All the old posts for cordeliayu.com can now be found at archive.cordeliayu.com.

I need your help finding my next job—regardless of whether you've worked with me or mostly know me on the internet, I have some questions I'd love time find time to chat!

• If you know of me on the internet or through the conference circuit, I want to hear about the sorts of problems your organizations need help solving.
• If we're friends (be it online or in person), I want to know if there's anyone you think I should be talking to.
• If we've worked together before, I want to hear what you think made me a good colleague and where you think I could do better.

I've been thinking a lot about what I've learned in my last 8 years that I want to more about later, but I still hold to the core truth that I believed in when I first joined 18F in 2018: there are smart and people everywhere, there is worthy and impactful work everywhere—the trick is to find places that combine all of that. Email or ping me on signal—let's catch up.

So often the refrain is to minimize the harms, say that progress is necessary and this is the only way. But we cannot colonize our way to a more just and happier world. Progress starts with justice and care now, not for a hypothetical future utopian state.

As someone who has been experimenting with language models for my own private research for over a decade, the state of generative AI is a travesty. A tool that many of us hoped would help us analyze large sets of data to find interesting or hidden patterns has become--like many revolutionary technologies before it--another tool of imperialism and subjugation for the benefit of a few.

I have seen many projects where AI is used responsibly and for the benefit of people and communities who are underserved by existing structures and institutions, but for every good use case, I have seen innumerable troubling cases. From inaccessible interfaces to silent hallucinations hidden in complex analyses, the industry has created powerful amoral machines that are literally focused on doing whatever they can without stopping to think about whether they should.

From whom? By whom? For what purpose?

My stance on AI, as with my stance on all technology, is on the side of people and communities.

From whom

From stealing the intellectual property of creators to feed their models to regulatory capture to building data centers without environmental oversight in communities who don’t want them, as well as the wanton disregard of the social welfare of communities, workers, and anything other than their profit, the creation and maintenance of AI is extractive and exploitive. Entering and taking from communities without consent or consideration of the communities affected.

By whom

No technology is value-neutral so no analysis of technology should be without an analysis of the power dynamics involved in its creation and deployment. The explosive growth in AI is largely driven by the hyper-wealthy and imposed upon everyone else. as methods of surveillance and control.

For what purpose

If our tools do not support our individual agency and collective flourishing, then something is extremely wrong. Increases in productivity without correlating increases in quality of life are no improvement at all. The only value AI seems to provide right now is increasing the wealth of the few and the subjugation of everyone else.

My criteria for using machine learning and AI tools

Used poorly, LLMs are dangerous bias engines. That is why I am extremely careful with how I evaluate the quality of and use the results from from the tools I use. Results are benchmarked against human analysis; every source is cited and verified; every inference is auditable and traced.

Public domain and consensual data collections:

Data used to train and feed the models I use must be from open sources. If a community of origin or author of material does not consent to their data being used, it should not be used. While there are many real world examples where ignoring the consent of an individual or a community has created value for the whole, the ends do not justify the means. Too often, the greater good has been used as an excuse to ignore the needs of historically-minoritized communities.

Data sovereignty and privacy:

My preference is to run models locally and on my own systems, rather than third party or cloud services.

Verify results against established processes and tools:

My experience is that the loudest proponents of AI tend to demand immediate adoption while refusing any level of rigorous verification. Doing so in situations where hidden mistakes can irrevocably disrupt lives and communities for decades is incredibly reckless.

Other considerations

Transparency and auditability:

Since LLMs are non-deterministic, it is important to be able to understand, evaluate, and audit the accuracy of how the outputs are generated.

Default to openess:

I prefer to use language models that have openly released weights, training code, and data.

Domain-specificity:

Generalized large-language models are often less accurate in highly-specialized fields because they lack important context.

…and there is no such thing as a virgin forest.

When European colonists came to the Americas, they thought they had found a vast world of untouched plenty. As they expanded across the land, they kept finding new ecosystems of rich natural resources, it seemed infinite and unblemished by human hands. But that bountiful Eden they found was not untouched, but rather carefully maintained, cultivated, and managed by the indigenous communities that the colonists killed as they settled the land.

AI is a human technology, its intelligence is strip-mined from our collective cultural history; its rapid growth, a cancer, draining resources from and poisoning the lifeblood of our communities. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

I have seen AI projects made by people building tools to analyze open government data to help people understand what is happening within their own communities. Projects to build tools to help case workers working with people trying to access benefits programs. Drawing specifically from trusted, domain-specific data sources, these models have been able to become accurate enough to provide a tool to support case workers and legal teams. With the growth of movement for Rules as Code for regulatory documentation, high-quality metadata, there is much potential for AI tools to help people navigate laws, regulations, and other convoluted complex systems.

The commonality across many of these uses is that they are led by people who are trying to solve problems that their communities are facing. They are using trusted, open data sources. And instead of replacing established trusted human processes, they support the people doing the work, and make the difficult parts clearer and easier.

