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I started and ran a local polyamorous community for five years. Here’s how you can, too!

2025-03-08T20:00:00+00:00

Reading time: 40 minutes

Look, I’m not much of a writer. You get a title that’s to the point, not one that’s particularly catchy. But I’m here to tell you about my time starting and running a queer, polyamorous community in Seattle for the last five years, because, for as much writing and community discussion as there is about how to be polyamorous, and how to find local communities like this, I’ve found precious few resources on how to organize one of these groups.

I’ve written down the story of my community, how we structured it and the tradeoffs of that structure, the approaches and techniques that worked well for us in managing it, and some lessons learned. My hope is that at least one other person who’s starting or managing a community like this one finds this helpful. Feel free to skip the stories about my community if you want to jump to the tips and resources!

Why did I start a group?
How did we get it started?
- Policy docs
A brief history of SQPS
Managing the group
Mistakes I made
Other thoughts
Closing words
By the numbers

Why did I start a group?

The first couple years I explored being polyamorous, I checked out as many local polyam, ENM, and kink communities as I could find. I’m pretty social and extroverted, but I had a hard time connecting with people at most of them: some felt cliquey and hard to break into as a newcomer, while others felt like groups of strangers with no social cohesion (especially the Meetup.com ones).

It took a year, but I finally found a community I vibed with that I’ll call “The Room” (not its actual name). People made a point to welcome me as a newcomer and get to know me, events were sociable in a way that felt like a fit for me, and after attending regularly for a few months I felt like I was making a lot of actual friendships. The Room was a “generic” ENM community —- not explicitly poly, or kinky, or anything else, though I’d describe the demographics as ~half swingers and ~half polyam, with many couples who started as swingers and drifted towards polyamory. The vibe was “swinger-y” in that the focus was on flirting and partying and hookups more than other community support, and they knew how to have a good time!

The downside came, though. Every group focused on dating+sex inevitably confronts hard interpersonal situations, whether that’s people just bringing bad vibes to the group or more openly harmful behaviors like stalking, harassment, sexual assault. And in my time there, I felt like The Room did a pretty poor job managing those — partly because they didn’t have clearly defined expectations for member behavior, or any process for how to handle those situations when they came up, so leadership’s handling and communication seemed pretty arbitrary and inconsistent from one instance to the next. I tried pushing the admins about this for a few months (along with my partner “Dani” and a few other members), hoping for some change and offering to help them build processes, but our offers weren’t welcomed and our feedback created more friction than change. Eventually we realized that we wanted a different enough kind of community that we could try starting our own instead.

My experiences with The Room wasn’t the only reason for starting this group: Dani and I also had dozens of other friends and acquaintance who we knew would be interested in the kind of community we were envisioning. Dani had helped organize a previous Seattle poly community years prior that had its own dramatic fallout with many members leaving (especially women and queer members) that had remained her friends, and I’d gathered a few friend groups of queer+polyam people I’d met various places in Seattle. Dani had long wanted to start an explicitly queer+polyam community group, and with our experiences in these different communities we’d developed some pretty strong Opinions about what a better-run group could look like. So we went and did it!

How did we get it started?

First, I gotta recommend you this book: “Get Together”. It’s a short, to-the-point manual on starting, organizing, and growing in-person communities. It has pointed questions to help you define what you’re doing and why, concrete advice for building cohesion and growing the community, and case studies illustrating how applying its advice can play out. I read this book just before starting my community, I re-read it a few times during major inflection points in my group’s history, and I’ve recommended it more times than any other book.

“Get Together” suggests answering the Who, Why, What, and How of your group to get started. For us, this looked like:

Who
- Questions: Who are the people for your community? Who do you want to start with? Who brings energy to the group?
- Our answers: Seattle-area polyamorous queers. Folks with strong opinions on how groups like this should operate and policies they should have. Event hosts from past groups.
Why?
- Questions: Why make this group? Specifically… What do people need that this group can meet? What change can we make?
- Our answers: Expand people’s queer-poly networks — for friendship, support & dating. Provide community for a niche identity group: many people we know with these identities haven’t found community. Many kinds of non-monogamous folks find value in seeing how each other practice.
What?
- Questions: What activities are you actually gonna do together?
- Our answers: Social gatherings. Bars, park days, dancing, skating, karaoke. Structured discussions, i.e. book clubs.
How?
- Questions: How do you promote the culture you want? How do you cultivate that, and make the group “sticky”? What are the venues, prompts, and structure that help you cultivate human connection?
- Our answers: We write a Charter + Code of Conduct to provide a starting point for culture. Charter helps set intention. Code of Conduct helps set expectations. For venues: group chats online, in-person events. The types of events we plan are intended to promote connection. Structurally, we also decided to make this group invite-only, and encourage members to bring people in who they trust + vouch for. (More on this and “stickiness” later.)

