have great relevance in food supply---pollen and nectar---bees don't waste time. Among these we have *pitanga* and *jabuticaba*. As Manoel just explained, this is how we try to facilitate, besides feeding and bringing healthy fruit to our tables, feeding our hives. We need great plant variety, so we can't have monoculture---we need diverse plant types to serve diverse bee types, according to region and time of year. Some flowers are very abundant but have very small flowering cycles.
+
+This is very interesting because we have a time when flowers bloom abundantly---spring, as everyone knows. So hives will experience great food discomfort in autumn and winter. Therefore, we stay alert and seek to improve our melliferous pastures so that during this off-season for bee feeding, we're involving trees in our biomes that will feed not only bees but mammals, reptiles, birds, etc., because it's a food chain.
+
+**Manoel:** Just one observation---notice that all the plants mentioned here, besides producing food, some spices, other fruits, are also medicinal herbs that serve to treat health. And here comes production. In the same plant, you have three or four food sources. You have pollen, nectar, resin, and leaves that often serve as spices and other things.
+
+**Dionísio:** I think it's also good to highlight that ornamental plants don't produce food for any type of pollinator. They're not angiosperms. So when we're inserting ornamental plants in our gardens, we're not collaborating with melliferous pastures. Many people don't know this information.
+
+*Besides exchanges made in the group through the internet, which connect people from across the country, what other channels are used to propagate this information?*
+
+**Glaicon:** I'm a small meliponiculturist. I've taken on the condition of meliponiculture, but I recognize I have a very small public reach. Sometimes, for example, I know I'm in relevant groups in Peru. They love my posts and ask me to post more. I see that we're somehow being facilitators in Peru, Argentina, here in South America. There are other countries where some of our colleagues are more present. But I see our work as a whole today, with my friends, as great progress, because some years ago, people killed bees. Today, there's understanding because our work is showing results. Dionísio, for example, Dr. Dionísio, has a completely different professional segment. Today, within his professional condition, he's clearly promoting and teaching meliponiculture and environmental preservation. This is very nice---bees are going into law, health, entertainment, various different fields, always bringing life, health, well-being.
+
+**Dionísio:** And complementing, another way we disseminate this is through congresses and meetings we organize. Now, for example, we're organizing the monthly meeting of meliponiculturists in Juiz de Fora. This word-of-mouth is still fundamental for knowledge dissemination. It attracts many new meliponiculturists, many new people, many curious people who today or tomorrow will be great meliponiculturists, great guardians of bee propagation and environmental conservation.
+
+**Manoel:** I'd add that as a form of knowledge dissemination, we're always invited to public events. We go to schools, squares, where there are larger crowds. We can explain and demonstrate what stingless bees are and the benefits they bring.
+
+**Glaicon:** I work in two municipal schools as a volunteer. I work with science teachers because state schools have an educational program where science teachers must execute field classes. This isn't possible today due to lack of training. So what has been my work in these schools with students from first to ninth grade? I work with their teachers teaching this biological and morphological part of bees. They complete the educational cycle that is the field science class that the State needs today, requests, but isn't being done. It's a very nice legal project. There's also demand for bee presentations at agricultural exhibitions, agribusiness events. You yourself participated and collaborated with our rich region here, Leopoldina, where Manoel went and did exhibition work with bees and honey. It was very interesting and very nice work.
+
+*What is your vision for the group's future?*
+
+**Glaicon:** I have an optimistic vision. I'm a person who always thinks we can be better, so I didn't create this group just for it to end one day. I created it so it could take flight and reach horizons, reach as many people as possible, and the result would be at minimum the satisfaction of living with health, with freedom for our children, grandchildren, all inhabitants, our descendants who come forward, to have a better world, a healthier world, something really nice. I don't want our group to end. To fix this information, I'd cite the case of our friend PPP, who must be 93 years old, working with stingless bees for 40, 50 years. If you asked him 50 years ago, today you'd have the answer that his own self-motivation and enchantment with bees kept him going. Even he is a reference for us. I think the group's future objective is that we don't pass through here leaving only peace. We must make our contribution to improving the world, the planet, and the population in general. The group becomes so strong that when my friends call me privately or say something in the group, I stay quiet because I want to listen---it seems like I'm going to learn something more. So our desire is always to continue, improve. This is very nice and true. The meliponiculturist has a mission in my view---the mission of not letting some pollinators, these wonderful insects, go extinct. Isn't that right, Manoel? This bee here is a capixaba bee from Espírito Santo that is extremely endangered, on the first extinction list.
+
+**Dionísio:** Does it only exist in Espírito Santo?
+
+**Glaicon:** Only in Espírito Santo. It's not known as *Capixaba* anywhere else---that's why it's called *Uruçu Capixaba*. What's interesting is highlighting what led this bee to extinction. The invasion of mangroves, mountains, monoculture, condominiums, deforestation, industry---industry caused this bee to become extinct. Today, we have this bee in the south of the country, in the mountains of Petrópolis and Teresópolis, because this bee only survives 700 meters above sea level. Certainly, Paulo Nogueira Neto wasn't wrong. If Espírito Santo today needs pure *Capixaba*, we can send them some. Because the meliponiculturist had the responsibility to treat this pollinator with love to prevent extinction. So we're going to see this *Capixaba Uruçu* hive now.
+
+**Dionísio:** The yellow *Uruçu* is a bee that is truly endangered and continues to be endangered. We no longer find it in nature.
+
+**Glaicon:** Exactly. It builds its nests, every 3 kilometers on average. It flies 4. Today we have only 200 hives. I believe that registered in the last 3 years, I multiplied about 4 thousand specimens that were sent to other meliponaries that today have 300, 200 hives. So it's a bee that is far from extinction but still endangered because it's not present in Atlantic forests.
+
+**Dionísio:** And remembering that this bee is from our Atlantic forest.
+
+**Glaicon:** Yes. Can't forget to highlight. The yellow *Uruçu* bee divides into 11 types of yellow uruçu. The one from our Atlantic forest is the mondore, which is the bugia---that's the popular name. So we're going to open the box here for people to see.
+
+**Dionísio:** This bee looks like gold, doesn't it?
+
+**Glaicon:** It looks like gold. Look how beautiful. It has the color of the Atlantic forest howler monkey, so it has the popular name *Bugia* bee. Taking advantage of this connection, these here are the resins, right?
+
+**Dionísio:** These are geopropolis used to make propolis extract.
+
+**Glaicon:** Exactly. Which protects the hive from fungi, bacteria.
+
+**Dionísio:** Yes. And we talked so much about *samburá* and honey---the honey of stingless bees is stored in these pots, called *samburá*. Here there are pots with samburá and pots with honey, and extraction is totally different from traditional apiculture.

