GIA Reader article on my work with the MAP Fund

The MAP Fund is an amazing organization and it was my privilege to work with them for a few years. We thought very hard about how to design an application process that mirrors MAP’s strongly anti-oppressive values, and deep commitment to experimentation in performance work. I brought a product management lens to the process, and …

Lucy Bernholz’s Blueprint for 2018

I look forward to this monograph every year. If you work anywhere close to technology, civil society, activism, nonprofits, philanthropy, or social justice, then you should too. Most people connected to these issues work with a single focus, such as making non-profit tax data machine readable, or building Agile practices inside civil society organizations, or …

Acknowledging Privilege for Classical Arts

This year I gave my fifth annual talk at the Fresh Inc. Festival for young musicians. I love helping artists. As usual, I spoke about the role of crowdfunding in the life of a young musician. But I tried to take classical music’s privilege a bit more seriously this year, and to address the differences …

I Wrote About My Work for Digital Impact at Stanford

I’ve been hanging around the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford a lot recently. It’s pretty much my favorite place to work on the intersection of technology and non-profits. Lucy Bernholz, who directs the lab, is totally brilliant and is fighting hard for the right things. Today Digital Impact, which is part of the lab, …

Join The CASH Family

And by that, I mean pay CASH Music the $9 a month that you pay to any streaming service. If that’s all you need to hear, sign-up right away. If you want to hear more from CASH directly, read Jesse’s medium post. Here’s my pitch. You get music (really good music). You get access to …

Engineering Management at the Board Level

I’m the board chair for the Live Music Project. It’s a fantastic organization doing excellent work to serve the classical music community. We help people find just the right concert for them, and build meaningful connections between organizations and audience members. Seriously. They send each other love notes because of us. This year we went …

Make Art Sustainable

I’ve been thinking a lot about frames for arts advocacy, and there’s one that I can’t stop thinking about. I wonder if you think it’s as useful and compelling as I do: sustainably produced art. But first, some clarification. The terms can mean different things. Wikipedia, for instance, has an article about sustainable art that …

2016 Fresh Inc talk on crowdfunding

This week I gave my fourth annual half-hour talk on crowdfunding to the Fresh Inc Festival, run by Melissa Snoza and the Fifth House Ensemble in Chicago. After all these years Melissa and I have still never been in the same place; one day we’ll have to fix that. I like to post something about …

Non-Profit Software Platforms: The Time Has Come

News recently broke that a new, non-profit alternative to Uber and Lyft is launching in Austin. The city kicked the companies out for a variety of reasons, including low pay, labor practices, the usual. Instead of rejecting technological advances, or trying to turn back the clock to a past taxi industry (as some try to …

Baumol at SPU and on NewMusicBox

I’ve been working on this line of research for over a year, and the first publications are out today. Above, we’ve got video of the talk I gave at Seattle Pacific University last month for their Futures of Music Series, hosted by Brian Chin. And today NewMusicBox has published my first written account of this …

The News and The Arts Have Similar Problems

Today Melody Kramer (who is awesome) published this essay on public media. She talks about how public media serves a public, and how a lot of the current fight over “traditional NPR” vs. “podcasts” misses the point of what’s happening. Linda Holmes also wrote a great re-framing of that debate. I’ve been following a lot …

For my grandfather

Gramps died. You may have heard about it. It was sudden, but peaceful. Losing him was really hard, but the memorial service and other rituals of mourning did help to handle the grief. Gramps, Wesley A. Clark, designed the first personal computer, and that’s what most people knew about him. If you’re curious about his …