Taking the time to come up with intentional answers to these questions gave us a lot of direction on how to shape the group, especially its structure and policy docs.

Policy docs

When Dani and I were initially planning, we sat down and wrote most of the policy docs in just a couple nights — and then iterated on it with our initial team of co-leads until we all felt good about it.

I’m pretty proud of what we wrote in that first run — we tweaked it over the lifetime of the group as changes were needed, but five years later, 70%+ of the contents is still original text from those first nights.

I’m going to quote our group’s Charter and Code of Conduct in their entirety here. If you’re writing similar organizing documents, you’re welcome to use any part of these that resonates for you!

Our Charter was intended to speak to the values of the group, to set an intention and to let members know what was important to us in bringing this community together:

Charter

We are a social group of ethically non-monogamous people in the Seattle-area focused on building community, especially through in-person events. We are a queer-centric, poly-centric, sex-positive, and consent-focused network of friends and partners, with an eye toward community safety and inclusion.

Queer-centered: members aren’t required to be queer, but all members should take responsibility for self-education about queerness and sexuality and understand what it means to occupy space as someone with privilege.

Poly-centered: members aren’t required to be polyamorous, but group norms and practices will be built around more polyamorous-type relationships than other types of ethical non-monogamy. (i.e. if you’re a “strict swap” couple looking to play with a single bi woman, this might not be the space for you.)

Sex-positive: this is a space where sexuality and sexiness is okay (with consent for all involved). People across the sexual spectrum are welcome and included here, with the understanding that some events may get sexy!

Consent-focused: consent in this group goes beyond sexual encounters and intentions. We all have different levels of ability and interest in engaging; respecting the autonomy and agency of every person is vital to a healthy community where people feel safe and welcome.

Community safety: members are accountable for their behavior to each other and to the community at large. Members and leaders should strive to cultivate a sense of safety in this community.

Inclusive: we celebrate the differences that inform who we are, and are mindful of the various forms of marginalization and privilege that make us each unique.

Space for disagreement: As queer community members, doing the work of deconstruction means embracing ambiguity, nuance, and the possibility that we’re wrong. This includes being able to work through difficult topics such as social justice and ethical issues, without our members feeling scared of rigid, unspecified expectations with social consequences for getting it “wrong”. This space is for learning, for educating each other, and for not always coming to the same conclusion.

Our Code of Conduct supplemented the Charter, by spelling out the behaviors we expected members to adhere to in our group. I think it’s particularly important for communities that involve sex+dating to have a Code of Conduct: that aspect makes them more susceptible to being host to interpersonal conflict and harm than many other types of communities.

Code of Conduct

Engagement. This is a social group focused on facilitating in-person events, and we want people to get to know each other IRL! Members are expected to regularly attend events, with the understanding that they may be removed for inactivity / inability to attend events. “Inactivity” means that you have not attended an event in the last six months. (The leadership team understands that life happens to us all: PM an admin if you need to take a group hiatus; you’ll be welcome back when you feel able to participate again.)

Communicate with compassion. Recognize that members bring different background and context to each interaction, and prioritize empathy and understanding over conflict.

Shaming doesn’t change minds. We reject the use of shaming and social ostracization as effective means of improving our community. As part of creating space for disagreement, we ask that you refrain from wielding shame as a tool against members you disagree with.

Incendiary behavior isn’t hot. We consider antagonizing communication and actions to be detrimental to keeping our community spaces feeling safe.

Affirmative consent is expected: this includes PMing group members, sending spicy pics, posting pictures of other members on social media, for touching at group events, etc.

Avoid oppressive language (if you are unsure what this entails, PM an admin or start a thread).