content/interviews/zargham-ultimate_frisbee.md

@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@ approved: 2024-12-02
 summary: "As a sport often played with no referees, ultimate frisbee has developed a strong set of norms for addressing conflict and self-governing."
 location: "East Greenbush, NY USA"
 headshot: "michael_zargham.png"
-topics: [sports, organizations, dispute resolution]
+topics: [mediation, sports, organizations]
 ---
 
 *How do you like to introduce yourself to people as you encounter them in the world?*

content/interviews/zayner-biohacking.md

@@ -0,0 +1,264 @@
+---
+narrator:  Josette Adeline Zayner
+subject: Biohacking
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2025-07-30
+approved: 2025-07-30
+summary: "How hacking computers led to hacking biological systems, including her own body."
+location: "Austin, TX"
+headshot: "josette_zayner.jpg"
+topics: [art, gender, health, science, software]
+links:
+  - text: "Biohack the Planet newsletter"
+    url: "https://amateurgods.substack.com/"
+  - text: "The Embryo Corporation"
+    url: "https://building.life/"
+---
+
+*How do you like to introduce yourself?*
+
+Oh, I hate when people---my name is Josie Zayner. I have a PhD from the University of Chicago in biophysics, and I'm CEO of two biotech companies simultaneously. I know. Long story.
+
+*Let's get into that story. How would you outline the trajectory of your life and career? Where did you start?*
+
+I grew up on a tiny farm in Indiana. It wasn't really a farm---I think we just called it a farm because we were so poor and wanted to pretend life was better than it was. We had chickens that we collected eggs from, some goats, dogs. I grew up in rural America in pretty bad poverty.
+
+This was in the eighties, and we actually drank dehydrated milk. I don't know if most people here even know that's a thing. The people I know who know about dehydrated milk come from some third world country. We were really poor.
+
+My mom was divorced at a young age from my biological father, who was violent. Not a lot of good things happened there. My early life was probably pretty foundational for who I am today. I have three brothers, raised by a single mother who had to work all the time. We had no money, so you had to learn to be self-sufficient pretty quick and pretty early. If you needed something, you had to figure out how to get it yourself, because you couldn't ask my mom for money or help.
+
+When I was about eight, nine, or ten, I moved to the Chicago suburbs to live with my grandparents. My grandparents really raised me from then into my teens. I kind of take after my grandma---she taught me how to cook Italian food, and I like to cook Italian food.
+
+I wasn't good in school at all. I did terribly in high school---almost failed out. It wasn't that I was bad at school, I'm just not good at imposed structure. That's just the way I am to this day. I don't like imposed structure, and it's kind of made me who I am, stemming from needing to take care of myself and needing to decide what's best for me.
+
+I was arrested twice before the age of eighteen, which is pretty crazy considering where I am today. I don't know many people who are founders and have raised millions of dollars, or have PhDs, who have been arrested, much less twice. Very non-traditional upbringing compared to most people in my social class.
+
+*When did you finally start to engage? What was the bridge between getting arrested, not doing well in school, and then going to the University of Chicago?*
+
+It was computers. Do you remember "The Conscience of a Hacker," the hacker manifesto?
+
+*I teach it in one of my courses.*
+
+There's this line: "like heroin through an addict's veins." That's how computers were to me. My mom did this job for somebody, and they couldn't afford to pay her, so they gave her an old computer. I experienced being online from my friend who lived across the street, so I was like, "I gotta get my hands on a modem."
+
+I forget exactly how, but maybe I saved up money because I started working---once I was old enough to work, I was at the grocery store bagging groceries. I bought a modem, and it was just like, "Oh shit, this world is crazy. I love it." Got really into computers, into computer programming. Got a job at Motorola doing computer programming when I was eighteen. I was making more money than my mom, which was wild.
+
+I was really enthralled with that world. But then, in the early 2000s, the dot-com bubble burst, and Motorola laid off a bunch of people, including me. I was just like, "Is this really what I want to do with my life?" I was working for this giant, corporate company. I remember working on the Nextel cell phone network, and one weekend we were updating subscriber databases. I uploaded the wrong database or something, so maybe a hundred thousand people were without cell phone service for the weekend.
+
+When that happened, I remember the communication between everybody wasn't about how these people didn't have cell phone service---it was about how much money we lost. I was like, "Is that all I am here? Just a way to make other people more money?" I didn't want to be that. I wanted to work on something bigger.
+
+I decided to go into biology. The natural world has always fascinated me---it should fascinate everybody because it's so wild, but it really fascinated me. I did an undergrad degree in plant biology. I was always enthralled by the idea of plants starting out as a seed, sucking molecules from the soil, eating CO2 and sunlight, and growing. I was like, "How do you do that? That's crazy. I want to understand how you do that."
+
+I'm a reductionist. With computers, I wanted to control things on the lowest level---I wanted to program in assembly and move around all the memory, do different stuff so I had complete control. It's kind of the same way with living things.
+
+*Did that experience with computers leave you approaching biology differently than other people you studied with?*
+
+I think so. I saw it more as---especially in Western culture, we have this view of life as this sacred thing, and I'm not saying it's not at all true. But I approached it more from the idea that it was like a computer, like an operating system, something to be manipulated and programmed. From when I started biology to when I started my first company, I always approached it with that same hacker mindset. It was like, "How do I hack this stuff?" and not, "How do I write scientific papers about this stuff?"
+
+*How did you begin learning biology? What kinds of protocols became part of that practice?*
+
+In undergrad, I was poor enough that the government would pay people at the university to pay me---this work-study program. Basically, find a job and we'll give them money to pay you. So I would go work in labs---scientific labs. All plant biology labs in undergrad.
+
+That really got me excited about research, because undergrad is just learning, you're not necessarily doing. I wanted more of the doing. Once I started doing research, I was like, "Oh, this shit is fun." You can mess around with things and go crazy---if you have a crazy idea, you could just try it out.
+
+After my undergrad, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, so I applied for some master's degree programs. I had two: one where I went to undergrad, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, which was like a six-hour train ride from Chicago where my family lived, and Appalachian State in Boone, North Carolina, because they had good rock climbing and I was really into rock climbing. I had a couple of friends who lived out there and ended up going to Appalachian State.
+
+*How did the organizational life in research labs compare to working for Motorola?*
+
+I definitely could have more autonomy. I wanted to find somebody who would just let me rip, and that's what I did. I found this person working on understanding the molecular mechanisms of cholera---the bacteria that causes the disease cholera.
+
+She also got pregnant and gave birth within the first six months I was there, so it was literally just me in the lab. I think there was nobody else. She would stop by once a week to have a meeting with me, but otherwise it was just me doing whatever I wanted. I'm somebody who can get super obsessive. I just dug in and went hard and made a lot of progress, had a lot of success---won all these grants and awards.
+
+At Appalachian State, it was a small school, so they didn't pay us big stipends---we had no money. I would work all night and then go to the bar right next to campus and drink dollar beers on dollar beer night. Another living situation with no money in some shitty-ass apartment, but I loved it. I absolutely loved it.
+
+*Were there particular moments where you found yourself able to achieve something or manipulate something in a way that you experienced with computers early on?*
+
+It was different in that science is this very physical thing. You're using your whole body. Computers is like---typing. It really turned into a form of self-expression to me. I could channel my anger or happiness and express that through my work. Sometimes in labs when experiments would fail, I would throw something across the room. Sometimes when things would succeed, I would scream. It became this art form for me that computers never could be necessarily. They couldn't reach this level because it was all in the digital world. Even when I did some electrical engineering work, building electronics, I felt like it was all in this digital world. Science became more of a real thing for me.
+
+*How did you move toward the PhD?*
+
+For my PhD, I wanted to go deeper. I wanted to break it down even further and be really reductionist. I wanted to get into biophysics---to be able to watch these atoms move and manipulate them.
+
+I applied for biophysics PhD programs all across the US and got accepted to University of Chicago, which was the only school I applied for in Chicago. I went because it was probably the best school I got accepted to, it was near my family. It was one of the greatest moments of my life. Here's some kid who came from shit, and you get a PhD from University of Chicago. Immediately you start to enter---you're no longer lower-class anymore. Even just the stipend they pay you every year as a graduate student is a reasonable amount of money.
