Please join me in welcoming Daniel Mackisack (LinkedIn), the new Manager of the Civic Tech Field Guide!

First though: I am deeply grateful to everyone who applied to join the team, both for your time and for wanting to be part of this project.

Thanks also to my colleagues at Superbloom Design for helping me survive this process while onboarding at another full-time job. And to the Public Interest Tech Infrastructure Fund for their vital support and belief in the Civic Tech Field Guide.

Because this is our first full-time hire, we were looking for someone with both very specific domain expertise and a very broad set of skills. Daniel stood out in each stage of the process.

Not just for his domain experience (editing and building product at the literal Democracy Technologies magazine, co-creating the first platform to make space policy participatory, Celestial Commons). But also, the quality of his thinking and writing on the very challenges we’re facing today as a community. As an example of what I mean, check out his piece, Participation Is Not a Panacea for Democratic Decline.

Daniel’s been engaged in the field from supporting journalists in Cairo during the optimism of the Arab Spring to practicing actual diplomacy to experimenting with liquid democracy tools. He will keep the project’s critical journalistic lens polished. He calls himself a ‘belligerent optimist’, which I think is an apt stance for all of us to take these days.

As Daniel gets going, I will be stepping back from the day-to-day management of the Field Guide. I will continue leading the overall project and work with Daniel to help the Field Guide productively grow the fields of civic and public interest tech.

You, our community of practitioners, builders, students, funders, researchers, and activists will very quickly benefit from both Daniel’s contributions and the deepened capacity on our team. I’m thrilled to have him here.