You are accountable for the people you bring into this group. Be intentional about who you invite to this group; code of conduct violations from members you invite may impact your standing.

You might notice we kept the guidelines loose, trying to set intention and expectations without getting too specific and legalese-y. The spectrum between “we have an explicitly spelled-out list of acceptable and unacceptable behavior” and “our only rule is ‘don’t be an asshole’” is a tricky one to find a good spot along. On the “explicit” end of it, members have clearer expectations, but you’re more likely to invite rules-lawyer fights when someone is being an asshole in a way you didn’t specifically call out in the rules (”the rules didn’t specifically say I couldn’t do that!”). On the vague end, the leadership team has much more leeway, but in a way that could invite capriciousness in leadership choices and lead to community discord. I won’t claim we found the perfect balance, but I do like where we landed.

A brief history of SQPS

Feel free to skip this section if you don’t want stories that are more specific to our group. They do provide some “color” to the rest of this post but aren’t necessary to understand the rest.

Getting started

Besides writing the policy docs above, our initial group setup required a few more pieces:

We built an initial leadership team of opinionated folks from The Room who’d raised similar concerns about how that group was run: six to start, but two dropped out before we got to our first event. We ran the group with four leads for the majority of its lifespan, with occasional periods down to two or three (not enough).

We polled friends online about name ideas and landed on the Seattle Queer Polyamory Syndicate, or “SQPS” — pronounced “scoops” (or “squips”) verbally. With a name, a charter and CoC, and an initial list of friends to invite, we were off to the races!

We started out inviting everyone we knew who might be interested. We made a Facebook group to organize the group’s events, posted a first event at a brewery that was easy to drop into with a large group, described what we were trying to do and put the invitation out. We invited ~45 people in the first wave, and of those: 21 came to our first event (and a few more +1s), 8 showed later, and 16 never actually attended.

In our first months we hosted a handful of events: a couple happy hours, a karaoke night, a couple brunches, a holiday party, an art walk, and a bookstore meetup. The group was growing, with 1-2 new members brought each event, and a community energy started to gel.

Pandemic

and then, the funniest thing happened…

Unfortunately, our timing was a bit unlucky: our first event was in Nov 2019, so we’d barely gotten 4 months into growing this nascent community before we were forced to move online.

But we adapted! We became an active online group, with our group chat a day-to-day social lifeline for a dozen active folks that became closer-knit friends. We hosted virtual events: lots of movie nights, a show-and-tell, a book club, a 4/20 smoke sesh. We even got together IRL in the summer for a distanced, outdoor picnic, with a giant ring of picnic blankets spread 6+ feet apart. These started as weekly events but slowly spaced out to monthly as we all collectively got Zoom fatigue.

Around June, we had a silly “incident” where people started posting nudes in our group chat. We had no policies about it at this point, but no one asked, and once one person posted a bare titty, others started following with more explicit photos — and on Facebook Messenger, no less! We asked people to hold off while we started a separate chat for sharing nudes on a different platform, with a Code of Conduct addendum — but then we all got to enjoy a little side chat for gassing each other up in a context where sexual attention was otherwise more difficult to come by.

This period was hard for a lot of reasons, but having some consistent community to help get through it was a silver lining.

Growth

We came out of pandemic hot and hungry for connection. In May 2021, we started with a park picnic, had a summer full of sunshine and potlucks and reconnecting. The group grew rapidly: people bringing friends they’d made during the pandemic, or new dates they were finding as soon as they’d gotten vaxxed up. We even planned a 14-person cabin weekend that August! (a messy one though — lots of flirting, hookups, and multiple breakups over just two days. that was our first and last cabin weekend.)

The growth felt good, an affirmation that people were excited to bring friends and partners, and that guests liked our community enough to stick around! The group added 20 people in 2021, 35 in 2022, and over 100 in 2023 🔥.

In the first couple years, I used to joke about how SQPS was just “come hang out with Andrew and his polycule” — because in some ways, it was just an extended friend group primarily based around me, my 7ish-person polycule, and our immediate friends. Those jokes poked at something I didn’t love about the group at that time: I wanted to build a community that was more than that, that could sustain itself without me. And as it grew, I watched it get there! At its peak I think I counted four distinct, sizable polycules—overlapping and interconnected—with their own social orbits and dynamics, plus many other folks who would regularly hang out with us all. I worked on growing the leadership team with the hope I could eventually step away and watch SQPS continue on.