+
+All the people I was around had summer homes and lake houses that we'd go to. I was definitely one of the very few kids who came from poverty. It was one of the moments of my life I'm most proud of---being accepted there.
+
+When I went there, I knew what I wanted to do. I found the nerdiest, smartest professor who tried to work on things in the most reductionist way and worked with them to get a PhD. It was such an amazing lab. A lot of people from that lab have gone on to success. One of the people in my cohort, John Jumper, just won a Nobel Prize. It was a really impressive group of people.
+
+The knowledge I gained there set me up for the rest of my life. It was like a firehose of knowledge and information that I absorbed like a sponge. I spent extra time studying outside of the lab and classes. Nowadays, there's so much shit in my brain that I try to anti-learn. I don't need to learn anything more for the rest of my life.
+
+I had some amazing mentors there who really spent time with me, like Tobin Sosnick. Another professor doing biophysics research would invite me over to his office every other day. He would have fancy whiskey or alcohol that somebody gave him for giving a talk, and we'd sit there for two or three hours sipping whiskey, just talking about science. He would close the shades on his office door window. Amazing mentors there.
+
+But I also realized that academia wasn't the place for me. There were these guidelines of the way you're supposed to do things. It happened twice. 
+
+Once was when I published my first paper---I wrote the whole thing, made all the figures. I think maybe it was just me and my PI as the only two authors on a massive body of work. It was like a work of art. I put my soul into that paper. If somebody could read it and actually understand it on a truly deep level, it is like a work of art. Some of the experiments I did were so novel and wild---a breadth of experiments, from computational stuff to complex NMR measurements. I was super proud of it.
+
+We sent it off to the journal. Initially, they were really excited about it---do some revisions. We did the revisions and they came back, and they're like, "We're not interested in it anymore. Sorry." I was like, "What do you mean you're not interested anymore? What the fuck?" Even my PI wrote a strongly worded email to them.
+
+I was just like, this system---the scientific system---is not about the beauty. It's not about the cleverness, like that hacker world where it's all about the cleverness of stuff and the beauty of what you do.
+
+*How did you find balance between that rigor and regimentation of a lab environment and the art?*
+
+My PI just let me do whatever the fuck I wanted. "Do your shit, go off, go off, homie," and I did. I published four first-author papers, won the best thesis award at the university. I did really well, even by academic standards.
+
+But after that paper I got really jaded, and I decided to start fucking around. I built this musical instrument. I was really interested, because I was studying this protein and looking at the atoms move in this NMR machine. I was so obsessed with it---I had such a strong relationship with this protein molecule. I could tell you where all the amino acids were and where they pointed, what it looks like, how they vibrated. I knew way too much from spending so many hours and days with it. I didn't take days off ever, maybe one or two weeks off around Christmas, and I worked every weekend.
+
+I wanted other people to be able to experience this. I was like, "How can I do that?" Because it was this light-reactive protein that followed this photo cycle, I was like, "What if I could take that cycle, that exponential decay of function, and map that to a musical note?" Then people could kind of experience the life of this molecule and understand it, maybe even a little bit, because I'm taking it from the molecular world to the macro world.
+
+I built this musical instrument. I would be in the lab all day, come home at night, be working on this, and literally just fall asleep. I bought this wooden lap bench off Craigslist for a hundred bucks---person hand-built it and delivered it. I still have it actually, and it's a piece of shit, but it was a hundred bucks.
+
+I had never built a musical instrument. I had no idea about music or sound, never integrated sound with electronics. It was an impossible task to me---how do you even begin doing this? But slowly, over time, I built more and more, got better and better, figured it out more and more.
+
+We used to have this thing called Graduate Student Seminar---just graduate students could go. They had beer and pizza, every Friday. I went and played this musical instrument. Everybody had no idea how to respond and kind of laughed and stared at me.
+
+It was wild, and then it was even more wild because _Scientific American_ and _The Verge_ wanted to write news articles about this shit. I remember talking to my PI in the lab, and they were like, "Oh no, you can't put this in your thesis or anything," but I'm starting to catch recognition from these outside publications.
+
+To me, this has scientific relevance and interest in many different ways. But the fact that I can't include it with my thesis or can't contribute it to my scientific body of work seems silly and dumb. That was kind of the final thing with me. I was like, "I'm done with academia. I'm on this trajectory that I think is totally different, and I want to embrace that."
+
+*Where did you go next?*
+
+I went to this conference wearing a shirt---because in graduate school I was known to be a curmudgeon---that said, "I need my space," and it had a NASA logo on it. At this conference, somebody was like, "There's a guy from NASA here. You should talk to them." This person from NASA talked to me and they're like, "You should apply for this NPP fellowship. It's this prestigious fellowship---you basically write a proposal for research, NASA funds you, and you get to do whatever you want." It was in Silicon Valley.
+
+I wrote this proposal, and it was so weird. I'm coming from this world of watching atoms move in the basement of the library---the NMR room was in the absolute basement underneath the library---to writing a proposal about helping astronauts on Mars do this shit. It was so surreal, and then they accepted it.
+
+This was one of the first times where they're just like, "Here's a bunch of money to move out here, you get a nice salary, amazing health insurance." I lived in a hotel on base for the first two weeks I was there till I found a place to live. I wound up at NASA with a fellowship, which was pretty wild. I got to work on something cool and crazy, and I didn't have to deal with all the fucking academic bullshit.
+
+I worked on engineering bacteria to degrade plastic or degrade human waste so they could reuse it. It was pretty fun. I had two interns who worked with me, and we'd go to all these trash dumps to bio-prospect. I'd just be like, "I'm from NASA. Give me samples of your trash." People would be like, "Okay." It's so funny because you got this official NASA badge, and people just do whatever you say.
+
+*Did you find your way into startups through being in the Bay Area?*
+
+NASA was also really bureaucratic, and nobody worked---seriously, nobody worked. My boss came in one day a month. I was coming from academia where I was working my ass off, working on weekends and everything. So I come into NASA, I'm working on weekends, and they start telling me, "Don't come in on weekends---it's not a good look." I'm just like, "What? Why? What's going on here?" I was this naive person who doesn't understand social dynamics and bureaucracy.
+
+I remember one time the fire alarm went off in the building---it's this six-floor building that's really cool, pockmarked to look like the moon from all the micro-meteors. The base fire department comes, and the fire people were like, "Is everybody out of the building?" We're like, "I think so." There were five of us standing there, and I was like, "Holy shit, this is how many people come into work on any given day?" There's this six-floor building that employed enough people to fill it, and I was just like, "Oh my God, I don't think I'm gonna get anything done here."
+
+I worked on engineering. I wanted to start working on stuff that was less molecular because I realized from the musical instrument that if you want to have an impact on the world---the real world, not just mental masturbation that you enjoy---you need to build things that impact the world. That's when I figured out, "Okay, if I want to do something that I want to do, I'm gonna have to build it myself," because all these systems that have been established, I just don't fit into.
+
+When my contract was coming up---the fellowships are for three years---I was just like, "I'm out, homies. We had a good one. I'm taking off."
+
+I was really interested in democratizing this technology. From the computer hacker days, what made computer hacking so great was access---access to the ability to program, access to knowledge and information. I believe that really drove the computer hacker movement. I was like, "I want to recreate that in biology."
+
+I made this CRISPR DIY---a CRISPR genetic engineering kit where anybody could gene-edit some bacteria in their home, and I did a crowdfunding campaign. If I raised $20,000, I thought, I'm just gonna do this full time. I ended up raising like $150,000 and got a ton of press. It started this trajectory of running companies and being in the public eye.
+
+*When you started building these tools that enable people to take things out of the lab and into their homes, how easy was that translation? How is providing access to biology different from doing it with computers?*
+
+It is a lot different. One thing I really learned about science is there's no user interface, no user experience design. It's just terrible. It's not intuitive in any way and requires all this complex equipment, expensive equipment. I was just like, "How do I package this in a $150 kit?" Which was the first problem---how do I make the protocols and experiments for somebody who doesn't have a whole lab full of equipment to use?
