A big apology to all those unlucky enough to stumble across my site during the months of September and October, as things are currently in an irritating state of chaos due to my redesign of content, logo and layout. In the meantime, feel free to follow me on Twitter to keep updated on what I’m up to. Right now, this mostly entails working as Community Coordinator for the Open Knowledge Foundation and speaking about my MSc thesis on gender in hacker cultures, so I’ve been having lots of fun organizing and attending open knowledge cons and meet-ups around Europe. Thanks for your patience!

For those interested in my, well… eccentric writing side, I’ve just started a new column over at the awesome, London-based Mint Magazine about my experiences in the city’s dark streets entitled “A Gutter Rat in London”. I’m feeling quite hyped to share my thoughts through this avenue - because as all word-crafters know, there’s nothing worse than a writer with odd ideas and no soapbox to stand on!

An excerpt: “London is literally awash with cool shit. In its graffiti-covered alleyways, its dirty puke-filled gutters, its art student ‘happenings’, its crumbling warehouses and its pirate radio rooftops, this city is pulsating with a chaotic energy that’s both subversive and fascinating.” If you’re reading this and have ideas of odd and interesting London-based things I should sniff out, do let me know. I’ll buy you a rat….

As my London self, I’ve done some work with the always-rad #media2012 folks lately. #media2012 is a collaborative project aimed at using London’s 2012 Olympics to help create a positive, citizen-focused media legacy in the region. Says #media2012: “We propose to build artist-led community media hubs around the UK and in London during Games time, which will draw in stories from the Nations and Regions, affecting the core media narrative about the Games and building a new media legacy for the Olympic Movement.”

My participation has included representing #media2012 as a student citizen journalist at the [very official] PODiUM conference for higher education and the Olympics [see a story on our participation here, and my photos from the event here], and I’m looking at other ways to involve the collaborative’s potential in London pre-Olympics community building. The reason I’m such a big fan of #media2012 [outside of the awesome people who started it, including Andy Miah and Jennifer M Jones] is because it reminds me of the work all of us Vancouver community organizers did with the W2 Media + Culture House to build citizen empowerment around Vancouver’s 2010 Olympics. Here’s hoping #media2012 can build an even more successful coalition of cool and empowered folk in 2012!

For those who haven’t yet been updated, last week I left Vancouver’s lovely shores for the far-off metropolis of London. Why would I ever do such a thing, you ask? Well, the techie nerd in me has ventured back into the world of academia, specifically via UCL’s exciting Digital Anthropology MSc degree. I imagine UCL’s prestigious hallways smell rather like leather bound books and rich mahogany.

I look forward to studying the theory behind Internet community building and activism. Exactly how is are decentralized virtual worlds changing our understandings of cultural identity? My thesis will explore the ways hacktivism and open source countercultures contribute to our civil society. I’m excited to get started.

Two other things I look forward to:

•  Being at the heart of London-centric street graffiti, dubstep and electronic music and its subterranean, dark and entirely mind-blowing nature. Some of our generation’s most inspirational artists live here, from Banksy, D*FACE, Burial, James Blake, Four Tet, Mosca, ITAL tek, Kryptic Minds & Distance to StolenSpace gallery (I could go on!)

•  London’s chaotic Olympics energy. After interesting (and at times, harrowing) experiences with Vancouver’s 2010 Olympics (and the great citizen media projects we helped build at spaces like W2 Woodwards with events like the Fresh Media Olympics), I’m intrigued to watch London grapple with its own 2012. Olympics. I’m hoping Londoners will also focus on democratizing citizen experiences through the lens of the Games the way we did in Vancouver - and I look forward to getting involved with initiatives that help build that (#media2012 is a great start).

For now, this means I’m open to taking on new design, writing and social media contracts in London, which is both terrifying and exciting! Thanks to Flickr user EO1 for the great London photo.

I always find myself inspired by deliberate incongruity in graphic design - startling, vibrant flashes of manic creativity juxtaposed with regularized organic landscapes (such as the map tumor above courtesy of Strange Maps). There’s something oddly beautiful about our world’s modern combinations of progress/innovation and tradition/routine.

Seeing pieces like this almost prepares me to believe that our society has finally learned how to reconcile our past with our impending future - as if the hopeful, celebratory visions of Superstudio are being realized (albeit in a newly cynical world).

In other news, our first REMIXOLOGY salon (organized by Fresh Media, a media/arts collective I co-founded) was a resounding success, with a packed house at the W2 Media + Arts Centre full of interesting people discussing citizen journalism in Vancouver. I’ll upload my poster design for the event, photos and press features soon.

I’ve been really inspired by the concepts of Transformation Design lately. The concepts are definitely interdisciplinary, but when applied literally to graphic/web design, it gives us an innovative method for overhauling old stereotypes of what design should be about — in doing so,  designers like myself (with backgrounds in social justice work) have more opportunities to make the world a more equitable place through design. It’s great to learn that these ideas are being discussed at length in academic and professional realms.

Via Peter Jones, Design Dialogues: “Like the onerously overused “innovation,” transformation may be getting a bad rap. Both are broad, overstated terms that mean very different things to people, depending on background, experience, industry. Both must be defined in their contexts of use before we can have any serious discussion. The wide range of meanings and uses of transformation should give us pause before going too far with the term in mixed company. But transformation (as in organizational) has been merging closer to design (as in envisioned, creative, structured changemaking and sensemaking).”

I’m currently the Editor of Beyond Robson, a multi-author Vancouver publication focused on blog-style coverage of local city news, ideas and opinion. Here’s one of my most recent articles about Vancouver’s various descriptions through the eyes of international media who were here during the 2010 Winter Olympics. It was a fun article to write and got some really interesting comments.

so, i’ve finally updated my portfolio site and will be keeping things fresh from now on. speaking of things that are ‘fresh,’ here’s the poster i recently made for an upcoming fresh media conference we’re planning at the W2 media + culture house about how the vancouver olympics have been affected by social and online medias.