event that meets every week in the city of Chicago to, build, share, and learn about civic tech. And then I also am the founder and partner at Datamate, a civic technology consulting company, which was founded about three months after Chai Hack Night. 2012 was a busy year for me, and, is a company of the size of about seven people now, and we do consulting work for government, academia, nonprofits, and journalists all around sort of civic tech, and using data to tell stories with, to tell stories with data. So I, by day, have started a business and do civic technology type work during day time hours. And then at nighttime, I go spend my spare time, which I have less of these days with two kids now, doing civic technology in a volunteer capacity through TryHackMe.

evolved, I'd say, over the years. In the beginning, the why was, oh, this is fun and new, and this data that wasn't there before is now there, and I can go do something interesting with it. And I can learn new skills as a technologist along the way. So it was very much around the idea of sort of self fulfillment or self actualization, which if anybody from Traheknight and leadership team is listening, they'll laugh at that because that's like a running joke about nobody knows what that means, but some people really like that phrase. But I I stand by it. It basically is the idea that, that that people can, through this work, sort of achieve greater understanding, and greater sets of skills to see the change in the world that they want. While that's sort of like, where I started was very sort of self driven. It was sort of a a maybe selfish motivations to get into this stuff. Now that I've kind of gotten to the place that I'm in where I, you know, again, own a business and I'm leading a very large and successful, meet up, My goal is to help other people go through that same path and transformation that I went through. I think that there's a lot of power to be gained from leveraging technology and data. And if no one is really helping out, folks that need that help, then the sort of default way for power to be, actualized is going to continue to stratify who has that power. So the folks who already have the resources Internet. Those folks are gonna fall further behind. And so I really see, the work that I do both at DataMaid and TriHackNite as a way to help people who really need that extra boost and can and wanna use that power for for benefiting broader society. And I see my role is is helping people do that, and do that successfully. Now as you've mentioned there, you're now a a founder a couple times over, both a business and a volunteer organization. But from what I gather, you started off your career on, essentially, a software development track. Could you talk a bit about your career journey going from that space to not kind of growing into something more kind of like a leadership oriented position here? Yeah. So, yeah. I went to school in Saint Louis at Washington University and got a degree in computer engineering. As of now, I am the only person at DataMaid who has a computer science degree. Everybody at DataMaid has other degrees like, sociology, and we have a music PhD. We have an art school dropout. We have some gender studies. So, I have what you would probably call, like, a traditional, like, background in technology right after I came, to Chicago, which I I this is, like, came to Chicago after I graduated not knowing what I would do. I found, some jobs doing web development in the city, and I kinda gained the skills of being a consultant and also being a technologist in building websites, over about, like, five or six years. And then around the time, like, 2012 when there's this moment of, real change in the city, we had a new mayor, Mayor Emmanuel, who's actually he's now leaving. So maybe that's the end of certain chapter, but in the beginning of a new one. But at that time, it was this very exciting moment where all of a sudden, all these folks who and I was not really involved in the open government movement very keenly yet. I was sort of in it, but not, like, that active. There's this group of folks who are really, interested in open government. It was all the folks who, you know, founded every block like Dan O'Neil and Joe Jamuska, who, at the time was at the Tribune, News Apps team, and folks like Harper Reed. They were all very much thinking about trying to get