+
+There was a lot of translation, a lot of R&D that had to go into making this work for somebody in their kitchen who doesn't even have the ability to control temperature. That's a basic process of biology---you have an incubator, you can control temperature. People don't normally have that in their life. We have a thermostat that we could generally control room temperature, but that's it. You can't go up to 37°C or down to whatever.
+
+I had to adapt things and do things over and over again. I made more kits---letting people engineer human cells in their home, letting people genetically engineer plants in their home. The company still sells this stuff. It was always like, "How do I take this complex scientific experiment and break it down so that somebody without complicated equipment can do it?"
+
+Every time I did something like this, people would be like, "That's impossible. You're never going to be able to do that." And every time I was able to figure something out. I think it was just that hacker mindset---being clever and understanding things. Graduate school really helped because I came from this world where I tried to learn things from first principles. I didn't follow protocols---I wanted to understand the process so that I knew how to do things intuitively because I understood each step and why it was supposed to be done. I think that helped me greatly to take these protocols that people have been doing and still do and just be like, "Fuck that, you can do it this way also. That's way easier, requires way less equipment."
+
+*What did people start doing with these kits, and did it surprise you?*
+
+A lot of the kits are educational. You have to understand that even nowadays---I started the company around ten years ago---people still don't have an intuition for biology, which always blew my mind. We understand these devices, we use computers and cell phones so intuitively, and we have no intuition for ourselves and what we're made of.
+
+Almost all the kits we sell are geared towards, "Here's a basic experiment that's pre-built for you so you can understand the principles by doing this experiment to get this desired result." 99.9% of people do not move past that. But some people do. A couple of people that work with me today started off with those kits.
+
+It's more foundational. We're not at the place yet where people really understand or are willing to put in the effort to take it beyond just learning from a kit. It's like when you buy a little electronics board and you make the LED blink on it or something---it's basically like that for the world of biology or, in programming, writing a "Hello World" program.
+
+You have to understand the difference between playing a song and writing a song. It's really hard to get people to that writing-a-song stage. Very few people make it there in general in the world. With biology, most people are just going to be people who do the experiment, understand it, enjoy the process, brag to their friends, and then move on with their life.
+
+*How has art continued to be a part of your life as you've been a founder of companies?*
+
+When I was at NASA, one of the things I did was apply for this art fellowship at Stochastic Labs. It was this new organization that just opened up in Berkeley---a rich person gave them a bunch of money to buy this mansion and set up this hacker space. It was super cool, a bunch of brilliant people from the Bay Area.
+
+I applied by myself, but they paired me with Lynn Hershman Leeson. She is an icon---a feminist icon and art and technology icon. At the time I didn't know. She's made a bunch of movies with Tilda Swinton---Tilda Swinton starred in a bunch of her weird, crazy movies.
+
+We started doing art together. This brought me into the more professional world of art because the projects we worked on ended up in museums, which was really wild. We worked on some genetic engineering projects together. I think it was called the Infinity Engine---we worked on a bunch of different stuff to create this huge installation. I was combining some of my computer programming knowledge with biology knowledge.
+
+The first place it showed was ZKM, which is this new-media, techno-art museum in Germany. Then it went around Europe---I think it went to the Tate Modern and all these other places. It was really wild. That's when I first started to actually be considered an artist and consider myself an artist.
+
+But at the same time, outside of that, I started doing these weird experiments. I had gut health problems, and people were talking a lot about microbiome transplants. I learned a lot about the microbiome---the bacteria in and on your body. There's this really famous bio-artist at the time who I was friends with, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, and she did this DNA sequencing from cigarette butts to facial reconstruction of people, which got a lot of press.
+
+I was like, "Let's do this experiment where we transfer our microbiomes---I transfer yours to me, and I transfer mine to yours." We're like, "Oh yeah, this is gonna be really cool." Eventually, she's like, "I don't know if I want to do this. It seems dangerous, and I don't want to fuck up my microbiome."
+
+We were having this conversation at this event, and some people I met who are filmmakers were just like, "Oh my God, that sounds fucking crazy! We'd love to film this thing." I was like, "Okay, I guess." Heather was out, so it was just me these people wanted to film.
+
+Somehow _The Verge_ got wind of this idea, and they're like, "We want to do a huge feature on this." This was the first time I had serious press coverage---before, I had some articles written about me, but very superficial. This was the first time I actually had serious principal photography and cameras in my face, a cinema camera, people following me around asking me questions, a journalist who's there.
+
+I'm doing this experiment and going through this process over the course of two weeks, and I have people following me around everywhere, asking me questions the whole time, recording every moment of my life. It was so intense---what the fuck is going on?
+
+It was intended to be a science experiment, and it was, but it turned into performance art where the world was interested in this crazy science experiment. It was super rigorous---I took all these samples of bacteria in and on my body, had the DNA sequenced, matched it to the bacteria, looked at how my microbiome changed.
+
+It was a huge success. The film documentary won a bunch of awards and went to South by Southwest and all these places. I'm at South by Southwest on stage answering people's questions because everybody's like, "Oh my God, that's crazy." This huge article comes out about me, and I started to become a public figure at that point. People started caring about what I did and what I said. It was weird. It was really weird.
+
+*How did your approach to science change when you turned it on yourself and your own body? What made you willing to do this?*
+
+It was really freaky because the journalists talked to a lot of scientists, and they were just like, "Oh, they shouldn't do that." At the time I was still male-presenting, so if I refer to myself as "he," just understand that, at the time, people referred to me as he.
+
+I felt like I understood it well enough and deep enough that I was taking a calculated risk---a risk that something could happen, but also I think something profound or really interesting could come of it. And it did. The results were amazing, just to see the shift in the microbiome. Nobody had done an experiment anything like that.
+
+When I started experimenting on myself, I thought there were probably few, if any, people in the world who understood this as good as me, and I understood it well enough that I thought I could make a calculated risk.
+
+It wasn't until later---when there started being copycats, who started copying some of these self-experiments that I was doing---that I was like, "Oh, holy shit, I never imagined that people who didn't have the knowledge would just start doing this shit also." They're crazy motherfuckers. But I think to do good science, to do a lot of this stuff, you need a certain amount of crazy to push boundaries, to do the impossible. You do need a certain amount of crazy, and you do need a certain amount of knowledge.
+
+I think I have a combination of crazy and knowledge that's really unique. Growing up, I never had anything to lose---I wasn't afraid of getting arrested or stealing shit. Where am I gonna go back to? I'm probably not gonna be worse off than I was at one point in time.
+
+It really built in me---this attitude of "I have nothing to lose." I think that's still ingrained in me to a certain extent, even though I've grown up and I do have stuff to lose. I still kind of more than not have that attitude of, "Shit, what's the worst that could happen? I've seen some shit. What's the worst that's gonna happen?"
+
+*I'm curious about whether you're influenced by the legacy of DIY medical interventions in the trans community, where people have had to take these matters into their own hands for a long time.*
+
+Oh, for sure, especially later on. At the time, my transness was really weird---I didn't quite understand. And I don't want to get into specifics because I think it makes me really vulnerable, and I don't like this information out because some journalists do use this shit against you.
+
+At the time I was still understanding who I was, and I think it definitely played into this idea of the body being malleable and not so set in stone like people thought it was.
+
+It wasn't long after that when I started doing more experimenting with medications---hormone replacement therapy in a trans context, DIY outside of medical intervention. To me it was a big deal---if I go to a doctor and say I want to experiment with this stuff, it's like you're either trans or you're not. And if you're trans, it's a big deal. Your partner obviously is going to know you're trans, everybody in your life is going to know you're trans, and it completely changes everything.
