Albert R Carter

Building a Carshare

2026-07-15T00:00:00+02:00

Do you want a shared car, or do you want to share your car?

I recently re-structured a car sharing group, together with 9 other people and two vehicles. I can now drive a car as much as I like for less than I would have otherwise pay to own one. It is also a nicer car than I would otherwise have been willing to afford. While there are sometimes issues with availability, these will resolve themselves as the group grows.

In the process, I designed a fee structure and incentives for our group. This was surprisingly difficult and is arguably one of the largest barriers to grassroots shared mobility. To encourage more car sharing, I'd like to remove this burden from your shoulders and share my results with you.

Here is the system in short. Later, I'll go into the details of why car sharing is a good thing and why our group is designed this way.

tl;dr: Members either deposit money (becoming joint owners who set fees and policy) or pay yearly interest on a deposit to secure access. Everyone pays per kilometer driven; "regular" members also pay a monthly fee in exchange for a lower per-km rate. There are no hourly fees, as availability is governed by social norms, not a booking price.

The Why

Personally, I didn't much care for cars. What I do care about is going to the mountains to hike with friends. I do want to go to the gym or to social events when the weather is bad and the busses aren't reasonable. And I would like the flexibility of looking for work away from transit or my home.

The answer to these desires is to have a car, but that want, for me, is tinged with guilt. While cars themselves can be beautiful, the roads they require are gray and lifeless, and it's impossible for me to look away from the environmental destruction of burning gasoline, shedding tire particles, and paving over forests, rivers, and meadows to build roads and parking lots.

They're also expensive, depreciating assets. Ethics aside, I don't like opening my wallet for financially dubious purchases.

Car shares, by contrast, take cars off the road and can help transition people to less-destructive electric cars.

In short, the same quirks of my values system that put me off from car ownership encouraged me to be involved with car shares.

Financial Structure

With car sharing, I drive for roughly 20% of what ownership would cost. You can expect similar savings of 40-80% depending on your region.

Members pay either deposits or interest on deposits. Some "regular" members also pay a monthly fee. All members pay a fee for the distance they drive. Fuel (gas or electric) is paid by the organization. There is no hourly fee for car use, as availability is governed by social norms.

Our system is set to Dutch prices. The costs in your area will vary greatly. For US readers, here are rough conversions as of Summer 2026, at $1.14 per €1:

Deposit: €2000 → $2280
- Interest on deposit (7.5%): €150 → $171
Monthly fee (regular): €33 → ~$38
Monthly fee (irregular): €0 → $0
Driving cost (regular): €0.20/km → $0.37/mi
Driving cost (irregular): €0.37/km → $0.68/mi

Deposits & Ownership

Deposits are set at €2,000 because this is slightly less than what someone might spend on a cheap used car. Nicer used cars cost around €10,000, or 5 deposits.

Non-depositors still pay a yearly fee: 7.5% of the deposit price, or €150, the lowest bank-rate car loan. These fees either go into the general budget or, if needed, can be converted into an additional €2,000 deposit from a member, used to buy a car. The depositer then receives €150 of credit toward fees or driving. I've deposited twice, which effectively gives me a a €150 yearly discount on driving.

Depositors receive their deposit back one year after the next July 1 or January 1st when they leave the group. This structure keeps depositors financially accountable: since they're joint owners, they're incentivized to keep fees sustainable and only admit safe drivers.

Monthly Fees

"Regular" members pay a monthly fee of €33. "Irregular" members drive infrequently and skip the monthly fee in exchange for a higher per-km rate, discussed below. They must still pay a deposit or interest on one to secure access.

The monthly fee covers fixed costs: insurance, regular maintenance, and excise tax. The Netherlands' monthly excise tax varies by weight and emissions, from €38 for small two-seaters to €150 for SUVs. At €33/month, regular members always pay less for shared access than they would for their own car.

Driving Fees

Regular members pay €0.20/km; irregular members pay €0.37/km. In a gas car, €0.23/km roughly covers fuel, tires, and oil changes; for our electric car, driving costs closer to €0.10/km. The surplus funds depreciation and irregular maintenance. Our one gas-powered car carries a €0.10 surcharge per km, making its driving cost €0.30/km (regular) or €0.47/km (irregular).

Gas and electricity are more expensive in the Netherlands than in most of the US, so the driving fee would likely be lower for a US-based group.

Price comparison with car ownership

Car owners tend to ignore the indirect expenses that make up most of what car ownership actually costs. People put insurance and tax bills on autopay and try to avoid thinking about them. Drivers imagine repairs as unlucky, unbudgeted surprises rather than a predictable per-km cost. Depreciation is the worst-ignored of all: the cost is paid up front, but owners tend to act as if a car's value holds steady until they sell it at a loss (typically 50-70% of its value, or €5,000 to €7,000 lost of a €10,000 car).

The result: Many car owners feel that a 50-80% discount on driving is too expensive and stick with their own cars, despite ownership costing twice to five times as much.

Our pricing model is built to make that contrast unavoidable, while staying sustainable in the long-term.

Costs	Carshare Electric Car	Private Ownership of a gas car
Deposit vs Purchase/Lease	€2000 deposit or €150/year	€2500 (cheap used car) or €150/month (lease)
Monthly Fee vs Fixed Costs	€33/month	€50 (tax) + €70 (insurance) + €50 (maintenance) = €170/month
Driving/km	€0.20	€0.17 (gas) + €0.03 (tires) + €0.02 (depreciation) + €0.05 (wear) = €0.27
Yearly Deposit Depreciation vs Car Depreciation	None	€500+/year, or up to 70% over the car's life

How Our Group Actually Started

Our group didn't start from scratch. We inherited an existing car share with two member-contributed cars and no deposit system. One of the two owners was leaving, partly for personal reasons and partly because the arrangement never made financial sense for him: he wasn't compensated for depreciation, was absorbing higher maintenance costs, and the inconvenience wasn't worth it. Losing him would have left the group with only one aging car. This forcing event was a more effective argument for adopting deposits than any pricing spreadsheet I could have built.

It still took about three months to get buy-in and implement the system; existing members were understandably reluctant to trade artificially low fees for a system that asked them to pay a deposit and higher fees. Three new members, myself included, joined partly because we wanted access to a newer, non-manual, non-gas car that the old arrangement couldn't offer. About 60% of the original members stayed; the rest were replaced.

One frequent driver was requested not to rejoin: the old system had no mechanism to address safety concerns about him, but the new depositors, now with real money on the line, did. All told, the redesign took nine months from the time I started working on it until the new system was actually running.

Problems Once You're Running

Availability

Cars are not always available, which diminishes the appeal for high-frequency or emergency users. This has led us, initially, to underprice membership to attract new members while the fleet is still small.

This necessitates a low-cost membership strategy to drive early adoption—a constraint that persists until the fleet reaches sufficient scale.

Solution: The budget balances if members drive somewhat more than they currently do. We adopted a 4:1 member-to-car ratio for the first three cars, allowing enough members to keep utilization high, but not so many that booking a car becomes difficult. We finance this temporarily by not saving enough to offset depreciation. Reaching five cars should resolve availability issues for good; at that point, the fleet will become dense enough for regular commuter use, and per-km fees should recoup the losses.

Special-Needs Cars

People often have specific vehicle needs: long commutes, messy children, dogs, tow hitches, long-distance trips, etc. A small shared fleet cannot cater to all of these requirements.

Solution: We've prioritized more expensive, general-purpose vehicles first and plan to specialize later. Our electric VW ID.3 cost more than we'd have liked (€13,750), but it seats even our tallest member and can drive nearly anywhere in the Netherlands and back on a single charge. It is general-purpose enough to cover most needs until the fleet is large enough to add specialized cars. We expect to add a shorter-range Nissan Leaf next, in the early fall.

Frequent Drivers

The group's fees are paid partially by per-km fees. As a result, the group needs frequent drivers. Some potential frequent drivers have offered extra money, usually as additional deposits, to secure more reliable access. We have struggled to price this fairly: guaranteeing availability on short notice is hard regardless of what someone is willing to deposit.

Solution: For members who want near-exclusive access to a specific car, I hope to offer proprietary access for an added fee—a short-term bridge until we reach five cars. Once specialty vehicles are reliably available without reservation, we expect demand for this fee to fade on its own.

These are working assumptions, not proven outcomes. For updates, please get in touch via the contact form.

Problems Before You Start

Existing Car Sharing

When starting a car share, the first problem you are likely to face is competition from private owners sharing their cars at below-market rates. No one wants to join a car share if their neighbor allows them to drive for just the cost of gas.

The ideal solution is getting private owners to band together into a group. A more realistic one is showing the car owners what they're actually paying versus what they're charging, and asking them to raise their rates. (We are in the process of convincing one such owner to sell us his car, the aforementioned Nissan Leaf; the neighbor who has been borrowing it will likely have to join as a member.)

Existing commercial car-sharing services in our area, by contrast, have not presented much competition. They tend to feel expensive and inconvenient: the companies here charge €0.40 to €0.80/km, €2 to €8/hour, and €0 to €50/month, with too few cars per member, often parked in scattered, hard-to-predict spots. Much of that cost disparity is a result of their financing structure. Our group buys used cars, keeping capital requirements low, and our deposit system means we finance them at €2,000 per driver at 0% interest. Commercial services work with new or third-party leased cars and have to pass those higher financing costs on to drivers via per-km fees.

Who actually joins a car share (and who doesn't)

There is a predictable set of user flows that work against car shares. Understanding these flows explains why, despite the clear price advantage, so few people join:

People who have money and want a car just buy one. The car share's cost advantage doesn't register if ownership was never a financial question for them.
People who can't comfortably afford a car experience sticker shock at car-share pricing. This is because deposits and monthly fees are visible costs, while the true cost of ownership is not. Not understanding the indirect costs they would incur to own a car, these people often buy "cheap" cars anyway. This is, sadly and invariably, more expensive than sharing one.
People who only rarely need a car default to asking a neighbor for a favor and have little reason to organize anything more formal.

The moment any of these people buy a car, they stop being a candidate for your group. What's left is a smaller, more specific pool: people who are ideologically motivated (they care about transit or the environment) or financially motivated (ownership genuinely isn't within reach).

This also means the time commitment of building a group falls on this self-selected group. It took me three months to secure agreement for my new car-sharing financial structure and implement it. Including designing the financial structure, it took a total of nine months from when I started redesigning the system to when it was actually running on the new terms. If you're doing this alongside a full-time job, plan for that timeline rather than a weekend project.

How to Start a Car Share

In practice, many car-sharing groups begin with one or two people sharing personal vehicles and dissolve when the owners realize they're not being compensated for time, depreciation, or upkeep. Ours nearly did – one of the two original owners in my group left for exactly these reasons.

The best way to build a sustainable group is to find people who are ideologically or financially motivated, and to make the true cost of ownership clear before anyone starts splitting costs. In practice, forcing events are more effective than spreadsheets and persuasion. Our transition to deposits happened not because members were convinced by a pricing argument, but because losing a car made the alternative (one aging vehicle, or none) unavoidably worse than paying in.

If you're a car owner who wants to help your community, the most direct path is to offer your neighbors a pricing structure that works for them (see above), pool cars with another owner, and eventually "sell" your car to the group while continuing to use it.

If you don't own a car, your path is harder, but not closed. Buying one and building a pool around it is the most direct route. Failing that, look for an existing group, even an informal one between neighbors, and offer to join as a paying member; the existence of even one motivated newcomer is often what pushes a shaky arrangement toward a real structure.

Summary

Do you want a shared car, or do you want to share your car? Either path gets you there, but the second one is harder to walk alone. If you want to start a car share, the main obstacles you'll face are finding people, finding a car, and building a pricing structure that survives contact with reality. I hope this post helps with all three. The numbers, at least, are now yours to steal.

As an extra gift, you can also work from a copy of this spreadsheet.

Good luck, and let me know how it goes through my contact form.

A Bank.Green Recap

2025-03-01T00:00:00+01:00

Being good at doing good

Say you've just graduated college, bright, starry-eyed, and passionate about doing good in the world. Your first move may be to join a mission-driven organization where you'll spend a few years working on issues you care about, maybe visiting an orphanage or two, maybe surviving a burnout, and eventually deciding to get a lower-stress job that pays. At the paying job, you'll develop your professional skills and eventually begin to suspect that back in your 20s, while you did your best to, do good," you could have probably done better. You have a career/mortgage/kids now, and you determine that the best way for you to make a change is either to donate money to better charities or to focus on your family and the people around you. Maybe you'll pick up your word-changing dreams when you retire.

At least that's how the do-good career cycle often goes.

I spent the last decade and a half trying to reverse that cycle.¹ Instead of jumping straight to mission-driven work, I used well-paid but often meaningless-feeling work to build my hard skills and a retirement fund, embraced a thrifty lifestyle, and only recently began doing mission-driven work.

Then, during the pandemic in 2021, with the financial means to (mostly) sustain myself and the skills to make an impact, I created a nonprofit. (It launched with this blog post, also by yours truly.) In 2023, I joined it full-time. In 2024, I started earning consulting fees from my co-founder's largesse, and later, a grant.

I did it! At least, the quitting-meaningless-work first part of, "it." Maybe, "it," can also count as the second part, building-a-mission-driven-org. The jury is still out on the making-actual-change third part.

Unfortunately, I've also reached an age where few of my friends talk about their work. This feels unfair since it's only recently that I've begun thinking that work is worth talking about. Moreover, discussing my work with others might lead them to point out lapses in my thinking or obvious mistakes I'm making.

Fortunately, in this email list, I have an interested audience. Here's some more about my work. I'd love your helpful pointers and suggestions, large and small. Maybe I can even inspire you to use your own life to make the change that would make your 18-year-old self proud.

