I live in Hoxton in central London. It's not as nice to live in as it is to visit, but then few places are. I do love the hustle and bustle of living in the middle of a city though, a few days of peace and quiet in the countryside is enough to drive me crazy.
I'm an open source software developer; I've started a few projects (you can find some on my GitHub), and contributed varying amounts of code and/or time to many more. I was part of the staff team on freenode (RIP) for several years, and I'm currently staff in the #Linux channel on Libera.chat.
I'm a political activist, particularly interested in issues relating to civil liberties and social justice. I co-founded Police State UK in 2009 and still run it - these days mostly just updating our Twitter and Facebook feeds.
Political campaigning led to a general interest in how our democracy works (and how it fails), and from there I gained a strong interest in political reform. In 2010 I ran for Parliament as an independent candidate on a 'direct digital democracy' platform, and from 2016 to 2021 I led the first in-house tech team at 38 Degrees - helping millions of people in the UK to try to shape the political decisions that they cared about.
I took up the whole 'get fit' mid-life crisis thing in 2011, and got a lot fitter in the following few years. Initially weightlifting, but eventually it turned out that I mostly loved moving - I ended up doing a bunch of low-level freerunning and novice acrobatics. Sadly I didn't have time to keep that up while I was working at 38, but hopefully my next job will leave me with enough time and energy to pick some of that stuff back up again.