+
+I had just started to become a public figure. I did _Gut Hack_, which was huge, and then after that, all these documentaries started getting made about me from 2016 to 2019, culminating in a Netflix documentary coming out in 2019. I was constantly in the spotlight. I can't just one day all of a sudden show up and be like, "I'm a woman now. I'm trans." I mean I could, but to me that's a lot.
+
+There was a lot of experimentation going on behind the scenes---experimenting with different drugs and how they made me feel, how they made me feel about myself, what I thought about it. I think that was really helpful, and it was really amazing to have access to this stuff.
+
+There's a great resource---there's a DIY trans wiki that's associated with Reddit---that was so helpful to me to understand who I was and how I felt about all these things. It was super scary because you're going into the unknown, not just socially but also medically.
+
+*Do you think there are lessons that community has to offer the wider world in terms of thinking about medical interventions, about experimentation, about our relationship with our bodies?*
+
+I think our relationship with our bodies is huge. It really taught me a lot about body autonomy. When most people think of body autonomy, at least in more modern context, a lot of it's centered around abortion. But I think we don't realize how little body autonomy we have in general.
+
+Learning about this stuff, getting involved in the trans community, and just seeing that our bodies are so policed on every aspect---a woman can go and get an estrogen pill for birth control over the counter, there's no requirements. But for somebody who is born male, you have to sign all this paperwork.
+
+In California, when I eventually went and got prescriptions, there was all this paperwork---"I understand the consequences of this, I understand I could go sterile," and all this shit. You're just like, "Holy shit, they really want to control what we can put in our bodies."
+
+It really opened my eyes to that, and I think people don't even realize how much control they're under. It opened up my eyes to the idea that body autonomy is this huge thing---the right to take whatever medications we want, use whatever pharmaceuticals or drugs we want to get high or whatever it is, abortion, surgical medical procedures. It goes deep.
+
+A woman can go and get breast implants and nobody asks any questions. If you're transgender, you need three letters from psychiatrists. How does this make any sense? How is one different than the other when they're both gender-affirming surgery?
+
+It opened up my eyes to the struggles that a lot of people have. I've had it so good because, when I came out, my life was starting to become more upper middle class. I had access to insurance, I had money to pay and see therapists, really try to deal with this. In my life, I have been fortunate to---outside of online---not really experience much bigotry. The group of people I get to be around are very accepting people.
+
+I understand that a lot of people don't have that. A lot of people don't have access to insurance. A lot of people don't have access to people who---everybody around them will be bigoted towards them. It's complicated, and going to a doctor to get access to this stuff can be dangerous.
+
+Still to this day, even though I generally always pass as a woman, I'm still afraid to use women's bathrooms. Shit's crazy out there. Subverting that system again, I think this goes back to being a hacker---be clever enough to subvert the system. When I first started, I took medication off the internet and found websites where you can get a doctor to prescribe you blood tests. So I just go get my blood drawn to see what levels of my testosterone and estrogen levels and all sorts of stuff, so I had an idea of how the medications were affecting my body. It was really cool.
+
+*I wonder if you could say a bit more about your interaction with public health authorities. Where have you run into the limits of the dominant system?*
+
+Once I started to get more public attention and people paying attention to me, then the government started paying attention to me---and not even just the US government. It started at the time it was just me and two other people running this company, and I have the FBI chatting with me, meetings with the FBI, meetings with the FDA, meetings with the California Board of Medicine, California Medical Board. So many organizations just started to come after me.
+
+It was so freaky because here I am---the company is still growing, we don't have much money. If somebody wanted to do some sustained court battle with me, I would totally crumble. I'm flying by the seat of my pants, trying to figure things out as I go, and operating under the premise that I have nothing to hide---I'm not doing anything wrong.
+
+I made sure I would always research all the regulations and rules. Then the government started changing them, and California made a law, and the FDA came out with new guidances to start to try to counteract some of the stuff I was doing. It was so wild to have these government agents. The Bavarian government in Germany came after me, which caused this international incident that got the FBI and other people involved.
+
+It was way too much for somebody who---I don't want to say lowly, but what's all this drama going on? I'm just this farm girl who runs a small company in Oakland, California, out of a house! We didn't even have---because bio labs were so expensive, I just rented a house in this kind of reasonable but also not great neighborhood in West Oakland. It was right by the West Oakland BART stop where people got shot on the regular. I just run this fucking biotech genetic engineering company out of this house in West Oakland. What the fuck?
+
+*Where is the line for you between protection and guarantees that people should be owed, and that autonomy?*
+
+It is really complicated. I guess I'm kind of more libertarian at heart. There's these libertarians who are like, "Oh, you shouldn't need a driver's license to drive, or there shouldn't be stop signs," but when you think about it, stop signs and stoplights and guardrails do protect us, and they don't really infringe on our rights very much. You have to stop when you get to a stop---that's not really infringing on your right too much. These are good things. Having certain stoplights and stop signs aren't necessarily a bad thing when you're trying to prevent people from accidentally hurting themselves. What are those boundaries? I don't know. It's really tough.
+
+I'm sure there's some things we can all agree on---nobody should have access to Ebola. I think 99.9% of people are gonna be like, "All right, reasonable." I think when it gets to those gray areas is when it starts to get complicated.
+
+Honestly, what I've come to learn is that the system does play a role in---it scares, it prevents a lot of people from doing stupid shit, but it also allows room for pushback. If you're actually thoughtful about the pushback, I think you can actually hack the government, so to speak, in certain ways. Hack the regulations, find these loopholes and bypass them. That's what I've worked to do and still do today---find these loopholes and bypass them to your advantage, where they can't do anything to you because that doesn't break any of the things.
+
+And learning what's important to the system---what does the system value? How do I not fuck with the things that they value? I think I've become way smarter about it by understanding that the system does have a role to play. There should be some amount of pushback because I think just giving people freedom to do whatever they want isn't necessarily in everyone's best interest.
+
+So pushback so that the thoughtful people who are trying to push the boundaries end up making it through, and the people who are just doing dumb, crazy shit kind of get---don't make it as far. It's kind of like a self-selective sieve---if you made it this far where you're talking to the FBI, you probably hopefully have done it in such a way where they're not going to arrest you. If they are, you deserve it.
+
+*When you think of yourself encountering that computer and discovering your power as a hacker, what are you hoping to convey to people who are experiencing something similar with the tools you're providing now? What do you hope they learn?*
+
+I'm just trying to open people's eyes. I want them to see the beauty that I saw or see, because once you see that beauty---I call it "the illness"---it becomes this illness where you become obsessed. It's just like, "Oh my God, that thing is so beautiful. I just want to know more. I just want to feel it. I just want to touch it. I want to experience it in every way possible."
+
+That starts with showing people the beauty. That's why I started my new company. My first company was this bottom-up approach---people are never going to be able to see that beauty if they don't understand it. My new company is like, people are never going to be able to completely express that beauty if they don't see what's possible.
+
+In my new company, we're gene-editing animals, gene-editing embryos, which has been so wild and surreal. I want people to have the power to be able to be hackers, but I need to show them what's cool first. Just like when I was a hacker, there was a lot of code that inspired me---a lot of code that inspired a lot of the programming and clever hacking stuff that I did. People need that inspiration.
+
+It's also something I've learned being a trans person---I used to never understand what representation meant until I was the only woman, trans woman, queer person in a room. Then you're just like, "Holy shit---wow, it's very isolating." You start to realize people need representations of cool, interesting, beautiful things. I'm just trying to bring that to them, I guess.
+
+That's kind of one of my mottos---I even tattooed it on my arm myself: "create something beautiful." I want to inspire other people to create beautiful things, because what's the point if you're not seeing beauty?