government data released. And then all of a sudden when we this new administration, there was all of a sudden very open to supporting that. It's sort of like the floodgates opened and folks like myself who really didn't, like, know anything about politics or know anything about local government, but knew a thing or two about, like, data and websites, we're able to really, like, capitalize on that and benefit from and eventually, you know, start very quickly after that, start Chai Hacknight. Again, know, start very quickly after that, start Trihack Night. Again, did not start it with, like, the intention of it becoming the the huge, thing that it is now. The first Trihack Night was four people, and we were just trying to find a place to get some work done because we were spending all of our time outside of our nine to five jobs, you know, and meeting at coffee shops and people's houses, and that was just getting annoying. So we decided to just meet at the same time in the same place every week. And so that was actually the reason for the first Hack Night. And we just got to doing it every week. And every time we did it, we continue to invite more people, and then people built stuff there. They want to present, and then we had we decided to broaden the kinds of presenters that came. And it sort of just grew very organically. And so, I mean, just this last week, we had our three hundred and twentieth event. Before that, though, I was I wouldn't consider myself, like, an expert or even proficient in running in a running events. But if you do anything 320 times or even a 100 times or 50 times, you're gonna get pretty good or at least proficient at that thing. And so we had the opportunity in all these cases to get good at it, and by trying lots of times. And I think that's something that, you know, in the realm of software development, the the idea of, like, fast iterations and agile development is something that might ring true to folks who are listening. And I think that there's an aspect of that that's that's applicable here that we were able to, by having TrihackNet, be a weekly thing, not just a monthly thing, we're able to do it that many four times as much, you know, as as we would have otherwise. And so it gave a again, it gave this this sort of way we approached it it and just sort of the stakes of which we came into it at which we're at that one pretty low, enabled us to learn, and and sort of develop those leadership skills.

So the my very first tweet I remember, I was volunteering for the Obama o eight, campaign. And a couple of the folks that I was hanging out with at that office, were like, you should join Twitter. So I did, and I distinctly remember doing it there at the campaign office here in, like, Downtown Chicago. And then, yeah, I, I remember when the g one came out. I guess the iPhone was pretty new at that time. I think so. I think that was pretty cool. But then Google responded, like, within a year or two with Android, and the g one was, like, the first Android phone. And I remember being, like, oh, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna be, you know, a supporter of the walled garden of Apple. You know, I want I want Android because it's open source. Even though, like, realizing now that's, like, technically true, but also Google has its own walled garden anyways. But I am still an Android user. I will say that. And I will say that I still miss the the flip out keyboard of the g one because I can still I could still type faster on that than I can on my current phone. So, I had I I am still not with Verizon because they're terrible. I mean, they're all the carriers are terrible. Nobody likes their carrier. That's like a thing. It seems a bit like a choose your poison kind of choice. Yeah. Right. Exactly. So, man, I have never been challenged on my tweets before. I'm glad

Now I have, a blue RDH one, which is, like, literally a $100. You can just, like, I think Amazon has a deal, because I broke so many phones. I had a Nexus four. I broke it within, like, a few months because I don't know. I dropped it once and it just the screen was done. So I, ironically, I've had a cheap phone expecting it to break, and I've had it for, like, over almost three years now. So who knows? Maybe I just made it. Maybe I've I've stopped being so clumsy with my phone. But Well, talk about besting expectations right there. Yeah.