Decline and end

Well, it didn’t last. There wasn’t any one particular cause, either —- just a lot of things falling through without replacement over the course of the group’s last year.

First off, each of those four polycules imploded in their own ways. Without the vibrancy that each of those dynamics had contributed, the group’s energy started to dip, and by late 2024 our events were losing the excitement and attendance they’d once had.

Second, our main inflows of new members slowed to a trickle. In 2022 and 2023, a few specific people had done most of the “bringing” of new guests to SQPS. But when none of those individuals brought anyone new in 2024, and no one else stepped up to fill that role, we lost that regular additional energy injection that comes from new people showing up.

Third, we had admin burnout. We started 2024 with a team of four. But I was trying to find an exit after five years running the group, another admin was ready to step down after two years, and a third moved out of Seattle entirely. By the fall, we found ourselves asking if we should recruit more leads, make major structural changes to keep it running, or just shut it down.

And then we had an incident — where someone reported one of our group members for a range of problematic behavior. The last remaining lead (”Ava”) and I investigated, decided the reports were sufficiently corroborated and severe enough to warrant removing this person from the group. And when we removed them, we got a mix of loud responses — many in support, some loudly frustrated with some specifics of how we’d handled it, and (worst of all) some legal threats over it. The damage from this was a final blow to a community that was already on its last legs.

Ava and I posted some goodbye posts, I offered to help and advise anyone who wanted to pick up the mantle and start a new group, but we declared this the end of SQPS in its current form. I hosted one last happy hour to reminisce and say goodbye, five years and four days after our very first event.

Managing the group

With that history out of the way, I’d love to share more about how we managed the group, how we thought about managing the group, and how that worked out (or didn’t).

Tenets

I included our group’s stated values above in our Charter, but there were a few other values I’ll call “tenets” that influenced how we managed and structured the group.

Community, not meetup

If you’ve had the same experiences I have at Meetup.com events, they often feel like a bunch of strangers in a room, rather than a community. There’s no underlying social cohesion or trust when most people in a room don’t know each other, even if you’ve gathered around a common hobby or identity. And without social cohesion, the vibes tend to be awkward! I don’t know why Meetup.com groups tend to feel like this, but anecdotally everyone I’ve spoken to has had an experience like that.

One of our main goals was to create a sense of community: a social cohesion and trust built out of longstanding relationships, a place where people get to know each other more than once, where they build friendship bonds and keep coming back for those bonds.

Concretely, we had two major policies that tried to further this goal:

First, the group was invite-only. We started with ~50 known people, then asked members to bring other people that they trust and vouch for, whether partners or friends.

Partly this was for trust-factor reasons in a group that’s sex+dating adjacent, since we’d had more negative experiences with similar communities that open-recruit. Our hypothesis was that people would behave more accountably in a connected network of friends than if we added people who were strangers to everyone. And in five years of running this group, we had less than one hand’s worth of reports of problematic behavior, and only had to kick out one person — much less than I’ve seen in any other similar community. In that way, I feel like the invite-only growth path was effective at keeping predatory and inappropriate behavior to a minimum.

The invite process also made our community more sticky, especially since we required the member to physically bring their guest with them to an event — meaning every new person already knew someone there who could introduce them to others! And as a result, most people who came to our events kept coming back.

This policy had a positive effect we hadn’t intended in pacing the community’s growth: with new guests required to be brought by existing members, you had to come to an event and join before bringing new guests at the next event. Pacing growth helped keep a stable set of social norms, with new members able to absorb existing social dynamics. This was also a knob we could turn to slow growth if needed, by changing the policy slightly to say “you must attend 2 or 3 events before bringing more guests in”, though we never tried enacting that.

I’d be remiss not to mention the trade-offs of an invite-only framework. In particular, it inherently works against diversity, particularly in an identity-and-values based social group where members are inviting others they already know. That tends to bring more “like” than “different”. We talked about this concern often; generally, we felt the benefits outweighed this concern, but we never figured out how to mitigate that without losing those benefits.