Bank.Green as a lever, banks as a fulcrum

Bank.Green is the organization that I co-founded. It uses technology and law to decrease fossil fuel financing, ultimately benefitting the climate. It also boasts skilled professionals (developers, designers, data scientists, marketers, accountants, and lawyers) from the global north and global south, all of who volunteer for Bank.Green because they believe it's the best use of their time.

If banks are a fulcrum for change² ³, then technology, law, and finance are all parts of a lever. And like all tools, levers often need to be assembled by pros. At Bank.Green, we're trying to build one long enough to move the world.

What Bank.Green actually does

On the surface, Bank.Green rates banks on how climate-friendly they are and encourages consumers to switch to greener alternatives, having moved significantly more than $40 million so far.

Bank switching is an important and visible part of our work but it isn't even close to everything. Aside from bank switching, we coordinate with other groups on media campaigns to raise awareness of fossil banks, create writing campaigns for people to contact bank employees, and work with law firms, journalists, and regulators to expose when banks violate their policies.

At Bank.Green, while accountants design and execute our bank ratings methodology, software developers create interfaces to speed up the rating process, publish, and otherwise use the results. Content writers and partnership managers publicize bank ratings on social media and through partnerships. Meanwhile, data scientists use large language models to understand bank policies, allowing them to find policy breaches that are analyzed by accountants and lawyers before sometimes being passed to journalists and regulators. There are currently 40 volunteers reporting to me, of 62 total active volunteers.

Our campaigns are having a significant impact in the UK. This year, we're working to expand them to the Anglosphere, Europe, [South]East Asia, and Oceania. Other ongoing projects include statistically rigorous measurements of our impact, publishing datasets on bank sustainability policies and practices, and expanding our rating to insurance.

Though Bank.Green doesn't generate revenues, from the outside it looks more like a tech startup than a nonprofit. We have a modern website with well-designed user flows.⁴ Decisions are made in small semi-autonomous teams. And everything is always in the process of being automated.

Never ending fundraising

Fundraising, however, is a constant struggle. Awareness raising and bank switch campaigns are hard to quantify and therefore are hard to fundraise for. The first prerequisite of being a funder is having money. This often implies that funders have been successful at working within the financial system, not necessarily that they have thoughtful ideas or plans for how to change it ⁵

What's more, nonprofit funders rarely seem to understand automation. Automation often means software, and software means uncertainty and overhead.⁶ I'm sometimes frustrated that foundations seem willing to fund armies of low-productivity interns (who perhaps remind them of their younger starry-eyed selves) but don't want to fund software that can better do those interns' jobs.

Next Steps

I've worked on this project for four years. Also, during different parts of those years, I've been a full-time private sector employee, done other contract work, and been a major part of an eco-village. Bank.Green is taking an incredible amount of my time and once/if it gets more funding, it will be able to stand on its own feet. I'm now interested in switching some of my attention to other projects.

In the field of financial environmental activism, I'm interested in exploring ways to use corporate governance structures to create leverage for the energy transition. Unlike most people in the financial industry, I look at corporate governance through the lenses of technology and environmental leverage. Because I'm not financially interested, some regulations seem not to apply. What's more, unlike most of the middle-class and tame people in the nonprofit space, I'm open to taking confrontational approaches in boardroom battles.⁷ There's more leverage to be had here, and I think that with the right partners, I could play those games well.

Please do feel free to put me in touch with others whom you think might be interested.

This was deliberate but also determined by extenuating circumstances including a bad financial market and a very brief post-college stint where I joined an environmental organization in a paid capacity, quickly realizing that my time there would not be well spent. ↩
Banks are a critical point of leverage in the climate transition as they provide or underwrite much of the capital that's essential to the energy industry. Somewhere between half and 84% of all fossil fuel financing is provided by banks. The numbers are undoubtedly higher for renewable energy, as it's even more capital-intensive. ↩
Insurers, pension funds, and asset managers are other fulcrums, though we're only beginning to work on insurers this year. ↩
We don't, for example, publish comparison "league" tables buried in the middle sections of PDFs, as many other nonprofits do, a practice that I'm convinced has as much to do with a general lack of technical expertise in the space as with PDFs being an industry-standard mode of communication. ↩
Funders that made money in finance are some of the best partners because they understand a proximal discipline. The potential funders who don't have experience in finance, law, or technology are typically the most difficult to speak with. Imagine if you were a startup company and had to explain to potential funders what hockey stick diagrams represent. ↩
My impression is that funders can't assess uncertainty in technology. As someone working in the field, I can safely estimate that a project, for example, our LLM automated breach monitoring project, might have a 70% chance of success with a 95% chance of producing some useful byproducts. Funders have no such certainty, so, seemingly, prefer to fund two interns to monitor one bank for one year than spend the same amount of money to fund software with an excellent chance of monitoring 60 banks for the next five years. Even worse, software development seems to count as operational overhead to many funders, further causing them to avoid it. ↩
I've gotten some experience with another boardroom battle at my local living group. A review of boardroom battles shows that the tactics seem quite similar. That particular project is a conversation for another time. ↩

Structure and Governance for Intentional Communities

2023-08-09T00:00:00+02:00

I was recently involved in designing a governance structure for the intentional ecological community in which I live. This is an overview of that structure followed by a translated and heavily edited version of the structure itself.

Edit from June 2026, roughly 3 years after publication: This structure continues to function well within my community with only minor modifications. We have recently completed the process of updating our statutes to be more compatible with the described structure. I consider this a success.

For context, the eco-village is about 90 multi-generational mostly low-income people (60-ish adults) with separately doored apartments and houses living in the suburbs of a small Dutch city. We're integrated into our greater community through work, friendships, hobbies, and utility grids and intend to stay that way. Our roofs are covered in solar panels and also collect rain water for the washing machines and the garden. Our buildings' insulation lowers the heating bills and keeps our homes warm and toasty in the winter. There are many communal spaces including a big regenerative garden, fruit forest, large kitchen, community pantry, meeting + music rooms, a wood shop + bicycle shed, trampoline, hammock, guest room, outdoor pizza oven, chickens, and a sauna. We also share vehicles and many smaller things through a chat group. One of our missions is to encourage people to organize other intentional communities.

The land and buildings are owned and was developed by the local public-private housing corporation and the community, a nonprofit entity, and has a 30-year lease on it.

The neighborhood we're in is mostly suburban cookie-cutter market-price new housing and I believe that one of the requirements of new construction was that it come with a certain amount of affordable housing. While people often think that affordable housing will bring down their property values, affordable eco housing seems to have an entirely different ring to it.

At the moment, the neighbors, who are mostly recent transplants to this newly developed area, are generally pleased that we provide a beautiful garden and pseudo-public spaces and events that break the region's monotony. The developer and municipality, meanwhile, are happy to unload property management duties onto us as long as the actual public spaces stay open to the public. Though both the developer and municipality have provided some levels of financial support, from their perspectives, this remains a cost saving measure that generates positive externalities.

After 30 years, the developer will own one of the more beautiful pieces of land in the area, bordering a municipally owned fruit forest. It's unclear whether the developer will renew the lease and if so, under what terms, but that's a problem for another time.

The initial impetus for this new governance structure was the collapse of our all-important, "middle circle," driven by the simultaneous resignation of all but one of its members. Resigning members cited personal burnout, unclear vision, and structural issues within our system of governance.

I was part of the resulting working group to propose a new community vision and structure and was most involved with the structural side of the group. To this end, we identified problems by extensively surveying the community, both in written form and through a series of community gatherings. This led us to identify the problems in our (now former) structure as well as potential solutions:

Problems

Our previous consent-based sociocratic decision-making system presented a number of problems that people familiar with intentional communities will immediately recognize:

Slow, convoluted, and haphazard processes that tended to push decisions to the highest possible levels
A general lack of accountability
Individuals' ability to block governance activities at inopportune times
A relative lack of punishment mechanisms for misbehavior
An inability to justly determine active and inactive community members
An inability to prioritize projects

Solutions

Our overarching goal in proposing a new organizational system was to make it easier to work within the community structure than to work around it. The design criteria we formed our new governance structure around are as follows:

Separate consent based policymaking powers from representation and mandate based decision-making powers
Make decision-making fast, pushing it to the lowest possible structural levels
Establish a periodic process for prioritizing and understanding trade-offs between projects
Ensuring everyone's voice is heard

Separating rule making and decision-making

In a living community, there are very few sorts of graduated sanctions (punishments) that we were able to apply for misbehavior or misdeeds. Eviction, the most formal punishment mechanism available, is only usable in the most egregious of circumstances. Minor punishments like doing chores or being excluded from social spaces can breed resentment. What's more, the person being punished may not comply. As a result, the most common form of punishment is directing anger at the perpetrator. This sometimes works as a deterrent but does little post-facto good.

The result is that in order for rules to be universally followed, they must first be universally agreed upon.

Separating rule making from decision-making allowed us to ensure consent for new rules, but put decision-making processes into a separate faster-track process.

Decision-making at lower levels of power

Decision-making power, unlike rule-making power, is often best delegated to representatives and expert groups. Decision-making groups, "CIRCLES," in the document below, can have clearly delineated boundaries. This allows groups to make decisions and take actions without external input or kicking the problem up to higher levels.

Periodic prioritization

Without a clear distinction between contributors and non-contributors to our communal spaces, we instead devised a low barrier to entry on-ramp for our non-active members.

This periodic event also helps community members prioritize and understand the trade-offs between different projects.

Electing Representatives

Representatives in this system are rarely asked to make decisions. Their purpose is largely to interpret rules and mediate between decision-making groups.

We use ranked choice voting, also known as instant-runoff voting, to elect representatives. This helps members elect to consensus candidates while also ensuring that minority voices are heard.

Applications of this structure

I estimate that this governance model can would work well for intentional communities of 50 to 400 adults. With some modification, it might scale to between 30 and 1000. The structure was passed by unanimous consent within my community and I believe that it's vastly superior to the sociocratic structure that we previously had.

I've included a translated and heavily edited version of our new governance structure below and hope that this can help your community. Editorialization is in italics.

Our structure, in addition to being adopted before resolving some issues, had to be converted into a series of amendments to existing Dutch legal documents. The edited and translated version is much easier to read, even with the typos... Sorry about those.

People who want help designing their own structure or adopting this one can contact me at [first two letters of my first name][followed by the at sign][followed by this domain of this website].

STRUCTURE AND ORGANIZATIONS WITHIN THE COMMUNITY

THE COMMUNITY governance is composed of 1) a BOARD, 2) self-managing CIRCLES and WORKING GROUPS) 3. PROCESS SUPERVISORS, 4) periodic COMMUNITY DAYS, and 5) General Members' Meetings (GMMs).

In principle, policymaking is based on community-wide consent while decision-making is based on mandates. PROCESS SUPERVISORS help interpret mandates. THE BOARD may, in specific circumstances, override mandates and existing community rules to quickly make decisions. COMMUNITY DAYS function as periodic community touch-points for project prioritization.

1. GOVERNANCE AND THE BOARD

The General Members Meeting (GMM) elects 4 BOARD members, including a TREASURER and a CHAIRPERSON, for a term of 2 years. BOARD members are limited to two consecutive terms, after which they must not serve on THE BOARD for one year until running for re-election again. Two BOARD members are elected per year to ensure continuity.

The TREASURER works closely with the finance CIRCLE and the administration WORKING GROUP.

THE TASKS OF THE BOARD ARE:

Organizing GMMs
Encouraging CIRCLES to fulfill their mandates
Maintaining and updating an organisational chart, mandates and internal regulations
Prioritizing projects and ensuring that they are compliant with THE COMMUNITY vision and mission

In exceptional cases, the PROCESS SUPERVISORS may give THE BOARD power to make a community-wide decision on a particular topic. In these cases, THE BOARD may override mandates and community rules to make this decision. If PROCESS SUPERVISORS have given THE BOARD this power, THE BOARD must then inform THE COMMUNITY of this at the next GMM or earlier if possible, even if THE BOARD did not choose to use this power.

This structure intentionally attempts to prevent THE BOARD from making decisions whenever possible while maintaining a gated construction through which THE BOARD can still on special occasion making these decisions. In a previous structure, THE COMMUNITY found that an all-powerful BOARD led other decision-making bodies to shift responsibility up, eventually leading members of the previous construction of THE BOARD burning out and resigning en masse.

2. CIRCLES AND WORKING GROUPS

THE COMMUNITY is organized into CIRCLES. Each CIRCLE has a defined range of tasks and a mandate, given by the GMM. Within that mandate, the CIRCLES are allowed to make their own policy and decisions. When mandates are unclear or uncertain, CIRCLES may seek interpretation from PROCESS SUPERVISORS. Proposals for new CIRCLES and CIRCLE mandate changes must be submitted to the GMM, preferably in consultation with PROCESS SUPERVISORS. Any changes must be included in the organizational chart maintained by THE BOARD.

THE COMMUNITY has the following mandated CIRCLES:

facilities
housing
garden
barn
co-op (pantry)
welfare and wellbeing
communication
finance
COMMUNITY DAY facilitation
administration

Community day facilitation is technically a working group at the moment, but will likely become a CIRCLE in the future

WORKING GROUPS are groups of people who come together to work on a concrete and finite task. They may function as part of a CIRCLE, within that CIRCLE's mandate or function independently of a CIRCLE. WORKING GROUPS do not have their own community mandates. CIRCLES may block WORKING GROUPS' activities and decisions within those CIRCLES' mandates.

Each CIRCLE and WORKING GROUP has a coordinator. The coordinator is primarily the point of contact, takes responsibility for the functioning of the CIRCLE or WORKING GROUP, and maintains contact with THE BOARD. A coordinator is chosen every 2 years by the CIRCLE or WORKING GROUP.