experience there, I'm not sure how much it influenced the kind of civic tech work I did. I know that I realized afterwards that I was, like, did not really wanna work in campaigns because it was, like, crazy hours. Like, the moment when I, like, went to go in and, like, I took a day off from work to go volunteer for a day, and I had to call in to get, access to the building from my contact there at the Obama campaign. I know I got there at, like, nine, and I was like, hey. You know, I'm here. Can you let me up? And the guy let me in? He was like, oh, yeah. I I just got up. I'm like, oh, okay. I'll give you time. He's like, no. No. I slept under my desk last night. And so I was like, okay. That's what kind of thing is go and this is like the January before. Like, we were like ten months out from the election or more, and that's what it was like. So I was like, okay. Maybe not the lifestyle I want. You You know, my my experience from that point and then going into doing the sort of, earlier websites like Chicago lobbyists, really always kinda came from the outsider perspective. In many ways, that's kind of how I think Chai Hacknight positions itself even to this day as outside of government, which is something that I think is perhaps a bit different than a lot of other, civic technology groups. It seems like more often than not, Code for America brigades are more aligned kind of with government and as part like, treating government as a partner. And while some of that does happen, like, now actually more than than it had before, we've always of positioned ourselves as outsiders. Like, we've never been sponsored by the government. We've never really taken on projects at Chi Hacknight, at least early on that were for government. You know, some of the more successful projects or high profile projects that have come out of Chai Hacknight are, in some ways antagonistic of government. You know, my building doesn't recycle is a really good example that Claire Micklin, built. She didn't have recycling in her building, and she wanna know why. And so she did some research and found out that the city was supposed to be fining her landlord for not having a a recycling receptacle. And so she saw a law and she's like, well, on the books, like, this is already solved, but clearly the city is not even enforcing its own law. So how am I gonna go and change that? Right? It's not like I can just go and, you know, tell my landlord that they better do this or else they'll get fined because that just wasn't happening. So she set out at Tri Hackney to build a tool so so people could report that they were also experiencing this problem. And she got a a a a group of developers together and built my building doesn't recycle.com. And it was a website that you could just type in an address and it will comment and say, I don't have recycling here. And that yielded a map that, over over the course of, several months, she got thousands of reports. And it it was so much of a a of a a phenomenon that she got a bunch of press about her. Right? So, like, the website was featured on WBEZ and the Chicago Tribune and a number of other websites. And at that point, then all of a sudden, government was paying attention because there was a negative angle to it, and they needed to respond to being criticized. And so the the sort of end result of that is after all of that, after she got to that point where here you like, here is a website that she and her team built and got the the made the government honestly look bad. That was when she had leverage to actually do what she thought needed to be done, which is eventually they, wrote a new ordinance, and passed it, and it went into effect in January. So I'd say that that's the kind of angle that I'd say, is a is generally, like, a big part of the spirit of TrihackKnight. That being said, folks in government have come come and presented to Tri Hacknight. Folks in government have come and leveraged the sort of breakout group structure we have to work on projects. I mean, Thomas Schenck is a is a great example of someone who really, figured out an awesome way to thread that.

of use sort of the inherent, volunteer spirit of volunteerism that exists in TrihackKnight and leverage it for something like, really positive for the people working on it, but also for the city. I mean, they, the Clearwater Project came out of that, which is a way for them to have a better model of when to close the beaches whenever there was, the water was unsafe. And they were able to do that a couple of other different ways to get volunteers to help, you know, work on city projects. So it eventually did happen, but it actually took a little bit of time, I think, for both Tom and his team and TrihackKnight folks to figure out how to do that work because there's a lot of work that government just kinda can't take outside, you know. It's like sometimes it's got proprietary information. Sometimes it's, like, just a sensitive subject. And so Tom, being part of Chai Hacknight, for so long, knew kind of where to find where that space was, and was able to really do some cool projects with it. But, yeah, for a while, it was, like, very, it was hard to find that out. And the easiest thing to do is just to sort of be clearly on the outside of of government.