Our second policy for cultivating community was an attendance requirement. I’d been in meetup groups where the group description online showed hundreds or even thousands of members, yet only 5-10 ever showed to events; to me, that worked against a feeling of community. We didn’t want that for the group, but we also didn’t want an onerous requirement that would stress anyone out. We asked people to come to an event every six months or we’d remove them from the group. And even if they got removed, we let them know they were welcome to rejoin anytime, to just ask one of the admins for details about the next event to come back to.

This policy affected the dynamic of the online chats, I think for the better. We saw our group chats as extensions of an IRL (”in real life”) community first, not the other way around. Online-first communities tend to have trust issues, especially when tense topics arise: people often engage in bad faith, assuming the worst interpretation of each other’s messages, falling into name-calling and accusing each other of having bad morals.

We found that IRL community really lessened those kinds of “bad faith” fights. When you’re arguing online with someone you’ve spent time with IRL, they’re not just an anonymous stranger through your screen, and arguments tend to remain more productive. The most heated online conversations that we had to step in to manage were instigated by members who’d spent the least amount of time IRL with our community — which only strengthened our insistence that members engage with SQPS as an in-person community first.

“Build With”

A common refrain in “Get Together” is the phrase “build with”. The idea is simple: the more you can include the voices and opinions of the members you’re designing this community for, the more those members will feel included and be eager to continue participating, and the more successful your community will be.

“Build With, Not For” has also been a common refrain in the civic tech movement, for similar reasons: when you’re the one doing the work (building a community, or creating a government website), the power you have as a builder can make it easy to drift towards more paternalistic thinking. I’m making this, for people to use, I’m most involved, so I know what’s best. “Build With” is a guiding principle to counter that impulse.

For us, that meant keeping a pulse on what the community wanted, and using community feedback to drive what the group did and how it evolved. When we’d enter a new season of the year, we’d post a poll about the types of events people wanted to attend and prioritize what members said they were most interested in. While we were rebuilding in-person community after COVID vaccines were available, we posted periodic surveys inviting feedback about members’ comfort levels and preferred safety practices (social distancing, checking attendees’ vaccination status, masking requirements) and used that to inform how we structured our events. Whenever we made policy changes, we’d post drafts to the Facebook group and give members a chance to react or provide suggestions before updating the group’s policies.

We also encouraged members to host their own events whenever there were activities they wanted to do that we weren’t “officially” coordinating, and we gave them structure and support to advertise them to the rest of the group. Members set up extra beach days, hosted board game events, went to drag shows and out dancing. This on-ramp also helped us identify potential future event organizers and group leads by giving members a lower-barrier way to volunteer energy!

Anti-Cancel Culture

Many of the admin team are fans of Clementine Morrigan’s writing about the dangers of cancel culture, particularly in queer and leftist spaces, and we made a point to bring that into how we organized this group. This was probably our most controversial value.

(If you aren’t familiar with her work, here’s my TLDR: while right-wing criticism of cancel culture seems to be “don’t tell me what to do, say, consume, or laugh at, and you’re a sensitive snowflake if you do”, the leftist criticism goes more like, “cancel culture divides communities that should be organizing together, encourages us to act like cops to each other, and doesn’t actually help protect the victims it purports to”.)

We felt like cultivating a “safe space” for our members was less about “assuring members that no one will express Wrong Opinions in this space” and more about “assuring members that this was a place they could share openly, discuss, and not get ganged up on or tossed out of the group for saying the Wrong Thing.”

Being anti-cancel culture also acts as a mitigating factor when messy breakups happen in a community. I’ve seen people weaponize community leadership teams to exclude their exes from shared community after stressful breakup conflicts. We didn’t want our group to be used that way.

We initially held this as a softer, admin-team value that wasn’t codified in any of our policy docs. But then we had an “incident” where we had to mediate a heated group-chat discussion around AI Art in late 2022, when some of those tools started exploding. Our members included a range of artists and game developers who engage with the topic quite directly, and people expressed a wide range of stances on the ethics of AI Art. But it got heated when certain members started insisting that their perspective was the only moral perspective and shaming others for disagreeing. By the end of it, we had posted a few messages asking people to cool off, clarifying that we encourage disagreement if it can stay respectful, and adding the following updates to our Charter and Code of Conduct:

Charter

Space for disagreement: As queer community members, doing the work of deconstruction means embracing ambiguity, nuance, and the possibility that we’re wrong. This includes being able to work through difficult topics such as social justice and ethical issues, without our members feeling scared of rigid, unspecified expectations with social consequences for getting it “wrong”. This space is for learning, for educating each other, and for not always coming to the same conclusion.

