Zagaja.com

One of the largest challenges that I think civic technology projects face is involving non-developers. Every single week that I attend Code for Boston I often see groups crying out for people that are not developers to join and help them. There are a lot of skills and areas that developers are quite happy to disclaim or delegate, but actually engaging non-developers to do these things is difficult. I think it is important to talk about these roles and how we can better engage non-developers because it has the potential to help us build more inclusive innovations and engage communities outside the usual groups we work with.

One of the lessons that I am learning from the other fellows at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society is that in addition to spending time learning it is also important to be reflective. People like Nathan Matias and Jason Griffey do a great job of documenting their work on their blogs. I like the style they both use and I will endeavor to emulate it, but also sprinkle in my own personality.

If you are reading this post on my blog you are one of the few. Currently most of my updates are posted to Facebook and I will tweet interesting things on twitter. I think the reason for this is that the state of the open web regressed after the death of Google Reader. When Google Reader was popular many people used it. They’d stumble upon an interesting blog, add it to their Google Reader, and when you posted an update the magic of RSS sent a swarm of subscribers to your blog. While RSS readers still exist I think that their usage is down overall. This has lead many blogs and online shops to resort to e-mail newsletters as their tool to keep people updated and engaged. Unfortuantely, the quality of my inbox has steadily declined as a result.

I am currently in the process of restructuring this website to make it look nicer, since I love playing with HTML and CSS, but also to make this a better portfolio pitstop. I have come to realize that a lot of blogging these days is seen and done on Facebook and so I have been posting my blog type posts there. I will probably still post here but am going to modify the site to better reflect the fact that when people land they’re likely just wondering who I am.

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