Connecting dots

I’m surely not the only person who’s had the clever idea of describing themselves on some form somewhere as a “dot connector.”

In this period of diaspora as the team I was on goes into its second week of ghostly “administrative leave” paid to not work on our jobs, I am finding myself busier than usual and talking to more people than ever.

Where briefly people fantasized about a magical solution in which a billionaire fixed everything, instead now I am seeing a wide range of ideas kicking around about how to continue pursuing the work we were doing at 18F, how to further the mission that brought us all to this work, and how to address and possibly try to repair some of the damage we now see being done to the civic infrastructure.

What’s especially cool is that some of the ideas I’ve been discussing with people lately originated outside of the loose 18F collective and at the same time they still seem to be converging on some possible forms of alignment.

I’ve got to keep this vague because so many of these things are early-stage and also I am not the owner of most or any of these ideas and some of these stories are not mine to tell.

If they start coming to fruition in ways that I’m just starting to imagine, I’ll be sure to tell everybody about it when that happens.