There's plenty of projects that benefit government. And there's there's plenty of projects that, after you do them, the government looks good in the end. Right? I mean, I think a project that we did early on, Clear Streets, which, tracks the snow plows every winter, that was an example of a project released a tool that called plow tracker that lets you see where the plows are deployed whenever it snows. So they got about 300 plows, and they essentially, you know, usually while you're sleeping, go out and plow the streets. It's kind of amazing. People in Chicago, I think, unfairly criticize those plow drivers. Like, people will see that one of them, like, maybe pulled over to the side of the road. Maybe one of them, like, went into McDonald's or something. And there's a sort of, like, cynical attitude that I've observed that a lot of people have thinking that the government just isn't doing its basic job and that these plow drivers are lazy or something. And that compounded with the fact that, the city has had legitimate problems clearing the snow in past decades. I mean, Mayor Balandic lost to to Jane Byrne, who became the first female mayor of Chicago because the Balandic administration, like, literally screwed up clearing the snow. And so there's, like, a real history to that that, like, combined with people's, like, stereotypes about government and misconceptions about government, like, makes it, like, kind of a thing. So when we, built Clear Streets, and this is actually a project the first project I worked on with Forrest Gregg, who's my partner at DataMate now. Our goal was to just answer that basic question. It's like, is is there, like, equity when it comes to how the city plows the streets? Are they actually doing, like, what they say they're doing? And we found that, like, after launching it, it that was true. In the process of, like, making this app, app, it's also, like, a useful fun tool to look at because we scrape the plow locations in real time and then map them to the street grid. So you can see as the streets are being plowed, the the lines are drawn. So it's kinda like Tron, I guess, if you've ever played the, like, the light cycle game where the plows are, like, literally, like, leaving trails behind them. And so, it was, like, a very popular app because people were, like, really, this is exciting to see. But then we also looked at the aftermath of it and found that, oh, yeah. Like, the the city actually did do a very good job covering the the areas of the city. And so, in that case, I think that it made the city look good, because here, they were actually doing what they, said they were doing, and and sort of dispelling that that myth or at least what I saw is, like, a common, like, a common myth that people common misperception people had. Later on, we found that there were actual local examples of things not going quite according to plan, which is actually, like, I think, a great story of just how government kinda works in general. Like, overall, all the pieces, like, make sense. Like, the overall scheme of how the city plows streets is, like, they're doing a good job. But then at the local level, sometimes you have streets that get skipped, and there's reasons for that. And so there was a a block on the, North Side of, Chicago, I think, 30 Seventh Ward. And they, one thing that happens when you run a website is, with government data on it is that people, will mistake you for being the government. And so or at least think you're somehow connected to them. So we got an email from someone saying, hey. You know, our street has been plowed. Can you, like, do something about it? And we had to respond, like, no. We can show you the data about where they are, but we have no like, all you can really do is, like, call your alderman or call 311 or something like that. And they had already tried their alderman. They had already tried the city. And eventually, after a while, they just called the local NBC affiliate and asked them to look into it. And so then we got another email about, couple weeks later from someone from NBC investigates, and they asked us, hey. You know, we're gonna do a story. We think we wanna see what's going on with this block. Could you corroborate the that, like, what they're saying with data? And we could because we had that data. We'd scraped all the data. And so I did that analysis for them and found that no plows ever went down their street. And the segment aired and it was very popular. And lo and behold, the next day their street got plowed. Well, it sounds like that was effective. It was effective. Right? But I mean, sometimes that's what it takes. Right? And then actually, the next winner, the opposite happened where there's a very powerful alderman in Chicago, mayor, sorry, Ed Burke, who's as well call him mayor because he's, like, he's been in office for fifty years, and he is, like, the by far the most powerful, like, member of Chicago City Council. He, like, sets the legislative agenda for many things. And he lives on a dead end one way street on the Southwest side of the city. And, there was complaints from neighbors that his street was getting plowed before everybody else's. And we found out that event that, history was in fact getting plowed ahead of all these other side streets. And we we partnered with Dan Milopoulos from the Sun Times who went down and corroborated and then got his hands on what they called the plow book, which is like the master plan of, like, where the plows should all go. And then found that, somehow that dead end one Way Street had been listed as a main arterial. Interesting. And ended up publishing, I think, a cover story on the Sun Times, like, saying that, you know, Ed Burke got his street plowed five times before anybody else did. And then, it snowed again, like, a week later, and then we checked again, and he did it again. And then they had another cover page story. I think that one the title was he has snowshame. And then I think eventually, he I don't know if he stopped, but it did trigger investigation from the city inspector general, and they did eventually get it, like, changed. But it took, like, that kind of effort. So I the story with Clear Streets is that, like, I think is, again, like, a microcosm for, I think, a lot of things going on in government is that, like, overall things are working, but then there's certain cases where at the local level, like, some weird, like, you know, influence or weird kinds of of bureaucratic circumstance can mean that things don't quite work as as they properly do. But the cool thing about what we had with ClearStreet is we had all the data. So we could show both that macro view and zoom in to a very local level and see the micro view of what was going on at the block level, which, I don't know, I think is actually something that, like, is is it tells what I have observed over the years is, like, a pretty true story about what's going on with government.

