Next steps for Jonathan

A quick update on what I’m doing. I recently retired from Global Integrity with my best wishes to them. Nathaniel kindly recapped my time at Global Integrity on the Global Integrity Commons.

It was ten years to the month since I started, and time to step out, particularly to connect with folks in Chicago. So I’m working on two projects at the moment, one based here in Chicago, another with folks all over the globe.

The first is as director of the Chicago Summit Project at Community Media Workshop, providing reporting resources for the G8 and NATO summits to be held in Chicago this May. I’m working with the Workshop to help media cover those events in a way that brings in deep, solution-oriented discussion of the social justice issues on the official and unofficial event agendas. Less people on podiums, more storytelling around how these issues — security, food, economies — impact people and what we could do differently. We’re going to play with some cool crowd-engagement tools, and figure out how to tell a really fast moving story in a useful way.

The second is the Social Tech Census with the engine room, a startup consultancy with staff in Cairo. The engine room aims to help advocacy organizations find and deploy appropriate technology. The Social Tech Census is a project to understand the global landscape of training organizations, and figure out who is most interesting, influential and worth emulating. To do this, we’re going to collect a bunch of survey data, and build a list of orgs, but with an eye to building social graphs of institutions and track who looks where for information.

I’m also open to future projects, particularly after this summer, when these wrap up. Thank you to everyone who has helped me recently figure out what to do next. I’m not sure what the destination is, but I’m moving fast and have good people to travel with. Thanks for that.

Cheers,

Jonathan