Methods for the madness

Liz Barry is a founding member of the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science where, as director of community development, she guides the interplay between place-based organizing and distributed peer production. She speaks internationally on tuning human-environment-technology relationships and collaboration at scale. She is a nobody.

Serving as founding board member for The Computational Democracy Project, and developing strategy for civic lotteries for NYC municipal government took up most of the non-survival oriented bits of 2020. She dedicated 2019 to designing and implementing conflict resilience and consent-based governance with non-violent direct action group Extinction Rebellion NYC, and advising XR UK's Future Democracy Hub on "listening at scale" (quote by Audrey Tang). In Fall 2018 she worked in China with environmental defenders and stewards. In 2017, she traveled to Antarctica with The Aerocene, organized Data Rescue NYC with the The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, and taught Sustainable Systems at Parsons the New School for Design (think styrofoam-eating mealwoms). In 2016, she helped introduce English speakers to the cyberpunk frontier of democracy: vTaiwan. In 2015, the City of New York scaled TreeKIT -- a project she co-founded with Philip Silva to measure, map and monitor street trees -- into a city-wide initiative (TreesCount2015!) in which thousands of New Yorkers mapped over half a million trees. Additionally, she taught for a decade in Columbia University's graduate Urban Design Department, served as a Fellow at the Design Trust for Public Space on Five Borough Farm Phases II & III, and was named a Sunlight Foundation OpenGov Champion. She first came to the sidewalks of New York City to catalyze public interaction with a "Talk To Me" sign and throw parties in Bryant Park for strangers to meet each other, in contrast with working few years later in SOM's corporate architecture office on Wall Street designing new cities and campuses for people she would never meet. Liz is originally from North Carolina where she helped start an urban agriculture youth enterprise called the Durham Inner-city Gardeners (DIG) that continues to thrive today.

Presence

Arcana