has a place in kind of that broader civic tech movement? Oh, yeah. I mean, it has to. I mean, otherwise, what do you what do you stand for? They, you know, at Chai Hackney, we have, found, I think, what is a good and effective place to be at, which is we're not partisan. We don't endorse candidates. We don't endorse political parties. But we do I mean, we do and it's set we say this all the time. We care about transparency, accountability, and open data, and good governance. And so if we're not pushing for those things with the leverage that we have, then that's an opportunity missed. And who else who better to do it than us? Because this is, like, literally what we care about. It's like like, one of the main reasons we all get together every week. So that's something that we've done in the last couple of years, in fact, is, it started with the state's attorney, Cook County state's attorney, an open data pledge. Just, and it's just a document that we send out sent out to every candidate saying that if elected, will you support transparency and open data? And we have some specific asks. Because we saw, that is a as an opportunity because there's that's an office. The Stitts attorney's office was traditionally very closed off. And we learned through observing over the years that, like, a great time to push for something is around election time. Right? I mean, that is, again, like, why the city of Chicago got open data in the first place. It was because the right people got to the Emmanuel transition team at the right time. And and also, I think he was influenced by being in the Obama administration, which also spearheaded data.gov. That, like, moment of change was a great opportunity that people seized on, and that's why we have the open data portal we have. That's why, you know, Tom Schenck got to be chief data officers because that the right argument was made to the right people at the right time. And so seeing that as a as a mechanism for enacting the change we wanna see, we've done those open data pledges now for, the governor. So, we we have, governor's race coming up pretty soon, and, JB Pritzker has signed our pledge as did three other Democratic candidates for governor. I really tried hard to get Reiner's people to sign it, and I know they saw it, but they didn't sign it. So they have, as of this moment, not signed it. Don't think they will before November. And then we're we're gonna do another one for the mayor, the mayoral race in February because, again, there's another opportunity to expand the kinds of open data that are available. So, yeah, I think that, again, we come at this from an outsider's perspective. And I think that it's an important lever for us to to to be pulling if we actually care about these things.

Councilmatic is a website that lets you track what city council is up to. It is all of the council members and the meetings that they hold and the bills they sponsor and vote on. And it is something that actually has a long lineage in the civic tech and even before it, open gov or gov two point o space. It actually originated in two places. One was OpenStates, which is a Sunlight Foundation project where it was actually an amazing ambitious project. It's still around. It's not like, Sunlight has, like, sort of jettisoned it, and it is now being maintained by some of the original, builders of it in a more volunteer capacity. But it was an as a project to go and scrape the state legislatures for every state. And every single state legislature has its own terrible website that basically posts the same information, like, who are the members of the body, and what did they vote on, and and all that kind of stuff. So they built open states, and after going through and building a 50 state tool and all the scrapers that were required of that. Sunlight, in partnership with a couple other organizations, developed a, a platform and a standard known as open civic data as a way to model legislative bodies, not just at the state level, but actually all the way down to the local level, down to, like, you know, this board of a mosquito abatement district or whatever. Right? And it was amazing because they they took all that knowledge that they had in, in sort of doing it the hard way and and and and baking that into this very, like, robust, somewhat complicated structure. So that's one half of it. The other half actually came from a Code for America project. I think the first year of fellows twenty