Trust in the CIRCLE exists by virtue of information sharing. Each CIRCLE sends a delegation to each COMMUNITY DAY to report on the current themes and proposals that are being worked on. WORKING GROUPS may do the same. When a CIRCLE or WORKING GROUP's decisions affect the entire community, the CIRCLE or WORKING GROUP must seek broad support for that decision, preferably by adding an item to THE COMMUNITY weekly mail.

CIRCLES and WORKING GROUPS have little prescribed structure. They are largely self-governing and typically operate on a consensus basis. While it is possible to imagine people staging a sort of coop and maliciously declaring themselves part of a CIRCLE, given the close-knit nature of THE COMMUNITY, the coop'd CIRCLE's decisions would probably be disregarded as illegitimate and/or cause a minor constitutional crisis of sorts.

3. PROCESS SUPERVISORS

The GMM elects three PROCESS SUPERVISORS fixed terms of one year each. Only one PROCESS SUPERVISOR is elected at a time, in each of GMMs. Once a PROCESS SUPERVISOR has fulfilled their term, they may not be elected again until at least four months after their previous term has ended.

PROCESS SUPERVISORS are guardians of the mandate-driven decision-making process.

As such, they do the following:

clarify ambiguity and overlaps in CIRCLES' mandates, in consultation with the parties involved.
advise individuals and groups on how to best follow community processes, so that an initiative or proposal can be linked to sufficient support in THE COMMUNITY.
suggest changes to group mandates and process at the GMM
report on their considerations, advice, and decisions at COMMUNITY DAY

Some example advice that PROCESS SUPERVISORS might give includes the following:

to discuss a proposal with a CIRCLE
to set up a new WORKING GROUP
to organize a poll on a COMMUNITY DAY
to organize a village meeting
to bring an issue to the GMM
to implement a plan without further consultation
- PROCESS SUPERVISORS might advise this last point in cases in which an action or decision would likely have a low impact on THE COMMUNITY

In exceptional cases and on individual topics, the PROCESS SUPERVISORS may, with mutual consent, give THE BOARD the power to make overriding decisions or take actions outside THE COMMUNITY rules and mandates. (This is possible, for example, when issues cannot be discussed at COMMUNITY DAY or the GMM due to privacy legislation.) Once the PROCESS SUPERVISORS have given THE BOARD this power on an individual topic, it may not be revoked.

PROCESS SUPERVISORS work as advisors and enablers, helping individuals and groups establish their right to take certain actions or make certain decisions. This is meant to be one of the things that makes it easier for people to work through THE COMMUNITY structure than around it.

4. COMMUNITY DAY

COMMUNITY DAYS are opportunities for THE COMMUNITY to exchange information and prioritize tasks and may also contain optional trainings and workshops. They are organized and facilitated by a "facilitation" CIRCLE and take place every two months.

During a COMMUNITY DAY, CIRCLES, WORKING GROUPS, THE BOARD, and PROCESS SUPERVISORS present their actions, decisions, dilemmas, etc. Community members may ask questions and be polled regarding both their opinions on these decisions and on how to prioritize future tasks and projects. No decisions made during COMMUNITY DAYS, since this is done within CIRCLES, and in certain cases, by the GMM and THE BOARD.

At a COMMUNITY DAY, one or more facilitators from the facilitation CIRCLE ensure that everyone has their say, that there are no unnecessarily long discussions, and that it is clear how people can follow up on topics. Facilitators must share the minutes via the weekly mail within one week of the COMMUNITY DAY.

In addition to exchanging information and prioritizing tasks, COMMUNITY DAY establishes a community pulse and provides an easy on-ramp to community members who have recently been less active. A formal forum for information exchange (without decision-making) helps limit the number of topics brought to the GMM.

5. GENERAL MEMBERS' MEETING (GMM)

THE BOARD must organize at least three General Members Meeting per year, including a budget GMM meeting in November and a legally require annual GMM no later than March. Other general members' meetings are organized as often as THE BOARD or members deem necessary. THE BOARD must declare GMM and shares the agenda and related documents at least one week in advance of the meeting date.

The main goals of the GMM are 1. to change community rules and CIRCLE mandates 2. to elect BOARD members and PROCESS SUPERVISORS

Most decisions should be made via mandate outside the GMM. However, groups and individuals, in consultation with the PROCESS SUPERVISORS, may bring proposals to be decided upon at the GMM.

GMMs often have many members present but do not have a quorum, allowing THE BOARD to call and organize them as often as necessary. Because they can be long meetings, we tried to make decision-making possible to do at GMMs but preferable to do elsewhere.

6. AMENDMENT TO HOUSE RULES AND INTERNAL REGULATIONS

The articles of association of THE COMMUNITY can be amended. Changes to the internal regulations can be submitted to the GMM.

8. CONSENT BASED DECISION-MAKING AND ELECTION PROCEDURES

Decision-making takes place in using the consent method unless otherwise decided. This is true at GMMs, on THE BOARD, between PROCESS SUPERVISORS, and in CIRCLES and WORKING GROUPS.

These groups may also decide to vote in different ways. At the GMM, in order to vote in other ways, the facilitator or a PROCESS SUPERVISOR must make a proposal to do so and this proposal must be passed by consent. In smaller groups, those groups must vote with consent to change their voting structure.

Voting with consent means that a decision is only approved if no one has strong and reasoned objections. To give a vote of consent does not mean that the voter agree with everything and have no objections, but simply that they can live with the outcome. (i.e. "I think the decision is good enough for now and safe enough to try.")

Members withholding their consent votes must consider the decision and return to the next meeting improved proposals. Members who are not present at a meeting automatically give their consent.

Below are the steps for various decision-making and election processes.

The difference between voting consent and reaching consensus is real, but practically unenforceable. The best we could do was make it a cultural issue and place the burden of the next proposal upon anyone withholding their consent.

8.1 GMM CONSENT-BASED VOTING

With consent-based voting, members who do are unable to attend the meeting vote "consent" by default and cannot object. Consent-based voting can be used to make or change rules or to make decisions. Consent based voting follows the process below:

A group or individual submits a proposal can be submitted in writing in advance of a meeting, or creates a proposal at a GMM with the help of a facilitator.
Individuals ask questions. The proposal cannot proceed until the facilitator has established the group understands the proposal.
Individuals argue over the proposal and form opinions and objections.
Attendees can vote their consent or give well reasoned objections. (Non attendees may not object.)
If everyone gives their consent, the proposal is adopted.
If there is a well reasoned objection, the person or people objections objecting can raise must propose an improvement either in the current meeting or next.
This procedure is repeated until consent is reached.

8.2 GMM DEMOCRATIC VOTING

With democratic voting, members who will not be present at the meeting may another member to vote on their behalf. Democratic voting can be used to make or change rules or to make decisions. Democratic voting follows steps one to three the consent based voting.

At some point in this process, the facilitator or a member proposes a democratic election.
The democratic voting proposal must make clear what the threshold for a majority is.
The democratic voting proposal be passed by the consent based voting process if it is passed at all.
Voting is done by a show of hands or a show of hands, where one can vote 'for', 'against' or 'abstain'.
The facilitator counts all votes and announces whether a proposal has been adopted or not. This will be recorded.

Both consent-based and democratic voting are intentionally cumbersome. These formal methods of decision-making are used mostly by the GMM. In creating this, we considered consent to be necessary for rule making, since only people who consent to rules are likely to obey them. Making decision-making too easy in the GMM would lead to more decisions being taken up there, where it ultimately takes more member time. By making decision-making difficult, we try to push it to CIRCLES and WORKING GROUPS.

8.3 ELECTIONS

With elections, members who will not be present at the meeting may another member to rank candidates on their behalf. The election of BOARD members, PROCESS SUPERVISORS and CIRCLE coordinators is done with a consent round after people are selected through ranked choice voting. The steps below are used:

Agendas for a GMM and CIRCLE meetings with elections must state that election(s) will take place and have a description of the position.
Members may nominate candidates in writing, either to THE BOARD or the CIRCLE meeting. Nominations can also be passed to the facilitator upon arrival at the meeting. Nominees may withdraw their candidacy at any point in this process.
The meeting facilitator announces all nominations. A 10-minute discussion follows. Nominees may answer questions.
Individuals vote by ranking their top candidates for the position on a piece of paper and passing it to the facilitator. (Individuals rank 4 candidates if only one or two positions are being considered. They rank 5 candidates if more positions are considered.)
The election follows a standard instant runoff process:
For the 1st person, only everyone's 1st choice is considered. The person most often mentioned as 1st choice is elected. If several people are mentioned as often as 1st choice, the 2nd choice is included.
If a second person is elected for the role, the 1st and 2nd votes are added together. If several people are mentioned as often as 1st or 2nd choice, the 3rd choice is included.
If it is clear who has been chosen most often, a consent round follows.

This process actually gives disproportionate weight to minority voices, since some elections are won by multiple candidates and first choice votes often pile onto a single initial candidate and aren't spread elsewhere. That said, the minority voices that emerge still tend to be reasonable.

8.4 MEETING ROLES

For the processes at CIRCLE meetings, GMMs and COMMUNITY DAYS to run smoothly, various tasks are required. There is a facilitator, a heart keeper and a note-taker. The facilitator keeps the agenda, the time, the decision-making process, and the ways of voting. The heart-keeper is aware of whether there is enough time and energy for the entire agenda and stays attentive high, and encourages breaks if necessary. The note-taker takes a summary of the discussion and the decisions taken and then distributes the minutes via weekly mail.

If you made it all the way down here, you may be interested in designing a system of governance for your own intentional community. Feel free to contact me at [first two letters of my first name][followed by the at sign][followed by this domain of this website].

parcelLab

2022-12-31T00:00:00+01:00

Description

I worked as an engineering manager and senior developer on the data ingestion team, collecting, cleaning, and processing data from customers and carriers via files, APIs, webhooks, and scrapers.

Defunding Putins War

2022-03-20T00:00:00+01:00

Are you feeling upset but helpless as Ukraine’s war rumbles on? It might not be realistic to suddenly stop buying gas and you’re probably not in a position to pick up a gun and join the fight. And as you’ve found your way here, you were probably already concerned about climate change. How is one person supposed to confront these monumental issues?

Because of the ways that finance works, you’re not as helpless as you might feel.

It is fair to be upset, because the unfortunate fact is that your money probably provided financing for Gazprom, which is funding Putin’s bombs, which are dropping on cities and children and as you read this. That same money is also financing the climate crisis. Both are causing grain prices to spike, resulting in a food crisis that’s causing millions to go hungry, and contributing to a refugee crisis as the dominoes continue to tumble.

The following banks have all been financing Gazprom since 2016. If you have money at any of them, you inadvertently financed Gazprom and the war in Ukraine:

JPMorgan Chase, $3.6 billion USD Gazprom financing since 2016
UniCredit, $2.4 billion
Sberbank, $2.4 billion
Deutsche Bank, $1 billion
Crédit Agricole, $977 million
Intesa Sanpaolo, $356 million
BPCE/Natixis, $200 million

Source: Banking on Climate Chaos 2021 report

In more ways than one, coal, oil, and gas are destroying our world. So, what can you do?

Your first priority should be leaving any bank that gives fossil fuel loans; tell the people in your life who value your advice to do the same. Then, you should be pressuring your banks, insurers, and pension funds not to underwrite or buy fossil fuel bonds. Later, you should sell any fossil fuel bonds you have. Lastly, you should ask your insurance companies not to insure fossil fuel infrastructure. (Insurance isn’t covered in this article because Bank.Green targets – you guessed it! – banks, but this Harvard Business Review article explains more.)

I'm unable to post the full article here, but if you would like you can go to https://bank.green/blog/how-to-defund-putin to get more detail as to why some financial strategies work — and why others don’t.

If you would like to receive emails with similar pieces I write, or if you would prefer not to continue receiving list emails, please let me know at {static}/pages/contact.

Learning Dutch the Slow Way

2021-06-02T00:00:00+02:00

The world's full of pithy headlines: How to stop procrastinating. "Learn to code in 15 minutes." "7 Emails you should send every week." "How to Learn any Language in 3 Months."

They're needy. They overpromise. And they underdeliver. They always do.

This is post about learning Dutch the slow way, which is to say how people actually learn things. There are no shortcuts to language acquisition, and unlike the above headlines, I won't promise any. You will not master a language in 3 months and Herculean efforts notwithstanding, it's extremely unlikely that you will be able to speak fluently within a year. However, if you read this, you'll have a good idea on how to start with Dutch, at least.

I am not a polyglot and I do not have a natural predisposition to language learning. In language classroom settings, I'm a middling student.

However, over the past year, I have managed to teach myself A2 to B1 Dutch without attending in-person classes. I can manage every-day conversations, but often stumble with vocabulary, expressing emotions, or complex arguments. I can also read well enough to understand a cookbook. If my phone's predictive typing is on, I can compose text messages.

While learning Dutch, I've been through a fair number of tools, courses, and books. Here is a review of those tools, and advice on how to use or not use each.

LearnDutch.org

LearnDutch.org offers high quality group or solo Dutch lessons. I haven't had any desire to be on video chat more than I have to be, so have made use of the solo-learning materials, including the free vocabulary lessons and the paid grammar course (€120 for the bundle). There are other free supplemental materials on the site.

LearnDutch.org Vocab

Early in my Dutch learning experience, I completed the first 20 learndutch.org vocabulary lessons, doing roughly one a day. I also created flash cards for various vocabulary words. (In retrospect the vocabulary flash cards were a waste of effort.) I found these lessons tedious and do not think that they were the best way to learn vocabulary. However, I would still they were extremely helpful for learning how to spell and read. Spelling in Dutch more logical and consistent than spelling in English. Learning basic spelling rules allowed me to begin sounding out and reading words, which was more valuable than vocabulary lessons themselves.

LearnDutch.org Grammar

LearnDutch.org also has three courses of grammar lessons. The video lessons are well structured, well-paced, and generally of a high quality. They come with accompanying PDF slides, exercises, vocabulary lists, and tests. The largest issue I have with the grammar lessons is the relative lack of topic reinforcement throughout a course, which can make retaining knowledge difficult. I am currently working on the second of the grammar courses and strongly recommend it.