layouts/_default/baseof.html

@@ -37,7 +37,7 @@
     
     <!-- Open Graph / Facebook -->
     <meta property="og:site_name" content="{{ .Site.Title }}" />
-    <meta property="og:type" content="{{ if .IsPage }}article{{ else }}website{{ end }}" />
+    <meta property="og:type" content="{{ if .IsPage }}interview{{ else }}website{{ end }}" />
     <meta property="og:url" content="{{ .Permalink }}" />
     <meta property="og:title" content="{{ $title }}" />
     <meta property="og:description" content="{{ $description }}" />
@@ -53,18 +53,18 @@
     <meta name="twitter:image" content="{{ . | absURL }}" />
     {{ end }}
     
-    <!-- Article Specific -->
-    {{ if and .IsPage (eq .Type "articles") }}
-      <meta property="article:published_time" content="{{ .Date.Format "2006-01-02T15:04:05Z07:00" }}" />
-      <meta property="article:modified_time" content="{{ .Lastmod.Format "2006-01-02T15:04:05Z07:00" }}" />
-      <meta property="article:section" content="Oral History" />
+    <!-- Interview Specific -->
+    {{ if and .IsPage (eq .Type "interviews") }}
+      <meta property="interview:published_time" content="{{ .Date.Format "2006-01-02T15:04:05Z07:00" }}" />
+      <meta property="interview:modified_time" content="{{ .Lastmod.Format "2006-01-02T15:04:05Z07:00" }}" />
+      <meta property="interview:section" content="Oral History" />
       {{ with .Params.topics }}
         {{ range . }}
-        <meta property="article:tag" content="{{ . }}" />
+        <meta property="interview:tag" content="{{ . }}" />
         {{ end }}
       {{ end }}
       