Code of Conduct

Shaming doesn’t change minds. We reject the use of shaming and social ostracization as effective means of improving our community. As part of creating space for disagreement, we ask that you refrain from wielding shame as a tool against members you disagree with.

Incendiary behavior isn’t hot. We consider antagonizing communication and actions to be detrimental to keeping our community spaces feeling safe.

Not everyone agreed with these updates, especially when we clarified that we wouldn’t bar anyone from our group just because of things like what media they consume or what job they have. Someone pushed us on “would you let a cop join SQPS?”, and while we’re generally team ACAB, if a member had a guest they wanted to invite who they felt like would be a fit for the group, and that guest happened to work in law enforcement, we felt like that wasn’t inherently a reason to exclude them from a polyam queer community. (Though later, a friend came to me and said “I heard a rumor that SQPS is a pro-cop group?” 🤦🏻‍♂️)

Being anti-cancel culture means taking a different approach to community safety than is often seen in queer-centric circles, but it’s a value and approach I still stand by.

Management approach

When we started this group, Dani was a project manager working in healthcare, and I was an engineering manager working in civic tech. And for better or worse (I think mostly better!), we brought a professional approach to managing the group.

While communities aren’t professional jobs, I think that professional management skills definitely have some overlap with organizing a community. I’ve worked in large and mid-size companies and personally found it fascinating to watch how organizational policy worked or didn’t, how people responded to it and how often unintended second-order effects would emerge.

I think in some ways this group had more structure than other similar communities we’ve seen, in policy, in documentation and organization. Was all of the structure we made necessary? Definitely not. But I think it helped create clear expectations for members about what the group was, how it ran, and how to engage best with it.

A couple challenges I encountered related to this approach: first, I had some clash of working styles with other co-leads who hadn’t worked in similar settings. Second, I wonder if the structures we made led to our group feeling more welcoming to professionals than, say, people with more blue-collar or service-industry backgrounds. I don’t think either of these are necessarily cause-and-effect of this approach, but they definitely feel related.

Rituals

“Get Together” talks about rituals as one element of building community. What activities help make your community feel cohesive? Do you start or end events with a regular greeting or chant or cheer? Do you have matching outfits or accessories that people can wear? Shared experiences or imagery can be unifying for a community. Rituals weren’t our strong suit, but a few things stand out that we did:

We had a welcome “spiel”: when a member brought a guest to one of our events, we’d have them meet one of our leads for a brief “here’s what the group is about, and what to do if you wanna join” chat (see “Member chat playbook” below for the specifics). This helped orient new people to our values and structure, and was a shared experience that everyone went through.

We had a standing monthly happy hour: for many months at the same bar, at the same date and time. The regular vibe and interaction gave some predictability, and required almost no planning for it to keep happening. (Though notably, happy hours didn’t work for many members who didn’t like alcohol or wanted quieter forms of socializing). We also developed some recurring yearly events over time that members would look forward to: the HUMP! Film Festival, a Pride picnic in the park, and an October Halloween party were a few events that we’d plan most years.

When members joined, we asked them to write an introduction post in the Facebook group, with their name, pronouns, pictures, and some details about what they liked to do. This led to some interest-based connections (”I see you like Star Trek, let’s chat about that at the next event!”), but wasn’t as engaging as I’d hoped — maybe more prompting from leads could have gotten it there.

That’s about it for our “rituals” — I liked what we had, but I would have liked more, perhaps things like recurring conversation starters to create some more engagement and connection. I’ll be thinking about this more for future community design.

Techniques

Here’s some of the logistical nuts and bolts of how we kept the group running.