eleven, Majembe Poe, built the original Councilmatic for Philadelphia, which is actually still up. It's like philly.councilmatic.org. And, it was a Django project, and our sort of original idea behind Chicago Councilmatic was to, we really wanted to do something with legislative data. And by we, I mean, me and Forrest Gregg. And so we were like, well, on the way to doing something interesting with that data, since we have to get that data anyways, we might as well just fork this, project from Code for America in Philly and just and set it up in Chicago. That ended up taking six months because it was very complicated, and it was both, I think, Jumbay's first Django project and my first Django project. So there was a lot of learning the hard way. We eventually launched an early version of CouncilMatic, and it kind of worked. And then a couple of years later, we ended up getting a grant from the Sunlight Foundation to then set up CouncilMatic and rebuild it using this open data, open civic data framework. And so that's what we have now. And CouncilMatic in Chicago has been up for several years now. We have a version of it that the city Of New York has adopted officially. They pay pay for it. And we also have a a version of it set up in Los Angeles for the LA Metro board. And it's essentially a very it's a very powerful platform because we because we have open civic data, we can take the same stack and pretty easily set it up in another city as and and as long as we can pull the data in open in open civic data format. So, again, like, Sunlight Foundation Labs really, are amazing in that they came up with this sort of very robust, very, intelligent data standard, which enables something like councilmatic to happen. And I say that because that's usually not how it goes. That's usually, like, data standards are, like, not thought of in that way, by a lot of folks, but it really is the thing that makes it possible for it to to work the way it does. So, yeah, in Chicago, we you know, you can you can get an email alert whenever there's, a bill that has any keyword that you can subscribe to. You can get subscriptions to council meetings or committee meetings or or track your alderman. So, surprisingly, popular features on Chicago Council Matic is the Alderman lookup, just because you can type in an address and find out who your alderman is very quickly. And it's, like, surprisingly hard to do that on city clerk's website. Yes. The the the, the user experience of using CouncilMatic is at least some bounds better than that than my website. Yeah. And that's in itself a whole class of sort of civic app. Right? Which I I haven't really talked too much about yet, which is taking an existing, government data or government function and then just, like, doing it better. And it takes a certain level of commitment from the people doing this and a certain level of badness on the part of the government website for it to, like, make sense to do it. But there's certainly a number of opportunities out there for taking a bad government process and making it good or better. And that's what Councilmanmatic is.

do you partake in the, the Fantasy Civics app? Do you play I have. I haven't played it in a while. But, yeah, when Vinesh, set that up the first time, I think I got the round I was playing in. I think I got second place. Oh, impressive. Yeah. I thought I I I forget who won. Somebody got you know, I knew that, Alderman Burke was gonna be a good one because that guy likes to introduce a lot of honorary resolutions. By the way, that's like a fun thing that city council does. A fun slash pointless thing is they love to give out honorifics, which is just basically the city council likes to recognize such and such a street as this honorary street or such and such a person for a lifetime of service. They also have things that are, like, weird, like so and so's daughter for getting, like, straight a's on her math tests or something like that. They produce a lot of honorifics. And then the other big point getter would be Brendan Riley, who's the downtown alderman because there's just so many businesses. And another fun thing about city council is alderman are dealing with the minutiae of, of street awnings and zoning changes and small claims that all passes through city council and are technically sponsored by that alderman. So that's how you rack up the points in Fantasy Civics, which, is a pretty fun game. Have you talked to Vaneesh before?

