Here’s how I use storytelling in my work. Most projects I work on are in collaboration with mission-driven organisations, non-profits, and progressive think tanks. You can always learn more about me in a much more fun way by going to my website.
Funding Open Source Science Software is a comprehensive analysis of the funding landscape within open source science software. A lot of scientists need specialist software to do their research, and a lot of that research is open source — and open source software is notoriously difficult to fund. The Wellcome Trust asked me to produce a report to better understand the pain points felt by the scientists using & maintaining open source software for their work. So much of this software is unremarkable on paper, even though it exists as critical infrastructure for much of our digital world. And some of it helped capture the first ever photo of a black hole…
Audience: Funders and technical leads within Wellcome & beyond. This report was written without jargon to accommodate a large audience with mixed technical expertise.
Client: The Wellcome Trust | A global charitable foundation established in 1936, working towards a healthier future for everyone.
**Gotcha!** is a miniseries I produced for the Computer Says Maybe podcast. It’s about scams, how they work, and how technology is supercharging them. As with all episodes I produced in my time at The Maybe, I sourced the guests, prepped questions, prepped the host, and edited the series.
I told the story in four parts: from crypto, to multi-level level marketing, to generative AI — finishing with Cory Doctorow and Enshittification, the final boss of technological scams.
Audience: 10k+ listeners across Europe and the US, consisting of researchers, journalists, funders, and activists working at the intersection of technology and politics.
Client: The Maybe | A Media organisation & consultancy which challenges the politics and power of technology
**In this report,** Alice Thwaite and I go deep on technologies that are designed to enhance privacy, and assurances that these technologies come with. In order to understand assurance, you need to understand trust — and trust is a confident relationship with the unknown. If you trust that a piece of encryption software will perform effectively, that means you know there’s a chance it will fail. Trust relationships are a hugely important part of building good technologies; as you can imagine, we wrote this report before generative AI came and destroyed everything.
Audience: Leaders in science and technology, academics, think tanks, non-profits
Client: The Royal Society | The independent scientific academy of the UK, dedicated to promoting excellence in science for the benefit of humanity.
Sometimes trans hate proliferates through social media in the form of dogwhistles. So how do you catch it? And how does this effect the work of trans creators? I thought making a podcast episode was the best way to figure this out; I spoke to Jenni Olson from GLAAD, TikTok creator Shivani Dave, Trust & Safety expert Alice Hunsberger, and Emily Cousens, a professor of gender studies at Northeastern. This is a rich, harrowing episode that explores the struggles that trans people face in the UK and online, the history that got us here, and what technical experts and advocates are doing to protect online queer communities.
Audience: 10k+ listeners across Europe and the US, consisting of researchers, journalists, funders, and activists working at the intersection of technology and politics.
Client: The Maybe | A Media organisation & consultancy which challenges the politics and power of technology
Elise Racine & The Bigger Picture / Better Images of AI
AWO are a strategic litigation firm in the digital rights space. In that sense, they are very good at decentring themselves from their work. This makes a content marketing strategy especially challenging — they thought it might be vulgar to show off about how well they were protecting human rights in the digital age. Fair enough. I convinced them that writing blogs about representing high-profile complainants in very consequential cases brought against huge online platforms was just good business practice, never mind about showing off. As well as the blog, I helped them launch a monthly newsletter on algorithm governance, secure their tone of voice, and adapt a storytelling practice that worked for them.
Audience: Leaders, advocates, and legal professionals working in digital rights, trust & safety, and data governance.
Client: AWO | A law firm and consultancy that empowers individuals and organisations to uphold data rights, comply with the law and effect change in data protection and digital policy.
Turn2Us support those in financial hardship by providing digital tools and services; and these of course collect a lot of data. For a charity like Turn2Us, data is massively important to improving the way they support their service-users. Tom Kluge and I put together a Data & Insight Strategy for the digital team at Turn2Us to help them derive better insights from their data. I interviewed both internal and external participants, organised and analysed the data into findings & recommendations, and wrote up the report.
Audience: this was mainly internal but is the type of document that could add value to any leadership team of a charity who run digital services or have ambition to derive meaningful insights from their data.
Client: Turn2Us | A national charity providing practical help to people who are struggling financially.