How to use LearnDutch.org

If I were to begin learning Dutch from scratch, I would complete the first 10 vocabulary lessons from learndutch.org and also purchase and work through the grammar lessons. To reinforce grammatical topics, I would create flash cards after finishing each lesson and review them before the next day's lesson. A grammar workbook might also be helpful.

Pimsleur Audiobooks

Pimsleur offers a series of Dutch language audiobooks and small accompanying vocabulary lists for \$130. It is possible to purchase the CD's second hand or borrow them from some libraries. Pimsleur claims that completing a course with them will make you conversational.

I found Pimsleur audiobooks to be slow and extremely easy. I was easilyable to listen to them while running, doing dishes, or working in the garden, and I rarely needed to pause the book or to think about my responses to the audio prompts. I felt that Pimsleur helped me become comfortable with very introductory Dutch conversation and pronunciation. By the end of the series, I was able to say things like "Hello," "I'm well." Would you like to have dinner?" "Should I bring beer?" etc., but I wasn't really able to create new sentences or understand more general conversations.

How to use Pimsleur Audiobooks to Learn Dutch

If I were to begin learning Dutch from scratch, I would probably not use Pimsleur. There are better audiobook programs for learning Dutch.

Michel Thomas Audiobooks

Michel Thomas also offers an alternative series of Dutch language audiobooks for \$139. As with Pimsleur, it is possible to purchase the CD's second hand or borrow them from a library. Michel Thomas claims that completing a course will make you speak Dutch at an intermediate level.

I found Michel Thomas audiobooks to be friendly and fast paced. Occasionally, I found tracks and albums to be challenging, requiring me to frequently hit the pause button and consider my response to audio prompts. At the start of the series, I was able to simultaneously run and listen to Michele Thomas tracks. By the last disk of the series, I was only able to listen to tracks while walking and often had to replay entire disks. I would not recommend driving while listening.

I felt that Michel Thomas covered all of the material that Pimsleur covered and much more. The material dives into vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation, and contributed greatly towards my ability to hold conversations.

How to use Michel Thomas Audiobooks to Learn Dutch

If I were to begin learning Dutch from scratch, I would pair the Michel Thomas audiobooks with LearnDutch.org grammar lessons. While LearnDutch.org was excellent at teaching grammar, Michel Thomas helped reinforce those concepts while allowing me to put them into practice. I would, however, set aside time just for listening to the Michel Thomas audio. It's not something that I could multitask.

Babbel App

The Babbel language app offers an app-based language learning experience for roughly \$80/year. The app experience is slick and includes lessons on traditions, idioms, pronunciation, basic grammar, and vocabulary. Babbel claims to be a comprehensive learning experience.

Babbel Vocab

I found Babbel app to be clean, informative, and attractive. I made frequent use of its vocabulary section, which is extensive and well put together, and I have made significant use of it. Along with introducing new words, some people at Babbel have done an excellent job of choosing photos to illustrate the concept behind the words. Even for difficult words like "genezen" (to heal), "trouw" (faithful), or "ungehoorzaam" (disobedient), the Babbel team has found the perfect picture. Throughout the learning process, users are asked to match words to photos, type words, and to say them. The written/typed exercise UI is quite innovative and effective. After learning a word, the app uses spaced repetition to reinforce the knowledge.

Babbel Grammar

Unlike the vocabulary courses, I found Babbel's grammatical exercises to be unclear and somewhat superficial. They did little to reinforce my Dutch grammar, and were hard to properly review once complete.

How to use the Babbel App to learn Dutch

If I were to begin learning Dutch from scratch, I would use Babbel to learn vocabulary and idioms, ignoring the comprehensive courses and grammatical sections.

Using Babbel will cost you money and a little time, but it will also bring you much close to learning a language, unlike certain free alternative language learning apps which will cost you quite a bit of time in exchange for teaching not much at all.

Media

I often think of reading, watching tv, or listening to music as a leisure activity, and of grammar lessons as something more akin to work. As a result, throughout my learning experience, I struggled to make space for the neither-work-nor-play experience of consuming Dutch-language media.

Books

In my studies, I made use of introductory Dutch language books and of Dutch children's books. I found that children's books were more entertaining, but that they were also filled with incomplete sentences, idioms, and sounds like "pow" (pow) and "hatsjoe" (a sneeze), making it difficult to understand what was being said. As a result, I found books intended to teach adults Dutch were much more helpful than children's books. Another book, "De jongen, de mol, de vos en het paard", was also a delight to read.

How to use Books to Learn Dutch

If I were to begin learning Dutch from scratch, I would buy an e-reader that can handle Dutch->Dutch and Dutch->English dictionaries. For what it's worth, I have recently bought this one, which does the trick.

Movies and TV

I watched TV shows and Movies in Dutch via Netflix and Disney Plus. If choosing between the two, Disney+'s family friendly content means that it generally has a better catalog of Dutch-audio programming and I would recommend going with that. The subtitles and the spoken words never match perfectly, but in most cases, they're good enough.

How I'm Continuing to Learn Dutch

Currently, I'm working on finishing both Babbel App's vocabulary course and the 2nd Grammar unit in LearnDutch.org. After this, I'll likely listen through the last two or three disks of Michel Thomas again and start the Dutch translation of The Hunger Games on my e-reader.

Since I now live in a Dutch-speaking community in the Netherlands, I've also begun spending time practicing with my neighbors. Actual conversations are harder to quantify in terms of language-levels, but much more gratifying anyhow. As vaccines roll out, I might even be able to enroll in an in-person class!

A Conquistador, the Climate Crisis, and the Finances of Atrocity

2021-04-12T00:00:00+02:00

Content warning: violence, sexual assault

Hernán Cortés' greed knew no bounds. Even after he and his 600 soldiers landed in present-day Mexico, toppled the Aztec Empire, murdered some 100,000 people, raped and enslaved uncounted others, and looted its precious stones, gold, and silver, he wanted more.

He went on to launch a smaller but still bloody expedition to the Baja California peninsula, and followed this with another less ambitious expedition of present-day Honduras. He was thankfully never able to embark upon his dreamed-of Asian conquest.

Cortés' barbarism paid, but his conquests continued to shrink. Why? His reputation preceded him. He couldn't get new loans.

Initially, by lending Cortés money, his investors and creditors made possible and even exacerbated one of human history's great atrocities. Later, by refusing to lend to Cortés, they brought his conquests to an end.

When telling the story of Cortés' conquests, we often tell a story about a single greedy man. This story, however, is about money. It is a story about money’s role in enabling Cortés' atrocities and about money’s role in the modern-day atrocity that is the climate crisis. It’s a story that, today, can tell us more than ever.

This System Funds Atrocities

I am no Cortés, but I have resembled his creditors. Like them, when I sleep, my money does not. Instead, it funds all sorts of things. Some of these things, like schools and public health, are unambiguously good. Others are less so.

My former bank used my funds to help people buy houses. It also loaned my funds to carbon-belching power plants that will raise the temperature and the sea level, eventually putting those houses and their mortgages underwater.

One of my alma maters prides itself on sustainability and transparency, claiming that its endowment makes the world a better place. It also routes oil and gas financing secretly through the Cayman Islands.

My health insurer used my funds to pay for doctor visits. It also used my funds to buy bonds from the fossil fuel company that in 2010 flooded the beach near my home with crude oil, refused to give cleanup workers protective gear, and left them to endure seizures, skin lesions, and violent blood-vomiting episodes.

My money is supposed to protect my future. Instead, it’s being used to fund the destruction of our world and the abuse of its people. If you have a bank account, it's likely that your money does this, too.

I hate it, and I want to fight back in the most effective ways that I can. That is why I would like to empower you to regain moral control of your money – your money, but also your family’s money, your insurer’s money, your pension fund's money, and your government’s money. By learning from history and applying these lessons to today's atrocities, we can regain control of our moral stewardship and help to build a better world – a world where murderous conquistadors, slavers, animal abusers, coal mines, and oil rigs need not be financed.

To regain control of our money and our morals, we must first understand how atrocity is funded and then act accordingly.

This is part of an article that I wrote. I'm unable to post it in its entirety on this site, but you can read the full text here.

Closing The BikePoints Project

2021-02-15T00:00:00+01:00

"BikePoint" wayfinding is an innovative system of wayfinding in widespread use in Western Europe, but practically unknown and unheard of in the United States. A BikePoint wayfinding system is made of many "bike points," which are of numbered intersections connected by well-labeled bike-friendly routes. They simplify bicycle navigation while routing cyclists onto a predetermined network of streets and paths. There is a more detailed post about BikePoints here.

BikePoint wayfinding is more efficient, and easier to use, and requires less physical infrastructure than traditional wayfinding systems. In the United States, it can serve as low-hanging fruit for rapid bicycle and pedestrian transit improvement. In Massachusetts at least, unfortunately, BikePoint wayfinding also exists in a regulatory and political state of limbo. As a result, after four months of trying to bring BikePoints to the United States, I have put down the project.

This piece is meant to communicate steps and missteps I took along the way. In the event that someone else decides to pick up the BikePoint or a similar numbered wayfinding project, I hope this can help that person along their way.

Timeline & Timing

Over the past months, I have taken several steps to try and implement BikePoint wayfinding. My efforts focused exclusively on Massachusetts, where I used to live and can motivate various parts of my social network. This project might have worked somewhere outside of Massachusetts, though that's difficult to know without having tried it.

August-September, 2020: Worked on node-finding and route-fitting algorithms for generating BikePoint networks.
September 14, 2020: Published this blog post explaining what bike points are.
November 10, 2020: Launched the bikepoints.org website.
November-December 2021: Reached out to Massachusetts city and county planning authorities and Massachusetts Department of Transportation
December-January 2020-2021: Reached out to various distribution channels requesting help publicizing BikePoints.

Implementation Attempts

Considering the infrastructure's low-cost (\$30k in materials and ~100k in labor for a ~120k person municipality) and un-objectionable nature, I reasoned that it would be easier to introduce this concept to the United States via a pilot project, than with a publicity campaign.

As a result, I began this project in a technology driven (and in retrospect, backwards) way. My plan was to algorithmically generate maps of what BikePoint networks, signage, and cost estimates, and then to convince a municipality to trial the program. If all went well, after establishing a pilot project, I hoped that it might be possible to start small business collecting and re-publishing network maintenance data, since this is a significant concern for wayfinding systems.

My first attempts at establishing a BikePoints network were in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the Pioneer Valley area of Western Massachusetts. Both of these areas have young and highly mobile population and affinities for bicycle infrastructure, which I felt to be important to disseminating the idea across the United States. Here's an account of how things went.

Cambridge, MA Attempt

In Cambridge, MA, despite securing a proponent on the City Council (Thank You Councilor Zondervan!), infrastructure recommendations needed to go from the Cambridge Bike Committee to the Cambridge Planning Department was working from home, and so I was unable to reach them through their office numbers. It also never responded to my emails. This was a bit of a dead end.

The Cambridge Bike Committee, a group of volunteer Cambridge-based bicycle advocates might have been friendly to the idea, but met at 7pm EDT/EST. I live in Europe and due to COVID-19, couldn't travel. I was also unwilling to wake up my partner between 1 and 3 am on Tuesdays so that I could video call from our one-room apartment. I wasn't going to be meeting them anytime soon.

(If you're on the Cambridge bike committee or interested in cycling and way finding in Cambridge, the bike committee might be an angle to try.)

You can find a copy of my proposal to Cambridge, MA here.

Pioneer Valley, MA Attempt (Amherst, Franklin County, Montague, Northampton)

In Pioneer valley, I elected to try and contact planning departments directly to see whether I could interest them in the idea. I reached out to Amherst, Montague, and Northampton. All departments responded, with Amherst most interested. (Ben Breger in Amherst planning, especially, was pleasure to speak with.) Montague planning was difficult to get in touch with due to their small size and pandemic-related logistics. Beth Giannini at the Franklin County Regional Government sent a polite email explaining that they already had a regional wayfinding system planned. Northampton's planning director was extremely unreceptive.

Laura Hanson at the Massachusetts Department of Transportation was also helpful in introducing me to various players, explaining requirements for the grants she knew of, and generally supportive of the effort at large.

After many conversations, it seemed that to move ahead with such a project, I would need to solve several regulatory issues, find a source of funding, and demonstrate grassroots support.

Regulatory Issues

Signage

US signage is governed by the Manual for Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), which creates consistency across transportation systems. Unfortunately, the MUTCD, whose origins are in the US Highway System, continues to be extremely car-centric. In the MUTCD, non-motorized forms of transit including pedestrians and bicycles often seem to be an afterthought. This is certainly true of bicycle signage, wayfinding included.

To resolve this, and other regional issues, Massachusetts, has its own supplement to the MUTCD and (at the time of this writing) is nearing completion of a supplement section on bicycle wayfinding. Unfortunately for my project, this supplement is meant to govern all bicycle wayfinding on state roads, but is written with only traditional wayfinding in mind. Among other things, the draft regulation mandates aluminum signs, which must be elevated on sturdy poles to deter theft, and then be made proportionally large to ensure visibility at such height.

This would have some beneficial effects, especially for winter navigation. However, it is very different from the Dutch BikePoints network that my project is modeled upon. The Dutch system uses mostly small plastic signs on plastic posts hammered into the ground. Applying the Massachusetts draft regulations would have easily quadrupled BikePoints material costs and more than quadrupled labor costs.

You can find a draft of a mostly MA DOT compliant BikePoints sign design here.

Jurisdiction

Jurisdiction presented another regulatory issue. In the Pioneer valley area, roads and paths have a wide array of jurisdictions (MA Department of Conservation and Recreation, MA Department of Transportation, various municipalities, and Greenfield county). In order to establish a network, I would need to place signs on all of them. COVID-19 had caused various administrators to work from home and I found it quite difficult to get in contact with them.