city council and it was powered by Councilmatic, the data, to take it and make basically, like, a fantasy football, style game on top of what's going on in city council. I thought it was just, like, a very clever way of getting people to engage in something that is both important but mundane. Right? Like, I'm as I'm as guilty of this as the next person, but, like, I just get sucked into national politics. I mean, it's like, you know, it's hard to turn away from the dumpster fire that's happening right now. But, it's also simultaneously very paralyzing because you know you have no power. You you know you have no influence or no way to affect change in Washington DC. At least I feel that way. I think most people feel that way. But at the same time, the most important things that are happening to you personally are actually happening at the local level. Like, your alderman and your mayor and your, you know, whoever represents you on the at the county level and your governor of your state and your state legislature state legislators, even though you have no idea what their name is, they have actually quite a lot of power over what your day to day life looks like. And you, on the other hand, have a lot of power over them because just so few people pay attention and so few people vote in those local elections that that that, you know, one person actually makes a huge difference. So I'm very much a proponent of and, again, another reason why we built CouncilMatic, making that more accessible. Right? And I think there's a lot more that we could do with CouncilMatic to make even better, but I was just so amazed with, the effort and the execution of the Fantasy Civics project that Vinesh did because it really does achieve that goal. Right? And it's silly. Like, you can kind of, like, look at it and dismiss it as a silly laugh, but it's also, like, kind of amazing that you can actually get someone to pay attention to who you like, it might even make you go find out who your alderman is finally, which is, like, most people even that come to TrihackKnight don't even know who their alternate

I I've always kind of been somewhat connected to that space, but I've always like, my heart's always been in in the work that we do here in Chicago. I guess I'd just like to say that it it seems to me that the civic technology wave that happened and really sort of peaked, I wanna say, around 2014, 2015, has crashed. And that there was this huge seemed like this huge, amount of effort and and peer groups like Code of America and the Sunlight Foundation, and, you know, a few other groups as well, like open plans that, have really changed, I think, actually, in the last since since then. I think it seems to me that, like, a lot of funders have moved on to other things. And that, you know, I think this is especially it's been something I've observed for a while. And it's also something that, really kinda the point was really clearly made when I read the more than code report. I'm not sure if you've seen that. It's more than code dot c c. It's it's, like, basically a field scan for the sort of technology just and justice, space, which the folks who did the research included civic tech in that, but it also included, like, community tech and and tech for social justice, and a bunch of other sort of areas or nonprofit areas or industries that maybe folks in civic tech might not even think about or know about. But they included civic tech in all of that. And I think that after reading that report, it really kinda made me realize, probably for the, you know, for the first time in a really pointed way that, yes, sort of, like, I think the big wave of of civic tech that I have, like, seen, and known to define, like, in the sort of way that I've been brought up as sort of starting Chai Hacknight and started Datamate in this space. That's kind of, like, crashed and is still around, but sort of, like, fizzling out. But in the sort of aftermath of that, seeing that there are so many other groups outside of civic tech that do a lot of the same things that we do and care about a lot of the same things we do, and that we haven't really been connected to them. So I am we're very much this is something we're talking about at Datamade, somewhere that we're talking more about at Chai Hacknight. I think I'm at the point now where I think that it's okay to let go of that initial kind of group of civic tech, folks. Not that we're not gonna, like, still be in touch, but I think that there's a lot more to go see in the world and groups to meet and groups to talk to and groups to learn from and partner with that we're gonna benefit from much more. You know, I also think a lot about the really awful revelations that came out earlier this year around Clay Johnson and the, the Me Too of Civic Tech. And if you haven't read that, you should because it's real and it's happening. And there's some real terrible stories there, but there's also some very brave people who have spoken out about that. And I think about the kind of that rotten part of civic tech and the need to really face it. And I feel that the folks who are in charge of the civic tech space right now are not facing it. And I'm actually looking towards other other folks to to take that leadership position. And I'm doing what I can, you know, again, as like a white guy running a civic tech organization to, to do my part in helping to support the people that I think need to be supported and to sit back and listen and try to learn more about how we can make our space more equitable. I think we pay a lot of lip service to transparency and accountability, but I think that, a lot of organizations in civic tech do not practice them. And that's something that I think I I'm actively taking steps to do with Chi Hachnite, and and with DataMaid. And it's something that, I don't I again, I'm gonna be focusing on and learning more about doing better. And I'm doing that outside of the civic tech sphere, because there's just, I think, not enough experience or knowledge in our own space to do that. So it's, I don't know, maybe that's a somber note to go out on. But that's kinda where my mind's at. I figured I wanted to share that with folks.