I’m working on a new project in the progressive tech space. For lack of a better name I’m calling it “Progressive Workshop” for now. It’ll be a website which houses a collection of resources in the progressive tech space: a list of git repositories, APIs, and the like. I’m also hoping to pair it with a list of “problems” and “solutions” - that is to say, pain points that impact a lot of people across the progressive movement, and proposed means for solving them.

This last piece is the one I care about most. Over the years I’ve heard a lot of talk about problems in our space. Some of the most common ones include the need to contest every race and the need to organize all year, every year - not just when elections come around. There are plenty of others - recently there’s been some really interesting criticism of data models and the way they exclude people of color from campaign organizing, for instance. It’s time to roll up our sleeves and tackle these problems.

One thing I really like about the progressive tech ecosystem: it’s a positive, constructive environment. People tend to look for solutions first and gripe second. I hope this project will be one small contribution toward that feeling, and I hope that others find it useful, as well.

There’s more, or at least I hope there will be! Talking about problems and solutions is all very fine, but it’s better still to actually put solutions into practice.

One thing I think our space needs, as soon as earthly possible, is a startup studio. I have in mind some kind of organization which has as its mission the creation of new progressive-tech startups. Ideally it would be an organization which seeks out problems in the progressive space, and then methodically creates new enterprises which seek to solve those problems in a financially sustainable way. Do they all need to be for-profit, high-growth startups? Certainly not, in this space there’s clearly plenty of room for non-profits, PACs, and so on. Does it even need to be a new organization? Even that’s not entirely clear to me - there are certainly some really excellent groups who are doing adjacent work along these lines, most notably Higher Ground Labs and New Media Ventures. I’d love to see a studio emerge out of one of these groups - perhaps they’ve even got something cooking, it’s not exactly an unheard-of idea.

There’s a long road from here to there, and quite a lot of details I haven’t even thought to consider yet. But I hope this project is a promising start!