Liability

Several officials voiced concerns about liability issues. In a litigious system, bureaucrats were concerned that people might hurt themselves by tripping over knee-height posts, or by running into upright 7 ft tall poles. While the litigation risk may or not have been real, the fear certainly was. This presented an additional barrier to introducing a new signage system.

Grass-Roots Support Issues

All planning departments wanted evidence of grass-roots support before proceeding with a trial project. I did find this unfortunate, since the cost of an unobjectionable pilot project could be trivially low by public infrastructure standards, but I understand the officials' concerns.

Here, it seemed like my timing and location were particularly problematic. BikePoints is a type of wayfinding that's unfamiliar to the United States, and I, an advocate whose time zone is six hours ahead of EST/EDT, was attempting to introduce it to the public in the middle of a pandemic. Quite simply, I was unable to make most public meetings, which typically happen between 7 and 9pm, or 1-3am Central European Time. I don't believe that creating grass roots support too high a bar for this project to clear, but it was for me. A local advocate could almost certainly do this better.

Funding Issues

This project could have been funded through either public or private grants. Of the Massachusetts public grant programs that I researched, MassDOT's Shared Winter Streets and Spaces and DCR's MassTrails grant seemed to be most appropriate. MassDOT grant coordinators I spoke to seemed to be mostly supportive.

Conclusion

After several months of working on this project, I realized that what I had envisioned as a primarily a technological problem was in fact a political one; and my political timing was very bad. In Massachusetts, bicycle advocates had just finished putting together the regulations, plans, political coalitions, and funding required to build bicycle various bicycle wayfinding systems. Very few players wanted to hear about new ways of doing wayfinding if it meant jeopardizing that victory.

As a remote volunteer advocate, I decided to throw in the towel and step away from the project.

If you're planning to develop a new system of bicycle or pedestrian wayfinding, I strongly encourage you to look at BikePoint style systems. They have proven to be popular, cheaper, and all around better than more conventional systems of wayfinding and can be a real win for your community.

Of course, if you'd like to discuss this with me, please feel free to reach out. I'm unlikely to pick up the project again, but would be happy to help someone else make sense of a similar endeavor.

October Update

2020-10-26T00:00:00+01:00

As chill winds descend from the north and leaves turn to yellow and red, fall, and crunch underfoot, I wish we could huddle together, sharing hot drinks and thoughts, and feeling comfort in one another’s presence. Instead, we congregate over Zoom calls and emails, seeking connectedness in the harsh cold glares of our computer screens.

So I'm emailing you again; to tell you about my last few months; to try to keep the interpersonal connections that I have; to try and grow the connections that I don't have; and to connect with you in whatever way is available to me.

Here's a summary of what I've been up to. It's dry reading, to be sure, but I am looking for help with many of the ongoing and upcoming projects. If you'd like to be involved, please look to the end of the post. I've listed out a few areas that may be able to use your help.

What I've Been Up To

There’s not much to do while living in the countryside of a new country weathering a pandemic. I have no social life as a result, but at least I've found some of the past months to have been extremely productive.

In short, between August 1st and October 16th, I’ve started a new project for bicycle wayfinding, progressed on learning Dutch, done too little activism, and completed stacks of administrative paperwork:

🚲 🗺 ↖️ BikePoints:

BikePoints, a project to create Dutch style way-finding networks in the US, has consumed roughly 38% of my effort. Over the period, a friend and I were able to program a proof-of-concept bike network and produce a blog post. Following this, I was able to submit a proposal to the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts, which city Councilor Zondervan has been helpful in supporting.

The BikePoints sits on the intersection of several interests for me, including public service, transit infrastructure, data science, and environmentalism. I am doing this work entirely pro-bono in hopes that the cities of Somerville and Cambridge make use of the concept. However, I hope to eventually spin it into a stand-alone business.

Next Steps for BikePoints:

I expect to set up a proper BikePoints website, work on some of the technologies behind bike points, and spend some time understanding what motivates local governments to pick up such projects like this.

🇳🇱 📚 Learning Dutch:

Dutch has consumed 29% of my recent effort, and has progressed to A1 level. Over the period, I did the following: - completed a grammar course - continued an audio course - continued learning new vocabulary - and studied for and took a Dutch exam.

The exam, in addition to giving me some confidence, has exposed some of my weaknesses in the language. This should help study smarter and faster going forward.

Next Steps with Learning Dutch:

In the upcoming months, I will be working on my conversational Dutch skills by reading and watching Dutch-language children's books and TV shows, while continuing with my audio and vocabulary courses. I need a bit of a grammar break for now.

✊ 📈 Activism:

Activism has consumed 12% of my recent effort, with little to show for it. My remote location, unpredictable COVID-19 restrictions, and the language barrier have all made it extremely difficult to coordinate within Dutch-speaking groups, as was my previous plan.

As a result, I’ve written a few pieces and attended an established activist group’s retreat weekend , but otherwise failed to become meaningfully involved in ongoing activist projects.

Next Steps with Activism: Executive Education

In the upcoming months, I hope to write one or more pieces for the Extinction Rebellion blog, and to work with English-speaking financial activist groups in the US and UK on whatever it is they need done. I’m particularly interested in exploring actions supporting universal ownership and divestment from debt markets.

🗂 ✉️ Personal Tasks:

Personal tasks have consumed 21% of my recent effort, including visa and unemployment paperwork (8%) and learning Emacs (3%). This has allowed me to apply for Dutch residency and submit most of my unemployment paperwork.

Visa and unemployment paperwork are ever-present drags on my productivity. Documents are in Dutch and German (respectively) and procedures are in perpetual flux due to COVID-19, office closings, and travel restrictions. The resulting work is difficult to plan but easy to underestimate. I frequently have to drop everything to deal with paperwork, or face even more of it later on.

Next Steps with Personal Tasks: More Paperwork

I do not expect the bureaucratic burden to lessen. In the upcoming period, I will need to change my address to the Netherlands, transfer my insurance, and somehow procure a temporary visa while my residence permit works its way through the Dutch immigration and naturalization service. The best I can do is to try to estimate paperwork more liberally, and be better at turning in forms sooner.

🙏 💬 Requests for Assistance

I would welcome help in any of the following areas. In all of the below cases, I would love to share credit. My email address is al [at] [this domain name], though you can also reach me at my contact page.

✍️Editing and Writing Help

My activism efforts will involve writing two more pieces on the Extinction Rebellion global blog, while BikePoints involves writing copy for the BikePoints website.

I welcome harsh editing and criticism of my writing. If you would like to contribute your editing skills, please get in touch.

I may be collaborating with a former colleague on some of the Extinction Rebellion blog pieces, and would welcome additional co-authors.

🎨 Illustration Help

The Extinction Rebellion blog pieces can benefit from illustrations of environmental and financial concepts. If you are interested in illustrating climate truths or financial concepts, please get in touch.

💪 Infrastructure and Political Help

The BikePoints project can benefit from an additional champion in the Cambridge, Medford, and Somerville city councils, planning departments, and bicycle committees. If you are interested in helping Cambridge, Massachusetts adopt BikePoints and have personal connections in either of these organizations, please get in touch.

The BikePoints project can additionally benefit from some level-headed discussions about public infrastructure and revenue streams. If you have a background in public infrastructure, signage, or other bicycle infrastructure, and are interested in lending your knowledge, please get in touch.

📊 Finance, Data, and Other Expert Help

Much of my work is based on expert insights from within my community:

Financial contacts have helped brainstorm, proofread, provide content guidance, and provided commentary on financial pieces.
Marketing contacts have helped lent their insights on marketing campaigns and audience profiling.
Programming contacts have lent their time to brainstorm and program algorithms, as well as pointing me towards insightful articles, blog posts, and software tools.

If you would like to lend your knowledge, insights, and ideas on finance, public infrastructure, gathering marketing data, or other topics you think may be relevant, please reach out.

If you would like to receive emails with similar pieces I write, or if you would prefer not to continue receiving list emails, please let me know at {static}/pages/contact.

A Dutch Import We Can All Love: Bike Points

2020-09-14T00:00:00+02:00

by Albert Carter and Alex Crompton.

Update, November 4, 2020: a BikePoints website is now live.

Update, October 15, 2020: The City of Cambridge, MA is showing some interest in this, since it fits well into the Cambridge 2020 Bicycle Plan. If you're also interested in this, please encourage them to adopt the proposal. Emails can go to cddat344@cambridgema.gov and you can find a full PDF writeup here.

On a Friday night, Kelsey Rennebohm lost her balance. She was a 28 years old graduate student at Boston College, biking home on Huntington Avenue. The bus behind her didn’t react in time and hit her. She died. But what if she had been on another street?

When viewing a map of Boston, it’s easy to get the impression that Huntington Avenue is a vital artery to and from the city. It is... for people in cars, in buses, and in trams. For people on bikes, it’s a death trap. Traffic is fast and the curb is high; narrow lanes are crisscrossed by tram tracks. People on bikes are much better served by nearby paths along the Muddy River or Southwest Corridor.

We would like to introduce you to bike points, which are already a runaway success in parts of Europe, and might have saved Kelsey’s life.

Bike points — signage as an economic driver

Bike points are sets of numbered intersections connected by well-labeled bike routes. As illustrated by the graphic above, they simplify bike navigation while routing cyclists onto a predetermined network of streets and paths.

Bike points allow people to travel between cities with only a few digits scribbled on their hands, encourage connectedness within cities, attract new residents to rural areas, and support local businesses like restaurants and hotels. Particularly in the Netherlands, but also in parts of Germany, Belgium, and Croatia, they are already a low-cost economic multiplier.

A point on such a network is shown above. The sign, standing at junction 86 in the Dutch bike points network, indicates that people there can go straight to point 85 or turn left to reach point 81. Most bike point locations do not have maps of the larger network, but the one below happens to.

In addition to being used by students going to school, commuters going to work, and retirees out for a ride on their electric bikes and wheelchairs, this particular set of bike points attracts thousands of yearly tourists, filling the nearby town’s restaurants, hotels, sports equipment stores, ice cream parlors, museums, and campsites. (This has been true even during COVID-19, during which many restaurants have been serving takeaway meals).

Outside of planning, signage is the network’s only infrastructural overhead. Installing a bike point system requires no widening of lanes or reductions of street parking.

Bike points make places more livable. They are a fantastic navigational supplement to areas with already extensive bike infrastructure. They are a budget friendly first step for cities and counties looking to bolster their tourism industry, connect with nearby economic centers, or attract new people to the region. And they are an easy tool for traffic engineers to make streets safer while simultaneously increasing their overall bandwidth. All it takes is a few signs.

Case study & Cost estimates

As a case study, we used GIS data, network-generation algorithms, and subject matter expertise from local bicyclists to create a sample map of the Boston/Cambridge area.

Though the map has only 27 intersections, it provides a high level of regional connectedness. Further refinement is possible and encouraged; during the planning stages, tweaking junction locations or paths can be done quickly with a revisualization of the results. We estimate the entire material cost of the signs, poles, and occasional wayfinding maps for this network would be $24,000. This is roughly 1/10 the cost of purchasing and installing a traffic light.¹

Technical Details

The work took place in four stages:

Creating a street-network graph data structure
Identifying key intersections
Determining connections between intersections
Routing between intersections

1. Creating a street network graph data structure

Open Street Map provides XML-format exports of street maps. A helpful script allowed us to convert this data into a NetworkX graph. The graph generated by this original parsing was extremely noisy, and filled with extraneous nodes (curves on streets, landmarks, traffic signals…). To help reduce the graph noise and make parsing faster, we wrote algorithms to remove intermediate nodes (nodes that only serve as a bridge connecting two other nodes).

2. Identifying key intersections

Identifying key intersections was a challenging task that we only partially completed. While algorithms for centrality exist, some algorithms (pagerank, voterank…) gave poor results in testing, while other measures (eigenvector, betweenness…) performed somewhat reasonably on small datasets, but were not scalable.

We ultimately supplemented our graph with local population information, downsampled nodes, and crafted a local betweenness-centrality algorithm. Our calculations placed weight on population density but took care to have universal connectedness and avoid dead zones. Our goal was to simulate a large number of possible routes a person on a bicycle might take, so that we could see which paths and intersections they would frequently cross.

The end result of this effort still required some hand-selection of intersections where bike-nodes should be placed, based on input from Boston area cyclists.

3. Determining connections between intersections

Once hubs were identified, we used Delaunay triangulation to determine how these intersections might best be connected. The goal was to have a clean, uncluttered network that still allowed an easy, more-or-less direct route between any two hubs on the graph.

An initial triangulation produced a graph with an unnecessarily high number of routes. We pruned the graph by removing direct routes (A -> B) that could be reached through an only-slightly-longer indirect route (A -> D -> B).

4. Routing between intersections

With a set of street intersections and routes in hand, we used the Google Maps API to get biking directions for the routes.

The street map became a bit messier because of this, but better reflected real-world biking conditions. For example, people on bicycles were routed away from Prospect Street, Cambridge, which is dangerous, towards the relatively calm streets just to the west.

The human touch — why algorithms aren’t enough

No algorithm can determine an optimal transit network, and no dataset can replace the knowledge of local cyclists and planners. Our code benefits from (and needs) human input at every step of its process, from data processing, to intersection selection, to route connection.

For example, in the attached map, in addition to an unfortunate node number choice, our algorithm routed people onto the gravel path of “Riverway”, on the border of Brookline and Boston. More human input would have allowed it to direct bicyclists to the asphalt only a few feet away. Additionally, it did not initially identify Central Square, Cambridge as an important intersection.

For municipalities with existing unconnected biking paths, or for municipalities that would like to direct traffic past restaurants, cafes, or tourist attractions, corresponding nodes and edges can be manually added to the graph and displayed. The algorithms are designed to scale from small towns to states and beyond.