-      {{/* Author information using standard meta topics instead of article:author */}}
+      {{/* Author information using standard meta topics instead of interview:author */}}
       {{ with .Params.narrator }}
       <meta name="author" content="{{ . }}" />
       {{ end }}
@@ -78,6 +78,24 @@
     
     <!-- CSS Styles -->
     {{ partial "css.html" . }}
+
+
+    <!-- Matomo -->
+    <script>
+      var _paq = window._paq = window._paq || [];
+      /* tracker methods like "setCustomDimension" should be called before "trackPageView" */
+      _paq.push(['trackPageView']);
+      _paq.push(['enableLinkTracking']);
+      (function() {
+        var u="https://analytics.medlab.host/";
+        _paq.push(['setTrackerUrl', u+'matomo.php']);
+        _paq.push(['setSiteId', '8']);
+        var d=document, g=d.createElement('script'), s=d.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
+        g.async=true; g.src=u+'matomo.js'; s.parentNode.insertBefore(g,s);
+      })();
+    </script>
+    <!-- End Matomo Code -->
+
   </head>
   <body class="">
     {{ partial "header.html" . }}

layouts/_default/single.html

@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 {{ define "main" }}
-    <article class="single-default">
+    <interview class="single-default">
       <header class="mb-8 wompum-container wompum-container--wide-gap aspect-3/1 md:aspect-4/1">
         <div class="wompum-grid" data-text="{{ .Params.wompum | default .Title }}" data-columns="7" data-rows="5"></div>
       </header>
@@ -15,5 +15,5 @@
           {{ end }}
         {{ end }}
       </div>
-    </article>
+    </interview>
 {{ end }}

layouts/_default/taxonomy.html

@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@
 </header>
 <main class="flex flex-wrap container mx-auto justify-center">
   <ul class="flex flex-col md:gap-4 gap-16 w-full mb-16 mt-4">
-    {{ partial "article-list.html" (dict "Pages" .Data.Pages) }}
+    {{ partial "interview-list.html" (dict "Pages" .Data.Pages) }}
   </ul>
   
   {{ if gt (len (index .Site.Taxonomies .Data.Singular)) 1 }}

layouts/index.html

@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 {{ define "main" }}
 <main class="flex flex-col md:flex-row gap-4 md:gap-8 lg:gap-16 justify-around mt-8 max-w-screen-xl mx-auto">
   <ul class="flex flex-col md:gap-4 gap-16 w-full mb-16">
-    {{ partial "article-list.html" (dict "Pages" (where .Site.RegularPages "Section" "articles")) }}
+    {{ partial "interview-list.html" (dict "Pages" (where .Site.RegularPages "Section" "interviews")) }}
   </ul>
 
   <aside class="max-w-prose md:w-1/4 flex flex-col gap-8 mb-8">

layouts/interviews/single.html

@@ -1,11 +1,11 @@
 {{ define "main" }}
     
-    <article class="single-article">
+    <article class="single-interview">
 
-      <header class="mb-4 wompum-container wompum-container--wide-gap aspect-2/1 md:aspect-3/1">{{ partial "article-wompum.html" . }}</header>
+      <header class="mb-4 wompum-container wompum-container--wide-gap aspect-2/1 md:aspect-3/1">{{ partial "interview-wompum.html" . }}</header>
 
       <div class="flex md:flex-row flex-col gap-4 mt-4">
-        <aside class="md:sticky md:top-24 md:h-screen lg:w-1/3 p-4 font-iosevka">
+        <aside class="md:sticky md:top-24 md:h-screen p-4 font-iosevka">
           {{ $headshot := resources.GetMatch (printf "**/%s" (strings.TrimPrefix "/" .Params.headshot)) }}
           {{ if and .Params.headshot $headshot }}
           <div class="narrator__container -mt-24" data-text="{{ .Params.narrator }}">
@@ -17,17 +17,22 @@
             ) }}
           </div>
           {{ end }}
-          <div class="md:block hidden">{{ partial "article-metadata.html" . }}</div>
+          <div class="md:block hidden">{{ partial "interview-metadata.html" . }}</div>
         </aside>
-        <div class="prose lg:prose-xl dark:prose-invert lg:w-2/3 p-4 mx-auto md:mx-0">
-          <p class="font-bold text-4xl article-title article-title--single">{{ partial "article-title" . }}</p>
+        <div class="prose-xl max-w-prose dark:prose-invert p-4 mx-auto">
+          <p class="font-bold text-4xl interview-title interview-title--single">{{ partial "interview-title" . }}</p>
+          <p class="text-2xl">{{ .Params.summary }}</p>
+          <div class="wompum-container wompum-container--no-gap h-1">
+            <div class="wompum-grid" data-text="{{ .Params.summary }}" data-columns="12" data-rows="1">
+            </div>
+          </div>
           {{ .Content }}
         </div>
-        <aside class="md:hidden block p-8 mt-8 border-t border-gray-200">{{ partial "article-metadata.html" . }}</aside>
+        <aside class="md:hidden block p-8 mt-8 border-t border-gray-200">{{ partial "interview-metadata.html" . }}</aside>
       </div>
     </article>
     <aside class="max-w-screen-xl mx-auto">
-      {{ partial "related-articles" (dict "page" . "topics" .Params.topics "limit" 3) }}
+      {{ partial "related-interviews" (dict "page" . "topics" .Params.topics "limit" 3) }}
     </aside>
     <div class="text-center my-12"><a href="/">Go Home</a></div>
-{{ end }}
+{{ end }}

layouts/partials/article-title.html

@@ -1,3 +0,0 @@
-{{- if and .Params.narrator .Params.subject -}}
-    <span class="article-title__narrator">{{- .Params.narrator }}</span> <span class="article-title__subject">{{ .Params.subject -}}</span>
-{{- end -}}

layouts/partials/header.html

@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 <!-- basic header partial in hugo with just home and about -->
 <header class="flex flex-col mb-4">
-  <div class="flex justify-between items-center p-4">
+  <div class="flex justify-between gap-4 items-center p-4">
     <h1 class="text-2xl font-bold">
       <a href="/">{{ .Site.Title }}</a>
     </h1>