Spreadsheets

I love a good spreadsheet for managing things. Two really useful ones we had:

Membership list: a spreadsheet that included names, pronouns, the first event they’d been to and the date they were added, who invited them, and whether they were still active.
- I kept the list sorted by their join date in the Facebook group. Sometimes members would exit the Facebook group and I couldn’t find a way to get notified of this, but keeping it in the same order made it easier to track those down when the counts of active members differed between the Facebook group and the spreadsheet.
- A simple pivot table told us who brought the most guests!
Event tracking: this helped us track the many ideas we had for events, and we categorized them by groupings like “unstructured social”, “structured interaction”, and “physical activity” to help ensure we were maintaining some variety in our events. This spreadsheet helped us track our yearly recurring events and intersperse recurring crowd favorites like trivia nights, karaoke, book groups, and craft nights.

Events we hosted

I’m just going to list most of the things we did.

Yearly recurring: HUMP Film Fest, 4/20 smoke sesh, Pride picnic in the park, Mariner’s Pride game, late-summer River float, Halloween costume party, November Friends-giving, and a December Holiday party
Recurring events: bar trivia, karaoke, roller skate rink, book groups (usually non-fiction about polyamory and relationships, but sometimes queer fiction), board game nights, craft nights, Powerpoint parties, art walks, clubbing/dancing, picnics and beach hangs, comedy shows
Other one-offs: fancy afternoon tea, drag show, clothing swap, book swap, boat day

“Planning Posse”

When looking for folks to help expand our leadership team to support running the group, I found a lot more people willing to help plan events than interest in dealing with other leadership responsibilities. So instead of bringing all those people into our admin team, I coordinated a “planning posse” group chat that had 7-8 people excited to host events for the group.

While hosting events was usually less stressful than policy work or dealing with interpersonal conflicts, it was also the bulk of the work in keeping our group afloat. Having extra hands for this was helpful!

Pruning members / inactivity policy

Since we had a policy for pruning members who hadn’t come to events in six months, we needed a way to track that. Since we used Facebook for managing events, after events ended we would update the “attendee” list based on who actually showed up, using that as our record of attendance.

Unfortunately, the tricky part was then getting that data out of Facebook. I wanted an easy, automated way to do this. I even wrote a few Python scripts to dump guest lists for events into a spreadsheet, and then could see who hadn’t come to an event in X months, but then Facebook locked down their API, restricting much of it to registered businesses.

In the end, we did most of this by hand. Our group only had at most ~90 active members, so it was a little tedious but not too arduous.

Invite process / member chat playbook

We had some structure for the process to add new members to the group. It started with an existing member bringing their guest to an event, then that guest getting the “spiel” at some point.

I used to host most of the “spiels”, but as I trained more leads to do it, I wrote a short doc that described the main points to hit, and encouraged them to make their own version of the “spiel” that hit this:

Bullet version of the new member chat

SQPS started late 2019, just before pandemic

three important things about this group:

we center poly+queer identity and experience, but it’s not mandatory that you’re those things

in-person events, frequency typically between weekly and monthly

trust network — members invite guests they know and trust and vouch for

Logistics:

membership managed on Facebook. events on Facebook, group chat on messenger.

chat with an admin afterwards to go through the rules and get added

The doc also had a longer-form “conversational example” of this to help illustrate that.

After the spiel, we’d ask them to start a group chat with us, where we’d link our policy doc with the Charter and Code of Conduct (a ~2 page read), ask their friend in the group to invite them on Facebook (so that who “invited” who was recorded), and then approve them once they confirmed the Code of Conduct sounded good to them. It was usually a very quick process, but it showed some intentionality on their part in joining, and created another touchpoint for affirming the social norms of the group.

Mistakes I made

I’m not perfect (a lesson I’m still learning). Here are some of the places I screwed up.

Clear is kind, unclear is unkind. Brené Brown’s mantra applies everywhere. Most of my leadership mistakes have come from being unclear with people around me, especially those who were helping me lead.