Cost breakdown

On the map, we counted the number of incoming routes to each bike point (104), along with the number of turns along each route (337). This led us to estimate that the proposed project would require 104 + 377 = 481 (rounded up to 500) signs.

We envision that signs will be in two standard sizes (6” x 12” and 6” x 8”), customized on location with two to six reflective stickers each. At an average of four stickers per sign, we estimate 2000 stickers total. Similarly sized reflective-bead aluminum signs cost between $11 and $16 per piece. Vinyl reflective stickers required to customize the signage cost roughly $4 each.

We also estimate eight stationary wayfinding maps to cover the network’s 27 nodes, at $1,000 per map.

Our $24,000 estimate does not include labor costs of installation because these costs vary widely by locality, and we do not have good sources of data for them.

Next steps — would you like to see a bike network?

If you like the idea of a bike point network, please share this article with your local city, county, or state government, and ask them to start a pilot project. This is not a politically difficult project, but needs a champion, because it's new.

This is currently an unpaid hobby that we would be happy to turn into paid work. We can offer rough bike network maps of anywhere in the US, data on the location and number of signs needed, and help customizing maps.

We think it would be best to launch a limited pilot project, and are interested in working with organizations that would like to implement bike points for their constituents.

Please share this article to help bring low cost and high impact bike point infrastructure to the United States.

al@albertrcarter.com | github.com/rogertangos | twitter.com/al_carter

alexander.w.crompton@gmail.com | github.com/cromptone

Traffic Signals. (2019, November 15). Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://wsdot.wa.gov/Operations/Traffic/signals.htm ↩

3. Amplifying Corporate Dissent: A Tactic to Take Down Fossil Fuels

2020-08-25T00:00:00+02:00

This is one of a series of potential tactics to use against fossil fuel companies, meant to limit their ability to supply fossil fuels.

1. Phishing for Leaks | 2. Crashing the Roadshow | 3. Amplifying Corporate Dissent (you are here)

This campaign is presented in draft form. It would be helpful to know what you think, what you find interesting, and potential issues. If you have expertise in underwriting, oil or gas drilling, recruiting, or other mentioned fields, and would like to contribute your knowledge, please contact me. Industry insiders and insights make these posts possible.

3. Amplifying Corporate Dissent

The 2016 election and aftermath was characterized by divisive trolling. The trolls were sloppy, cheap, and loosely affiliated. They were also extremely effective at widening division and crippling the United States' political machinery.

What happens when fossil fuel company office politics go online?

Social Media is designed to make you angry. Anger drives discussion (even context-less discussion!), and discussion drives views, which create clicks, which result in Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other social media companies making $0.10 off of your enraged 3am keyboard-smashing. As a result, social media is an excellent place to sow division within an organization.

In the real world, people eventually de-escalate their anger. In social media, that circuit-breaker is jammed, because it's more profitable that way.

What if this happened to an essential company in the fossil fuel supply chain?

Amplifying dissent in essential companies within the fossil fuel value chain, can lead to sector wide slowdowns, preventing fossil fuels from being extracted and burned, while other, cleaner energy alternatives take their market share.

Logistics

Here's a sample to-do list to amplify corporate dissent:

Identify a fossil fuel target and topic of dissent. Companies who are essential to the fossil fuel supply chain and have ongoing scandals, difficulties, or different decisions are good candidates.
Start two or more Facebook groups taking sides. You'll want to use separate profiles for each group.
Create low quality memes mischaracterizing other opinions. These websites can help.
Invite employees and former employees. Employee lists can be found by searching for other company-related groups and posts. A small advertising budget (~ $50) can also go an extremely long way.
Routinely upload new inflammatory content. Some initially posting can artificially move the discussion forward, before it moves itself.

Notes and Disclaimers

This might be funded by short-sellers who would benefit from a company's crack-up, or by renewable energy competitors. (Hello hedge funds and renewable energy infrastructure players!)
This is inspired by the Russian troll campaign which would (does?) set up protests and counter-protests on opposite sides of the street, hoping people get violent.
I think that this is legal to do , but might be considered stock manipulation to fund.
People are allowed to have opinions about corporate decisions.
Social media companies may publicly approve, but their UX supports it.
- This is similar to the many companies thatspeak in favor of anti-pollution legislation, but donate to groups undermining it.
Make sure not to slander non-public figures.
I'm not aware of environmentalists having done this before.
The targeted organization would need to be essential to the fossil fuel supply chain in some way
In targeting a company with many competitors, activists would only be replacing one minion of the climate crisis with another.
e.g.: Don't go after Shell, BP, or Exxon with this tactic. Instead, it's better to go after something strange, technical, and irreplaceable. I haven't looked into it much, but Halliburton might be a good option.
You may also have internet troll friends who can help.
I'm too earnest to be a good internet troll, so don't ask me to do this.

This is one of a series of potential tactics to use against fossil fuel companies, meant to limit their ability to supply fossil fuels.

1. Leaks for Liability | 2. Crashing the Roadshow | 3. Amplifying Corporate Dissent (you are here)

What do you think?

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2. Crashing the Roadshow: A Tactic to Take Down Fossil Fuels

2020-08-25T00:00:00+02:00

This is one of a series of potential tactics against fossil fuel companies, meant to limit their ability to supply fossil fuels.

1. Phishing for Leaks | 2. Crashing the Roadshow (you are here) | 3. Amplifying Corporate Dissent

October 26, 2020 Edit: It seems that this type of action is coming too late, as it's already being done. An anonymous contributor sent in some useful thoughts on this piece. They are lightly edited and included at the bottom.

2. Crashing the Roadshow

In December 2008, Tim DeChristopher bid $1.8 million for oil and gas rights on lease-able land, with no intention to pay. His protest drove up the price of the parcels, disrupted bidding, and eventually led to him being sentenced to prison, and the cancellation of the oil and gas leases.

The auction was a small technical venue unprepared and unaccustomed to . His protest was effective and brilliant because it used this to target the industry where it hurt most: Their balance sheets.

Disrupting the roadshow is another way to hurt fossil fuel companies' balance sheets, while avoiding jail time.

What is a "roadshow," and why crash it?

Financial roadshows happen when a company wants to raise large amounts of money for a project, like an oil rig or a pipeline. At the roadshow, potential investors meet with a project or company's management team, and try to convince them to invest. This is usually facilitated by an underwriting firm (typically an investment bank), acting as a middleman. Companies like Uber, AirBnB, and General Motors used roadshows to raise money. So did this coal power plant and Keystone XL. (Sorry - I can't find a link for Keystone XL. The public is typically not invited to roadshows.)

Roadshows are a venue for investors and managers conversations to build the trust necessary for investment. This happens through conversations. Investors express concerns and discuss among themselves. Management answers questions in group question and answer sessions, and one-on-one settings.

By inserting environmental concerns and questions into this conversation, activists can elevate the investor-manager dialog, effectively obstructing trust (and investment) until environmental concerns are addressed.

When this happens, management will receive the strongest possible market signal that it must consider environmental impacts. (What signal is stronger than your investors/potential owners demanding that you do something?) This can lead either to less environmentally destructive or to scrapped fossil fuel projects, allowing funding to be diverted to non-fossil fuel investments.

Logistics

This campaign can take several forms. All forms depend on knowing when and where a roadshow will happen and having a list of questions ready for the management.

Acquire a prospectus and balance sheet. The prospectus may be listed on the company's website or the SEC's website. Or you can just call and ask a secretary to send you a copy.
Find the time and location of roadshows. The prospectus will generally list several "brokers," whom you can think of as the facilitating middle-men. Brokers will tell you the times and locations for the roadshow.
Create a list of difficult and painful questions to ask the management. Volunteers from the financial sector can help here. There is also a list of suggested questions below.

Logistics for an overt disruption

Create a pamphlet or flier with your questions. These should be narrowly focused on financial concerns. Public opinion and environmental impacts should probably be included only in as much as they affect the endeavor's riskiness and its bottom line. For extra effect, your flier or pamphlet can ask attendees to leak information to you.
Expose potential investors to the damage they may do. Advertise pictures and news articles of the last environmental catastrophe from a similar project. Because there are few investors in a single project, the advertising budget for this would be relatively small.
Stage an Extinction Rebellion style blockade or die-in outside (or inside) of the venue. Pass out the pamphlet or flier. If the questions listed on the flier are reasonable and the last catastrophes are fresh on investors' minds, they'll be inclined to ask them. After all, you're helping the investors do their jobs.

Logistics for and undercover disruption

Sneak into the roadshow wearing a suit and tie. This can be as easy as walking to the registration desk, stating a name, and giving a plausible excuse for not being on the guest list. A strategy for doing this is in the notes.
In the public Q&A, ask questions to the management. These are reasonable questions for potential investors to have. Difficult questions help other investors understand potential risks. They may even be glad you raised them.
Avoid one-on-one meetings and in depth-conversations. Often, at roadshows, investors are given the opportunity to meet one-on-one with the management. Since you probably don't want to blow your cover, avoid these. It should be easy to hide in the bathroom or look busy with your laptop. Plenty of people are.
Watch the management sweat.

Notes and disclaimers

This might be funded by industry groups fighting physical fossil fuel infrastructure, or by renewable-energy alternatives. (Hello fishers, farmers, and renewable energy players!)
This tactic is inspired by Tim DeChristopher's illegal, disruptive, and successful bids to save public lands from illegal drilling.
The legality of overt actions depends on the local laws and the action. Undercover action is probably criminal or civil trespass** but has limited enforcement ability, if activists leave if and when asked.
This tactic may not have been used by activists before, but almost certainly has been used by industry groups. (Though they probably didn't have to sneak in.)
On sneaking in: I have run and worked at high-ticket-price conferences. Because I never wanted to upset potential donors, collaborators, or investors, I almost always assumed that missing guest registrations were my administrative mistake and let people in.
a strategy for sneaking into in-person roadshows: you might arrive in a nice suit before an important speaker is about to go on stage. Tell the secretary that the speaker invited you a bit late and would love to see you in the audience. Ask if you can sort it out later. Walk in. Maybe they'll even give you a name tag.
a strategy for sneaking into online roadshows: you might call a manager's secretary, mumble something about tech problems, and ask them to send you a meeting invitation.
The object of this sort of campaign is not to scream or judge (That would just harden opposition to environmental causes and achieve very little.) but to influence potential investors, helping raise reasonable financial and moral concerns.

Sample questions to investors

"We just witnessed a precipitous drop in energy demand. How would another similar drop affect this investment?"
"Your prospectus does not disclose regulatory risks due to the COP-21 Paris agreement. What's the worst case if regulations are aggressively enforced?"
"Current public perception of industry is extremely negative. What do you expect to happen if the regulatory environment catches up?"
"How can we know that local and state government won't close or heavily encumber this project in 5-10 years?"
"This infrastructure is exposed to extreme weather. What are the insurance trends here, and why are they not mentioned?"
"If export bans on oil were reimposed, would there be enough domestic demand to justify the pricing implied in the prospectus?"
"What steps has the project taken to ensure a clean regulatory glideslope?" (Write these down. Inquiring minds will want to know!)
"Due to the rise of electric cars, how much decline is expected in oil demand relative to natural gas?"
"If the downstream were prevented from expanding, would there be enough domestic capacity to justify this project?"
[Briefly mention a similar killed/failed project] "Could that happen here?"
"This pipeline/infrastructure crosses the X river with X gallons/cubic meters per day. If there were a leak, what kind of environmental and health effects would occur?"
"We've seen some serious mishaps with this kind of work in the past. What's the worst case failure for this project?"
[At the water cooler / coffee break] "I always feel bad about even looking at this stuff…" [explain why]

This is one of a series of potential tactics to use against fossil fuel companies, meant to limit their ability to supply fossil fuels.

1. Leaks for Liability | 2. Crashing the Roadshow (you are here) | 3. Amplifying Corporate Dissent

Reader Response:

This is very intriguing, although late to the game. And of course, these days everything is virtual. Let me make a few points.

There are two kinds of road shows:

Ones where the company is trying to raise capital (usually equity)
Non-deal roadshows, where they are just updating current and potential investors without a particular transaction pending.

Company managements tend to be very heavily coached when the road show involves a deal and are limited by the SEC as to what they can say. I’ve been to a lot of these over the years.

Only big investors or investors seen as particularly sophisticated and likely to be long term holders get offered one on ones.

No one needs to hide in the bathroom to avoid being offered one; they are widely sought after. I was rarely a big enough investor to get one on ones for big deals but I did get a lot of one on ones with big companies either by being the only one in [redacted mid-sized city] willing to take a meeting on late Friday afternoon or by being known to company management from previous encounters.

I’ve never tried to sneak into a road show so I have no idea how easy it is. I’m sure it’s possible but not always. I also don’t know how to track upcoming roadshows since

I was always invited. The brokers generally want as many people there as possible since it makes them look good. Many road shows never go beyond New York or London so anyone who wants to attend a lot of them needs to be based in one of those two cities.

With respect to the oil industry in particular, there are likely to be very few roadshows that actually involve a deal.

None of the big oil companies needs to raise equity while bond issuance is usually done very quickly, often without a roadshow. Financing for a particular project as opposed to general financing for the company almost never involves a public roadshow. Individual projects are generally funded by the project finance arms of banks, which then syndicate the loans to a relatively small number of big investors.

This is already being done

A final point is that I’m not actually sure what this would accomplish. A number of large and small institutional investors have already been holding oil companies’ feet to the fire in both public and private forums for some time and asking precisely the questions that this post is planning to ask. In fact, they are coordinating with each other extensively. There is an organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts called Ceres that many institutional investors who want to combat climate change are members of. It’s worth checking out: www.ceres.org

1. Phishing for Leaks: A Tactic to Take Down Fossil Fuels

2020-08-25T00:00:00+02:00

This is one of a series of potential tactics against fossil fuel companies, meant to limit their ability to supply fossil fuels.