Technology always has a stance—I am skeptical that AI like Claude, ChatGPT, or any other that are rooted in exploitation and capital investment can help us produce a world where everyone flourishes. But tools that are, as Erin Kissane says, made in better ways and for better uses, and above all, in and for communities, might.

Hi y’all. Congratulations on finishing your rotation through the Digital Corp! The last few years have surely been a wild ride—possibly wilder than normal. And that’s what I want to talk about: to take care of yourselves in unprecedented times.

I’ve spent most of the last 20 years—nearly my entire career working in social- and civic-good spaces. In that time I have almost always given far more what was sustainable for me with the idea that I was building towards a better future and it would always be worth it. My greatest hope for you all is to not make that mistake. While we often celebrate the effort and accomplishments of heroes, heroic work is often necessary because of the failures of our institutions and social infrastructure.

Giving 110% and burning yourself out for a hopefully sustainable future doesn’t work. Sacrifice normalizes sacrifice, and sustained sacrifice becomes normalized injustice. Burning more than you can sustain creates a cycle of debt that is often impossible to escape, like orbiting into the event horizon of a black hole.

And that’s because capitalism is a hungry ghost. It will take everything you can give and still be unsatisfied. We chose this work because we’ve been called to make the world a better place, and that is generational work. So we need you to take care of yourself, too, because burning yourself out doesn’t make the world better.

There is meaningful work to do everywhere. There are brilliant, clever colleagues everywhere. There are places that care about work-life balance everywhere. The trick is to finding a combination of all three. Because making sacrifices to get something across the finish line might be a the short term reality, but it should not be the norm. It can’t be. We create the better world by finding and working with the people who are making sustainable and caring spaces real today.

Because this work isn’t a sprint, it’s not even a marathon, it’s a relay race, and we need you for the long haul. You got this. I’m so excited to see what y’all do next. Even if it’s take a nap.

hai frands,

after a lot of heartbreak, contemplation, and grief, it’s my turn to leave TTS.

When I joined 18F in 2018, I expected to be here for no more than 4 years, a full Schedule A(r) term and then leave after my tour of duty. In that time, I had the privilege of working on some of brilliantly impactful work, starting with e-regs, the redesign for pubmed.gov, findtreatment.gov, and way too many COVID projects. As I was preparing to leave in 2022, perhaps to move to Asia to support the vibrant international civic tech community there, I got the chance to stay. Never did I think I might get the chance to stay to help build a new office, much less to one dedicated to equitable access to the regulatory process and open government—to use expertise as a political science researcher in democratic systems, not just my skills as a technologist and design strategist. The hope was to build something durable, that had the potential to radically improve how the public contribute to and have a say in the rules and regulations that governed the communities we share. That time is at an end.

While we all live under capitalism, those of us in government have the privilege and responsibility to work next to it where our job is to serve the public and work for the common good. We get the rare opportunity to focus on stress cases—those who had nowhere else to go, those who are forgotten or ignored by profit motive because not all public good can be calculated through quarterly gains and shareholder value. With the privilege of not having to work with a profit motive, we have the duty to serve everyone—not just those who can afford to pay.

When I first joined 18F in 2018, we were nearing the end of another mass-exodus, so I tried to have as many exit conversations with people as I could. In those conversations I always asked two question: “What do you hope is your legacy at 18F?” with a follow up “How can we help see that continue?” Here are a few of my favorites:

• Modeling healthy conflict. One person remembers their role during the conversation when the original Guys Bot was being debated. They disagreed with its need, but when the organization came to consensus, they made an intentional decision to do two things: 1. make sure that those from marginalized communities need to have a larger voice in deciding what is necessary to make a healthy space for them and 2. Backing the community’s decision once it was made even if they still had private reservations.

• Radical transparency, openness, and trust. Several people talked about the radical transparency of the early days. They talked about how it sometimes got 18F in trouble, and how it was sometimes structured poorly, but how it was necessary for building a cohesive team. They hoped that as the new generation starts stepping into leadership, we would hold to that ideal—they also hoped that we’ll be more mature about it than they were.

• Never stop asking questions. “Some people thought I was being troublesome, but really I just wanted to understand things.” This person said that we need to keep asking questions on our projects, and of our own organization—that is the nature of agile and iterative organizations. Yes, make progress, but progress for its own sake fails when not everyone is sure we’re solving the right problem.
• Do things in a way that can be duplicated by others, and don’t just do it for your own projects. One engineer was proud to be able to use their is spare time to do drive-by Dockerizations.

Transparency has never been enough. We are at our best when we make space for disagreement, open discussion, and collective problem solving. We are at our best when everyone has the safety to raise their concerns. Openness, collaboration, and striving together with each other in service to the public. That is dignity.

TTS will always be a special place to me. At our best, we are people who are daring and brave yet humble and kind. People unerringly dedicated to a culture of kindness, of helping, and pitching in. We are a place where you are never turned away when you have a question. Where queries for help are never halted with an “I don’t know” or a “stop asking”; instead, they are met with a “Let’s figure it out together.”

Onward, fellow travelers. Stay in touch and see you on the other side.