Community engagement and advocacy for the City of Oakland

The City of Oakland asked us to engage directly with disadvantaged communities to understand what they might need from the Oakland’s Capital Improvement Program, and work with them to prioritize and submit CIP proposals. In partnership with Walk Oakland Bike Oakland and emergent labs, we used a mix of online and in-person tools based on the World Café model to gain understanding of each community’s local interests. We built an extensive GIS system to develop strong narratives for proposals which would address historical inequities. A total of 44 projects were submitted for the city’s consideration.

Legacy system abatement planning for Berkeley School of Education

The Berkeley School of Education had several legacy workflow database systems which included sensitive data dating back 20+ years. Support for those systems was no longer available, and security of the data became a critical concern. We worked with BSE to understand how the systems were being used, interviewed similar units to see how they were managing similar business functions, and talked to central campus IT about the capabilities of enterprise systems to meet the need. We worked with the campus Information Security Office to mitigate the immediate security risks, completed the data mapping and migration to modern systems for much of the historical data, built a screenscraper for the legacy system to extract additional data, and presented BSE with an outline of how to fully migrate its workflows to new systems.

Urban exploration by bike

In collaboration with Walk Oakland Bike Oakland, I lead tours of Oakland neighborhoods by bike, seeing areas of the city participants may not have previously known, while providing commentary and analysis about the history of the place.

Analyzing longitudinal corridor data at scale

I built an analysis platform in Python to examine street networks and census data for cities across the nation, gathering street network and Census data to identify trends in demographic change in historically Black neighborhoods.

Supporting a successful student team capstone project

The Berkeley Arts+Design Initiative wanted to support student engagement with the arts. We worked with their student team to help deploy project management tools, and navigate the technical and bureaucratic hurdles to a successful launch.

Analyzing geospatial data in Python

I analyzed urban street networks and demographic data at national scale, integrating street network, demographic and employment data to demonstrate interactions between infrastructure, jobs, ethnicity and race.

Researching cycling cultures and advocacy

Researching cycling cultures and advocacy, we investigated the social importance of cycling in disadvantaged communities in four U.S. cities. The resulting thesis examines how cycling infrastructure has become associated with gentrification.

Team-building for Berkeley’s One IT

Berkeley’s One IT initiative sought to unify the many distributed IT groups on campus. We developed an exercise which encouraged participants to break away from their cynicism, and work together in an appreciative and observational mode.