1. Phishing for Leaks (you are here) | 2. Crashing the Roadshow | 3. Amplifying Corporate Dissent

1. Soliciting Leaks for Liability

Exxon Mobil is under investigation for lying to its investors about the climate crisis.

Shell Oil's 1988 "Greenhouse Effect" memo and 1991 climate catastrophe film are being used by Dutch climate activists in ongoing lawsuits.

The Phillip-Morris tobacco company was laid low by class-action lawsuits, after internal documents revealed that it schemed to make teenagers addicted to nicotine.

These lawsuits were made possible by the release of classified documents, proving misdeeds by the company. In big tobacco's case, activists leveraged leaked documents to shrink the industry to a fraction of its former size. If only there were more leaks…

A New Way to Induce Leaks

In my programming career, I'm messaged by recruiters almost weekly, I receive emails about new tools and services hourly, and I'm advertised to constantly. Despite my past access to politically and legally sensitive information, I've never been asked to leak any of it. (Nor have I leaked any.)

It appears that there are two main ways to leak today:

Through a trusted contact, who is likely a journalist.
Anonymously, through the mail, or the internet.

I'd like to supplement the second way. By reaching out to employees of fossil fuel companies, it should be possible to solicit leaks.

More fossil fuel leaks can lead to more lawsuits, damaging the companies involved, making them pay for the damage they've already done, and shrinking the supply of fossil fuels that are available to burn, thus benefiting future generations.

Potential leakers working at fossil fuel companies may not like their employer. They may not like their co-workers, or their boss. They may detest the industry, but work in it because they need to provide for their family. Soliciting and facilitating leaks from them can help them affect change.

Logistics

Here's a sample to-do list to solicit leaked documents:

Put together a website detailing allegations against a company, and asking people to leak relevant documents. Columbia University maintains a search-able database of climate litigation that can be helpful with finding relevant allegations. Users of the website might be able to submit documents via email, via simple file upload, or via a secure digital drop box, or through a post office box. You might also use the website to sow corporate dissent, or solicit collaborators for your project.
Advertise to employees. This could use LinkedIn, Facebook, and/or Google ads. Because of the limited audience size, an advertising campaign should be relatively cheap. (I'd guess around \$300). It might be possible further lower spending by advertising only to employees that seem dissatisfied, are looking for other work, have recently been furloughed/fired, or that have relevant interests. For extra effect, it may be possible to use LinkedIn recruitment tools (\$50-\$100 / month) to directly solicit leaks, or to harvest emails from the organization and then contact employees that way.
Screen, clean, and categorize documents. Someone will need to do the screening, categorization, and cleaning of documents. It would be harmful to accidentally expose a leaker's identity.
Share documents with relevant activists/attorneys.

Notes and disclaimers

This might be funded by a legal agency engaged in litigation against fossil fuel companies. (Hello, lawyers!)
This campaign tactic is inspired by the many marketing funnels I've seen, and the many recruiters who message my LinkedIn in-box and personal email address.
The legality of this sort of campaign would likely depend on the local laws.
Bulk-mailing people found from an email-harvesting operation is almost certainly illegal.
I haven't looked into other legal issues, but welcome your thoughts.
As far as I can tell, this sort of campaign doesn't yet exist.
I have not and will not work on a campaign of this type unless I could be assured of its legality.

This is one of a series of potential tactics to use against fossil fuel companies, meant to limit their ability to supply fossil fuels.

1. Leaks for Liability (you are here) | 2. Crashing the Roadshow | 3. Amplifying Corporate Dissent

What do you think?

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June-July Update

2020-07-31T00:00:00+02:00

📢 June - July Update

It's the end of July, and time for an update on my activist strategy and activities. Because this is only for own audience (distribution via email and the website), it's much rougher than other pieces I may put online.

I'm curious to know what you notice about this. There's a 📋 survey at the bottom of the page.

If you would like to receive emails with similar pieces I write, please let me know at {static}/pages/contact.

Activist Strategies

My strategy for going into and eventually funding my activism as follows:

Proving my intentions
Teasing potential projects
Executing a project
Evaluating, refining, and investigating funding

As with other plans, details are lost with distance, so the later steps are a bit blurry.

1. Proving my intentions <-- I am here

In activism, my impression is that all people, and especially newcomers, have their own theories of change, opinions, and ideas for campaigns. Unfortunately, newcomers often don't realize the novelty of their ideas, the work that they require, or the resource limitations inherent in volunteer driven movements and organizations that may prevent others from hearing them.

Sometimes, finding a newcomer's ideas unworkable, activist groups will encourage the newcomer to leave. Other times, a newcomer may be discouraged by the group's lack of receptivity, and never return to another meeting. In either case, there's one less person working towards a common cause.

My blogging is meant to provide proof that I have thought through my ideas, and that I'm willing to put real work into activist campaigns, including those that aren't my own. I hope that this will make me a desirable asset for most groups that I would like to work with.

2. Teasing potential projects (September)

After proving my intentions, I intend to publicize a list of potential projects that make use of my skillset.

I am a technically trained person. My training was expensive, and I would like to see it put to use for causes that I believe in. I also see activism as a forum for self-expression and creativity, requiring space for imagination. My suspicions are that

Other people with hard technical and professional skills feel similarly.
Activist groups would be well served by attracting professionally and technically trained people
Activist groups could better attract these people if they had more interesting work for them to do.

This may all seem vague... I'm writing about making websites and fixing people's laptops, and why I would rather do other things with my time. It's unfortunate but understandable this is where technical activists are often steered. For me at least, it's not the best use of my skills, or even what I want to do.

I see technical and professional skills as a force multiplier and fertile grounds for creativity. Hopefully, a list of potential projects will build credibility for my ideas, help organizers imagine additional types of creative action, and save me from becoming tech support.

3. Execution (September - December)

I hope to try one or more of my projects to assist an existing organization with an activist campaign. It's unclear at this point both what project, organization, and campaign this will be. Hence, the brevity of this section.

I am in contact with some potential activist groups, but would like to finish the aforementioned two steps before jumping onto a campaign.

4. Refinement & Funding (December)

After the campaign, I hope to step back, evaluate the results, and plot next steps. There are three possible outcomes here, with differing results.

In the best case, the campaign will have been successful, will have used my professional skills, and will have created clear economic winners. This outcome may lead me to begin searching for external funding.
In the worst case, the campaign will have been unsuccessful. This outcome may lead me to either launch another campaign or go back to non-activist programming.
In the muddled case, the campaign will have been successful, though it either will have not used my hard skills or will have not created clear economic winners. This outcome may lead me to either launch another campaign, go back to non-activist programming, or seek funding from existing activist organizations. Unfortunately, without clear economic winners, external funding will be more difficult to come by.

This is the end of the strategy section. I would appreciate your thoughts. If you would like, you can skip the "Ongoing Activities" and go straight to the survey at the bottom of the page.

Ongoing Activities

The reporting period goes from June 1 to July 31st. This upcoming period goes from August 1 to September 30.

In the current period, my effort broke down as follows:

44% Learning Dutch
38% Activism
18% Non-Dutch-Non-Activism-Related (taxes, paperwork, etc)

⏱ Work Schedule

My work day begins at 10am, Central European Time, and ends between 6 and 7:30 in the evening with a 1-hour lunch break. I make extensive use of clubhouse.io and Agile methodologies, in a weekly sprint pattern. A writer friend and I make our plans on Fridays at 10am. We would welcome additional participants.

🇳🇱 Dutch

My Dutch is progressing steadily. I have not taken any recent comprehensive tests, but strongly suspect that it has reached or exceeded A1 level. In lieu of testing, I currently plan to consider it A1 level once I complete LearnDutch.org's Beginner Grammar Course, and 100% of Babbel's Vocabulary lessons. My Estimated completion date for my current course of study is September 15th.

🏠 Non-Dutch-Non-Activist Activities

My non-Dutch-non-activist activities have included self-study of a new programming language, Clojure, a text editing tool, Emacs, and writing and mailing a paper letter which many of you received. These activities were more frequent at the beginning of the period, as a result of closed out accounts. I expect Non-Dutch-Non-Activist to stay at their present low level throughout the new period.

✊ Activist Activities.

During this period, I spent significant amounts of effort building an online presence, educating myself in finance, and on writing. My piece on pandemics and the environment was posted in the new Extinction Rebellion global blog, and I expect to complete a piece or series of pieces on financial activism during the upcoming period.

💻 Building an Online Presence

Building an online presence, including building a website, building social media accounts, consolidating contact information, and reaching out contacts comprised fully 48% of my activist activities.

🏦 Financial Education

During and before this period I have been learning about corporate finance. 16% of my activist activities went to three introductory corporate finance courses. Un-accounted amounts of activities also went to reading the Heretic's Guide to Corporate Finance, reading the Financial Times, and watching XR's Money Talks series

🖋🤒 Writing a Pandemics Piece

I am finding an unfortunate part of writing to be the time spent not writing, but distributing my work. In the case of the recently posted pandemics piece, 60% percent of my writing-related activity was spent not on writing. Within this 60%, 50% was spent editorial work including markdown and html styling and formatting, and even debugging the Extinction Rebellion CMS, and 50% was spent on distribution channels outside of the Extinction Rebellion Global brand.

These non-writing activities have allowed me some accidental activist contacts within the XR Global organization, but are far outside of what I had hoped would be the project's scope.

For future pieces, I hope to minimize this by requesting only two rounds of edits, avoiding certain markdown elements, and setting clear expectations of what is outside of my project scope.

🖋💰 Writing a Finance Piece

Much of my financial education has been in support of a blog post I am writing on financial activism. The topic is very large, so I plan to split it into three parts: 1. a background on financing for fossil fuel projects 2. explanation of an ongoing campaign 3. tips and tricks for financial activism.

In the period, I did draft a piece based on the Money Talks video series and Heretic's Guide book, but after conferring with friends working in finance, decided to redraft a new one.

😯 So, uhh... what do you think? 😯

Let me know at the contact page

6 Ways That Pandemics and the Environment Are Inseparable

2020-06-22T00:00:00+02:00

Pandemics, ecology, and climate are hopelessly intertwined. The climate and ecological crisis sickens and displaces both wild animals and human beings. It creates excellent conditions for pests like ticks and mosquitoes to breed as well as for deadly bacteria to multiply. And it literally thaws ancient pathogens from the ground. All of these lead to disease, which, when left unchecked, can result in pandemics.

This post explains some of the less-visible connections between infectious disease and the climate and ecological crisis; how many pandemics begin; and how, by fighting against environmental destruction, we can also play a part in preventing the next pandemic.

Pandemics Start with Wild Animals

What are some similarities between COVID-19, SARS, MERS, Ebola, swine flu (H1N1), Lyme disease, West Nile fever, and HIV/AIDS?

All of these originated in wildlife before jumping to humans. The ancestors of HIV/AIDS and Ebola were first identified in chimpanzees, while West Nile fever and swine flu were first found in birds. (Also known as H1N1, swine flu originated in birds, jumped to pigs, and finally got to humans.) The remaining diseases originated in bats.

In the case of COVID-19, there is strong evidence that an infected bat ¹³ came in close contact with other wild animals (very likely caged and stressed pangolins and civet cats) that were then exposed to, and possibly eaten by, a human who became infected.¹⁴ ¹⁵ Airplanes and cruise ships then spread the disease worldwide, and the rest is history.

Wilderness Is a Wall that Keeps out Disease. We're Destroying It.

In healthy natural environments, wild animals’ diseases circulate mostly in the wild and keep away from humans, with plant and animal diversity shielding humans from infection.¹⁶ ¹⁷ This is largely because the vast majority of wild animals (including the previously-mentioned civet cats, pangolins, and most birds and bats) are afraid of humans and do their best to avoid us. Furthermore, with a multitude of wild animals available to infect, bacteria and viruses have little incentive to adapt themselves to human hosts.

But when people destroy nature – cutting down forests to make farm land, criss-crossing wilderness with roads and pipelines, disruptively damming and diverting rivers that wild animals depend on – it kills those animals. It fragments animal communities, and causes the survivors to be hungry and stressed – becoming perfect incubators for disease. This also encourages those same animals to venture closer to humans to search for food.

Scientists believe that this is why shrinking wilderness and disease outbreaks go hand in hand.¹⁸ ¹⁹ ²⁰ Destroying nature sickens wild animals, then brings their contagious diseases to us.

The Climate Crisis Strengthens Existing Diseases

Animal-borne diseases like Lyme disease, malaria, West Nile fever, and dengue are already moving into new regions. This is because longer, hotter summers, warmer winters, and increased annual rainfall cause the ticks, mosquitos, and fleas that carry these diseases to shift habitats, moving into areas that were previously inhospitable to them. ¹¹ ²³

By way of example, Europe has seen a sharp and shocking spike in West Nile virus infections, after years of record-breaking warmth,²² ¹¹ while in North America, warmer winters have dramatically expanded ticks’ ranges and made Lyme disease into a household name.⁵ ⁷ ⁶

Like animal-borne diseases, diarrheal diseases like Salmonella and campylobacteriosis too benefit from higher temperatures and extreme weather. This is because warmer temperatures allow bacteria to multiply faster, while extreme weather creates flooding, sewage spillover, and standing pools of water, which all provide prime bacterial breeding grounds. ²⁵ ²⁴ ²¹

As the earth warms, warmer winters no longer kill disease-carrying pests. Warmer and longer summers, flooding, and extreme precipitation provide pests and bacteria more time and better conditions for reproduction. And all of these contribute to the spread of disease.

Air Pollution Weakens Our Defenses

Many people know that air pollution worsens asthma and heart disease³ ⁴, but did you know that it also corresponded with deaths from infectious diseases?

