This is not a post-election think piece. Lord knows we have enough of those already. It is not a To-Do List for the Brokenhearted. It’s not an assessment of blame, a hope-in-a-dark-place mantra, or a rallying cry. This is just a statement of fact — a fact I believe sits at the heart of Tuesday’s election outcome — followed […]
The Bowdoinham Democratic caucus was a great place to be on Sunday. Excellent turnout and engaging discussions about the issues, all buoyed by the general ebullience that comes from having a choice between two strong candidates. This was my first caucus. If I learned one thing from the experience, it was this: be sure you’re […]
Reply All is my favorite podcast. It bills itself as “a show about the internet.” The latest episode is about diversity in Silicon Valley, approached through the lens of a black engineer who recently quit his job at Twitter. It is fascinating and absolutely worth a listen. One of my favorite parts is an example […]
David Cohen, a storied activist and leader on campaigns for social and economic justice, passed away at the end of last year. Between 2005 and 2007, David and I worked together at Experience Corps in Washington, DC. We shared an office for a brief time. At one point, I recall showing him the keyboard shortcuts […]
A couple weeks ago, Bates College was on The Simpsons. I found out on a Sunday evening via Facebook, where a friend mentioned he had just seen the show poking fun at Bates. Next, I checked Yik Yak, where some of our students were talking about seeing it as well. Because Simpsons episodes and clips […]
Watching a tragedy unfold from the other side of the world can at once be deeply moving and terribly frustrating. It can be hard to know what to do, how to react. Even if the events have no tangible, concrete effect on your day-to-day life, the urge to express empathy with the victims can be […]
I was very sorry to learn that legendary font designer Adrian Frutiger passed away on September 10. After a somewhat painstaking process of research and testing, last month we finally switched to his “Neue Frutiger” as our sans serif font on bates.edu. The response has been very positive, and I love seeing it there every […]
Wired profiles former U.S. CTO Todd Park in an excellent piece that absolutely nails the issues with stagnation in federal tech: procurement and inertia. Park knows the problem is systemic—a mindset that locks federal IT into obsolete practices—“a lot of people in government are, like, suspended in amber,” he said to the crowd at Mozilla. […]
UPDATE: Apparently the governor has been asking himself this very same question: “I’m considering running for Mike Michaud’s seat if you want to know the truth because it can’t be any worse in Washington than it is here,” LePage said. “Everything’s on the table. Retirement, Social Security, running for Congress, maybe going back to Marden’s […]
The movement to assess and improve the usability of federal government websites is small, vocal, and growing. GSA’s First Fridays program makes free usability testing available to federal agencies, and a wide range of agencies have undertaken their own regular assessments of their sites and applications. Slowly but surely, the archaic mindset that a .gov […]