layouts/partials/interview-list.html

@@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
 {{- end -}}
 <li class="group flex md:flex-row flex-col md:gap-4 gap-2 md:items-center">
   <div class="flex-1 min-w-0 flex gap-2 items-center h-full">
-    <a class="wompum-container h-full aspect-7/2 md:aspect-auto" href="{{ $page.RelPermalink }}">{{ partial "article-wompum.html" $page }}</a>
+    <a class="wompum-container h-full aspect-7/2 md:aspect-auto" href="{{ $page.RelPermalink }}">{{ partial "interview-wompum.html" $page }}</a>
     <time class="text-gray-800 dark:text-sand-500 font-iosevka w-12 flex-shrink-0" datetime="{{ $page.Date.Format "2006-01-02" }}">
       <p>{{ $page.Date.Format "Jan" }}</p>
       <p>{{ $page.Date.Format "02" }}</p>
@@ -14,7 +14,7 @@
     </time>
   </div>
   <div class="flex flex-col gap-2 md:w-3/5 flex-shrink-0 md:py-8">
-    <a class="article-title article-title--list" href="{{ $page.RelPermalink }}">{{ partial "article-title" $page }}</a>
+    <a class="interview-title interview-title--list" href="{{ $page.RelPermalink }}">{{ partial "interview-title" $page }}</a>
     {{ if $page.Params.location }}
     <p class="light:text-gray-800 dark:text-sand-100 italic">{{ $page.Params.location }}</p>
     {{ end }}

layouts/partials/interview-title.html

@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+{{- if and .Params.narrator .Params.subject -}}
+    <span class="interview-title__narrator">{{- .Params.narrator }}</span> <span class="interview-title__subject">{{ .Params.subject -}}</span>
+{{- end -}}

layouts/partials/interview-wompum.html

@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-<div class="wompum-article-grid"
+<div class="wompum-interview-grid"
      data-metadata="{{ dict "narrator" .Params.narrator "subject" .Params.subject "facilitator" .Params.facilitator | jsonify }}"
      data-columns="7"
      data-rows="5">

layouts/partials/related-articles.html

@@ -1,40 +0,0 @@
-{{- $topics := .topics -}}
-{{- $limit := default 3 .limit -}}
-{{- $currentPath := .page.RelPermalink -}}
-
-{{- $related := where (where site.RegularPages "Type" "articles") "RelPermalink" "!=" $currentPath -}}
-{{- $matchingArticles := slice -}}
-
-{{/* First try to find articles with matching topics */}}
-{{- range $related -}}
-    {{- $matches := 0 -}}
-    {{- range .Params.topics -}}
-        {{- if in $topics . -}}
-            {{- $matches = add $matches 1 -}}
-        {{- end -}}
-    {{- end -}}
-    {{- if gt $matches 0 -}}
-        {{- $matchingArticles = $matchingArticles | append (dict "page" . "matches" $matches) -}}
-    {{- end -}}
-{{- end -}}
-
-{{/* If we found matching articles, sort by number of matching topics */}}
-{{- $finalArticles := slice -}}
-{{- if gt (len $matchingArticles) 0 -}}
-    {{- $finalArticles = first $limit (sort $matchingArticles "matches" "desc") -}}
-{{- else -}}
-    {{/* Fallback to showing other articles sorted by date */}}
-    {{- $finalArticles = first $limit (sort $related "Date" "desc") -}}
-{{- end -}}
-
-{{- if gt (len $finalArticles) 0 -}}
-<div class="related-articles flex flex-wrap gap-4">
-    <h2 class="title text-3xl font-bold">Related Articles</h2>
-    <div class="wompum-container wompum-container--no-gap">
-        <div class="wompum-grid" data-text="Related Articles" data-columns="8" data-rows="1"></div>
-    </div>
-    <ul class="flex flex-col gap-4 w-full">
-      {{ partial "article-list" (dict "Pages" $finalArticles) }}
-    </ul>
-</div>
-{{- end -}}

layouts/partials/related-interviews.html

@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@
+{{- $topics := .topics -}}
+{{- $limit := default 3 .limit -}}
+{{- $currentPath := .page.RelPermalink -}}
+
+{{- $related := where (where site.RegularPages "Type" "interviews") "RelPermalink" "!=" $currentPath -}}
+{{- $matchingInterviews := slice -}}
+
+{{/* First try to find interviews with matching topics */}}
+{{- range $related -}}
+    {{- $matches := 0 -}}
+    {{- range .Params.topics -}}
+        {{- if in $topics . -}}
+            {{- $matches = add $matches 1 -}}
+        {{- end -}}
+    {{- end -}}
+    {{- if gt $matches 0 -}}
+        {{- $matchingInterviews = $matchingInterviews | append (dict "page" . "matches" $matches) -}}
+    {{- end -}}
+{{- end -}}
+
+{{/* If we found matching interviews, sort by number of matching topics */}}
+{{- $finalInterviews := slice -}}
+{{- if gt (len $matchingInterviews) 0 -}}
+    {{- $finalInterviews = first $limit (sort $matchingInterviews "matches" "desc") -}}
+{{- else -}}
+    {{/* Fallback to showing other interviews sorted by date */}}
+    {{- $finalInterviews = first $limit (sort $related "Date" "desc") -}}
+{{- end -}}
+
+{{- if gt (len $finalInterviews) 0 -}}
+<div class="related-interviews flex flex-wrap gap-4">
+    <h2 class="title text-3xl font-bold">Related Interviews</h2>
+    <div class="wompum-container wompum-container--no-gap">
+        <div class="wompum-grid" data-text="Related Interviews" data-columns="8" data-rows="1"></div>
+    </div>
+    <ul class="flex flex-col gap-4 w-full">
+      {{ partial "interview-list" (dict "Pages" $finalInterviews) }}
+    </ul>
+</div>
+{{- end -}}

layouts/partials/wompum-demo.html

@@ -1,7 +1,8 @@
 <div class="wompum-demo max-w-2xl mx-auto">
-  <h2 class="text-2xl font-bold mb-4">Wampum Grid Protocol</h2>
+  <h2 class="text-2xl font-bold mb-4">What are the color grids?</h2>
 
-  <p>The color scheme on this website is inspired by <em><a href="http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/ws63912f5dd-e703-4759-8c31-33ac98b3c190">Constitutional Wampum</a></em> by Robert Houle. The site uses the following protocol to generate the colorful wampum style grid.</p>
+  <p>The color scheme on this website is inspired by <em><a href="http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/ws63912f5dd-e703-4759-8c31-33ac98b3c190">Constitutional Wampum</a></em> by Robert Houle. This is a tribute to the convergence in that work between the long legacy of political protocol-building through wampum belts in Indigenous communities of North America and a pixelated aesthetic that evokes life in the digital world. In the concept of protocol, the ancient practices and recent technologies converge.</p>
+  <p>The site uses the following protocol to generate the colorful wampum style grid.</p>
   
   <div class="mb-8">
     <label class="block mb-2">Enter text to generate a grid:</label>