For COVID-19 sufferers, a small increase in a patient's exposure to air pollution was associated with an 8% higher death rate. This was true even when controlling for patient age, health, and wealth, the availability of healthcare services, the population density where they lived, and patients who used to live in polluted areas but didn’t anymore. Air pollution was also correlated with higher rates of death in the context of SARS²⁷ and pneumonia².

Air pollution – even when we were only exposed to it as children – gives us a lifetime of higher susceptibility to many diseases. And people who are susceptible to disease are more likely to spread it. Air pollution has already contributed to the deadliness of the COVID-19 pandemic - it may well worsen the next one.

Diseases Will Continue Melting out of Frozen Land

During a summer heatwave in August 2016, anthrax thawed out of land that we had thought was permanently frozen – the permafrost. The escaped anthrax killed a 12-year-old boy, infected at least 20 other people, and killed more than 2,300 reindeer in the area. It was the region's first outbreak in 75 years.⁹

This took place in a remote part of Siberia¹⁰. If it had happened in a city (or even an arctic village), the results might have been much worse.

The climate crisis is causing the permafrost to thaw. Fast.⁸. And many people expect pathogens trapped within the previously frozen ground – responsible for such diseases as polio, anthrax, smallpox and the Spanish flu – to eventually be released.¹

Human prehistory is long. We have no records, strategies, vaccines, or even names for the diseases that plagued our ancient ancestors. There's no reason to believe that those ancient diseases would be any less infectious or deadly than those we are fighting today.

We Can Fight Pandemics

Fighting the climate and ecological crisis means fighting against the destruction of nature. It means fighting against extreme weather, and it means fighting against pollution. It means keeping it in the ground - both fossil fuels, and the frozen pathogens that their burning would release.

It's too late to stop the COVID-19 pandemic from happening, but by fighting for the environment, you can be part of the fight against the arrival of the next pandemic.

Extinction Rebellion calls this fight a rebellion. If you are interested in joining us to tell the truth about pandemics, pollution, climate, and ecological destruction. To tell people how and why this toxic system will produce more pandemics.

Take a small action: The next time you talk about pandemics, bring environmental issues into the discussion, too. They're more relevant than people may realize.

Written by Albert Carter and the Extinction Rebellion Comic Science Working Group. Illustrations by Comic Science. This piece is also featured on the Extinction Rebellion Blog.

You can contact the author at {static}/pages/contact

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Farquharson, L. M., Romanovsky, V. E., Cable, W. L., Walker, D. A., Kokelj, S. V., & Nicolsky, D. (2019). Climate Change Drives Widespread and Rapid Thermokarst Development in Very Cold Permafrost in the Canadian High Arctic. Geophysical Research Letters, 46(12), 6681–6689. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019gl082187 ↩
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Why a blog?

2019-06-04T00:00:00+02:00

I'm departing on an activist adventure.

I've worked on the fringes of environmental activism for years. Among my projects, I started a well-reputed Extinction Rebellion group, and worked with friends to map inconsistencies methane leak reporting.

Many of the skills that I've acquired through work and my personal life (agile project management, data engineering and analysis, finance, and an ability to read scientific papers) can be helpful for causes that I care about. I'd like to make use of my skills in a way that doesn't contribute to the collapse of our world. Starting June 1st, I'm giving myself between 6 and 9 months to become a full time activist.

What I hope to accomplish

Initially, I hope to join with a finance-savvy environmental group, help on existing campaigns, and learn everything I can from them. I have some ideas for campaigns of my own, but don't intend to launch them until I've done a good job for an existing campaign.

Eventually, I hope to establish a new funding model for beneficial activism (This will be the topic of a later post.), while increasing capital costs for carbon-heavy companies and products.

This is a journey and an experiment.

Like any long journey, I don't know quite where this will take me, or when I'll get there. However, I do have some key milestones that I hope pass.

I'm steering myself towards financial-environmental activism.

This is a high-leverage and less-explored area, full of overlooked data, arcane rules, regulations, and potential allies. It seems ideal for someone coming from a data and engineering background. (This will be the topic of a later post.)

I intend to work with existing activist groups.

There are people with more experience with this than I have. While I have many ideas for activist campaigns, I expect that most of them will be unachievable. Others, I expect to be achievable, but imprudent. And the remaining few ideas will still need help. As a result, at least initially, I intend to work with existing activist groups.

This needs to be funded.

Burnout runs rampant in the activist community, in part because activism doesn't pay. When environmental activism financially benefits everyone in the long term, it financially benefits few people in the short. According to an activist friend, "You can do a lot of good for other people."

There are many other aspects of activist burnout, but a lack of income is one that I know well, and would like to avoid. For this adventure to be regenerative enough to continue beyond its experimental phase, I need to make enough to live a middle class lifestyle.

Eventually, for this endeavor to continue, it needs to fund me.

Like any experiment, this needs evaluation

In addition to the three milestones, above I'm interested in other evaluation criteria you may think of. On and between December 31st and May 31st , I'll take stock of these and decide whether or not to continue.

This list is for you, and also for me.

I'm recording this journey so that you and others can learn from it. I hope that it helps you with your own endeavors, and that you reach out if you need help.

Your reading this also helps me. It encourages me through a strange career move, and I hope that you'll reach out with advice and suggestions on things that I can do better.

I hope that you'll join me.

What evaluation criteria would you suggest for this experiment? What actions might I take, that will help me achieve my milestones? How can I make this a better read for you?

Sign up for the email list and then mail me directly once I send out the next post at {static}/pages/contact

Shipping Vessel Prediction

2019-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Description

This was a data science project and associated web API for predicting cargo vessels' next ports of call and arrival times. It achieved the following:

Predicted vessels' next three port calls with 50% accuracy.
Predicted port call times within a 10-hour margin in over 50% of correct predictions.

My role involved: - Data engineering. - Designing and testing algorithms. - Writing a RESTful API server in Flask.

Techniques used included data interpolation, sequence generators, deep neural networks (DNNs), Markov chains, and automated ML ensembles.

Transcript Transcription

2019-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Description

Transcript Transcription was a project to ingest messy, warped university transcript image files and export structured data from them. My role included:

Writing Docker images to extract various sections of text.
Using spaCy for phrase matching (NLP techniques).
Performing frontend work using ClojureScript.

Auto Tuning Models (ATM)

2018-08-31T00:00:00+02:00

Description

Auto Tuning Models (ATM) is a distributed, scalable application for selecting and tuning machine learning models. My contributions included:

Designing and implementing a RESTful API.
Refactoring the system to make it distributable.

This project was completed in collaboration with Latentine and the MIT Data-to-AI group.

Trane

2018-06-30T00:00:00+02:00

Description

Trane is a library for automatically generating prediction problems from structured data. My contributions included:

Refactoring the codebase.
Writing unit tests.
Collaborating with the Human-Data-Interaction Data-to-AI group at MIT.

This project was completed in collaboration with my employer, Latentine.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

2018-04-30T00:00:00+02:00

Description

I worked in many capacities at MIT and made many connections with the faculty, staff, graduate, and undergraduate student body. Projects included:

IDSS Data Sciences MicroMaster: Project Manager (2017-2018)
CSAIL Big Data Initiative/Living Lab: Research Staff (2014-2017)
EECS Department: Administrative Assistant (2011-2014) while concurrently earning my Master’s degree.

Industry Outlook

2018-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Description

Industry Outlook is a data science project about automation across industry sectors. It combines data from the US Census and academic papers to estimate the percentage of automatable jobs in each industry. My contributions included:

Collecting and analyzing data.
Designing and implementing an API for the project.

This project was completed in collaboration with my employer, Latentine.

Robot Studio

2018-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Description

Robot Studio is a project to build a web application that allows end-users to train, create, and deploy supervised machine learning models without labeled data. My contributions included:

Writing Kubernetes training "pods" and a command-and-control server.
Designing a CRUX database schema.
Contributing to the backend domain-specific language.

This project is an interesting application of weak supervision techniques.

Aurum

2017-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Description

Aurum is an application for large-scale data discovery with an accompanying query algebra. It can discover relationships between tables and columns in linear time. My contributions included:

Designing and implementing syntactic sugar for the query algebra.
Building a web client to demonstrate the application's capabilities.

This project was developed as part of my research at MIT's CSAIL Big Data Initiative.

LostLeaks

2016-05-05T00:00:00+02:00

Description

LostLeaks is a data science project about natural gas leaks in Eastern Massachusetts. It compares known gas leaks to gas leak repairs, discovering that many known leaks disappear without any nearby repairs. The work has since then contributed to a 2024 court case filed by the Conservation Law Foundation.

My contributions included:

Data sanitization.
Location identification.
Project management.

This was a personal interest project in collaboration with HEETMA.

BigDawg

2016-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Description

BigDawg is a data polystore and associated query language that allows many different types of databases to be searched with a single query. My contributions included:

Dockerizing various databases for deployment.
Designing and implementing screens for a web client demo.

This project was developed as part of my research at MIT's CSAIL Big Data Initiative.

DataHub

2016-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Description

DataHub is a data collaboration and sharing ecosystem. My contributions included:

Designing and building a RESTful API.
Implementing a row-based access control system.
Refactoring the codebase for security and maintainability.
Writing unit and functional tests.

This project was developed as part of my research at MIT's CSAIL Big Data Initiative. DataHub's development has since continued under the private company, Instabase.

GetFit

2015-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Description

GetFit was a yearly fitness competition for MIT faculty, staff, and students. The MIT Big Data Initiative released an iPhone application that used OpenSensing and DataHub to collect motion data (e.g., accelerometer, location). My contributions included:

Designing and developing an iOS application for the competition.
Reverse engineering the GetFit web API to accept data from the mobile app.

This project was developed as part of my research at MIT's CSAIL Big Data Initiative.

OpenPDS

2015-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Description

OpenPDS is a distributed system that allows users to collect, store, and give fine-grained access to their data while preserving their privacy. My contributions included:

Updating the codebase to ensure compatibility with iOS 8.
Implementing tweaks and optimizations to the existing system.

This project was developed as part of my research at MIT's CSAIL Big Data Initiative.

Northeastern University

2014-05-01T00:00:00+02:00

Description

I attended graduate school at Northeastern University. At the beginning of my first term, I knew nothing about computer programming. By the end, I had earned my Master of Science in Information Systems. It took three years to complete my degree while concurrently holding a full-time position at MIT.

OpenSensing

2014-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Description

OpenSensing is an open-source library for collecting sensor data from iOS devices. My contributions included:

Updating the library to be compatible with iOS 8.
Refactoring parts of the existing codebase.

This project was developed as part of my research at MIT's CSAIL Big Data Initiative.

BikeTrace

2013-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Description

BikeTrace was an iOS application for recording bicycle trips and displaying them to users. It was similar to Strava before Strava existed. My contributions included:

Designing the user interface.
Developing the application for iOS.

This project was completed as part of my graduate studies at Northeastern University.

Open Source Soylent

2013-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Description

Open Source Soylent was a non-programming project to create an open-source meal replacement formula. My contributions included:

Conducting nutritional research.
Managing the project and budget.
Sourcing ingredients.
Performing extensive spreadsheet-based analysis.

This was an independent project not associated with any organization.

Brown University

2009-05-31T00:00:00+02:00

Description

I attended Brown University for my undergraduate degree. Counterintuitively, I did not take any computer science classes during my undergraduate education. Instead, I focused on sociology and economics via the COE concentration (now renamed BEO).

Albert R Carter

Building a Carshare

The Why

Financial Structure

Deposits & Ownership

Monthly Fees

Driving Fees

Price comparison with car ownership

How Our Group Actually Started

Problems Once You're Running

Availability

Special-Needs Cars

Frequent Drivers

Problems Before You Start

Existing Car Sharing

Who actually joins a car share (and who doesn't)

How to Start a Car Share

Summary

A Bank.Green Recap

Being good at doing good

Bank.Green as a lever, banks as a fulcrum

What Bank.Green actually does

Never ending fundraising

Next Steps

Structure and Governance for Intentional Communities

Problems

Solutions

Separating rule making and decision-making

Decision-making at lower levels of power

Periodic prioritization

Electing Representatives

Applications of this structure

STRUCTURE AND ORGANIZATIONS WITHIN THE COMMUNITY

1. GOVERNANCE AND THE BOARD

THE TASKS OF THE BOARD ARE:

2. CIRCLES AND WORKING GROUPS

3. PROCESS SUPERVISORS

4. COMMUNITY DAY

5. GENERAL MEMBERS' MEETING (GMM)

6. AMENDMENT TO HOUSE RULES AND INTERNAL REGULATIONS

8. CONSENT BASED DECISION-MAKING AND ELECTION PROCEDURES

8.1 GMM CONSENT-BASED VOTING

8.2 GMM DEMOCRATIC VOTING

8.3 ELECTIONS

8.4 MEETING ROLES

parcelLab

Description

Meta

Defunding Putins War

Learning Dutch the Slow Way

LearnDutch.org

LearnDutch.org Vocab

LearnDutch.org Grammar

How to use LearnDutch.org

Pimsleur Audiobooks

How to use Pimsleur Audiobooks to Learn Dutch

Michel Thomas Audiobooks

How to use Michel Thomas Audiobooks to Learn Dutch

Babbel App

Babbel Vocab

Babbel Grammar

How to use the Babbel App to learn Dutch

Media

Books

How to use Books to Learn Dutch

Movies and TV

How I'm Continuing to Learn Dutch

A Conquistador, the Climate Crisis, and the Finances of Atrocity

This System Funds Atrocities

Closing The BikePoints Project

Timeline & Timing

Implementation Attempts

Cambridge, MA Attempt

Pioneer Valley, MA Attempt (Amherst, Franklin County, Montague, Northampton)

Regulatory Issues

Signage

Jurisdiction

Liability

Grass-Roots Support Issues

Funding Issues