Running this with partners

Everyone says starting a polyam community with partners is a minefield. I knew it, and entered in willingly. But here are a few specific ways it played out:

Good: Dani and I starting this as a shared activity gave it an energy boost that it might not have had otherwise. We had an aligned vision and compatible working styles that made this really fun, along with that special energy that comes from doing something with a romantic partner.
Bad: when we broke up two years later, it almost killed the group. We made promises to each other at the start that if we broke up, we could still keep running the group together and be cordial, but breakups rarely go as planned. Dani stopped attending events I was present at (most of them). Another lead took a side during our breakup and exited the leadership team, and when Dani wasn’t willing to talk about it or what to do about our leadership situation, it was pretty clear we had reached a dysfunctional state. The last other lead was about to step out, not wanting to be trapped in this dysfunctional dynamic with me and Dani, when Dani took the opportunity to graciously exit.
Worse: when Dani and I set this up, we created a two-tiered leadership team, where our entire team shared the load of running the group, but Dani and I had final say on policy decisions. It made for some really uncomfortable polycule dynamics, in particular because I had a second partner (”Alice”) on the leadership team who was now in a leadership power dynamic with me and Dani. In hindsight, I don’t think this was a very defensible decision, and feels like a way that personal problems within that relationship vee manifested themselves even larger into this community we were trying to start.

A half-fleshed out reporting process

We knew we needed a reporting process for when someone would inevitably come to us with accusations about another member’s behavior. But in our initial policy docs, we left the process pretty sparse (just a few simple bullets) and figured we could flesh it out more as incidents arose and we needed it.

Well, incidents that required it rarely arose. And by the time we really needed it, at the very end of the group’s lifetime, it turned out that the few bullets that were there were not only not helpful, they actively made our lives more difficult by setting expectations we couldn’t meet.

In handling that incident, Ava and I made choices as best as we were able, following what we felt the situation called for. Unfortunately, some of those choices contradicted the little that we did have written there, and that made for some difficult conversations with members who were reasonably upset that what we did didn’t match what we said we did. In this way, it was even worse having a half-written reporting process than if we’d had none.

I don’t tend to like writing really detailed rules and processes for cases that haven’t yet come up, since I think policy tends to be best shaped by experience. But in the case of a reporting + incident handling process, I think the situation could have been improved by either:

Not writing a reporting process at all, explicitly saying it’s “up to admin discretion” until we wrote more policy, OR
Spending some meaningful time researching and comparing other groups’ processes for this, talking with other leads to understand the tradeoff of their choices, and trying to make an intentional process early.

Not cultivating enough leadership

Admin burnout was one of the things that killed the group. And through most of my time running the group, we typically had a leads team of 3-4 people. That was enough to function, but sparse enough to not really be able to rotate and share the load effectively.

The event planing posse helped share this load, but to keep this group running beyond me, I think this needed to shoot for a steady state of 6 admins. At that size, I think one or two people exiting at a time isn’t quite as dire, doesn’t put so much pressure on the remaining people to carry forward the load, the values, and the effort to recruit and train more leads.

I don’t think I made specific missteps here, but as someone who approached leading this group as a “manager”, this gap feels like it was a management failure on my part.

Other thoughts

Before we wrap up, I’ll leave you with a few uncategorized musings about this space.

I have a personal friend who’s done a lot of community management and writes a popular polyam advice blog. I chatted with her about all of this before starting SQPS. Her advice: “Don’t start an organized community. Adminning your friend group is a minefield. Instead, consider making an event series: ‘Andrew’s Recurring Sexy Friends Party’ or something. Find a venue, host a thing every month or two, and some community will naturally form around the event. But then if you have to kick someone out, you’re just removing them from this event series, not from an entire friend group. It’s way less messy.” I didn’t listen, but I think about that advice often.
Communities follow their own arcs. I feel this in friendships, I feel this in relationships, I feel this in friend groups. My big relationships have often had arcs, periods of up and down that I could feel while in them, cohesive journeys that I could see better in hindsight. I think communities are similar in that way. I tend to conceptualize of organized communities as fixed structures that look and act a certain way, but in hindsight I think SQPS’ energy ebbed and flowed like a relationship does, like a friendship does, changing with time and context. I think that means that more of the outcomes are path-dependent than I’d like to admit, when I’d prefer to think of them as structural. But I think there’s a beauty in that.
The vibe comes from the people in your community. Somehow, for most of SQPS’ history, two-thirds or more of the group was non-men, as was the leads team (everyone but me). This is extra surprising when you consider Seattle’s dating pool has one of the highest men-to-women ratios in the country! Polyam communities (esp. more hetero ones) often have “meat market” vibes, particularly for women new to a group who show up and immediately receive a lot of interested attention. I don’t get the sense SQPS ever developed that problem. I think had a lot to do with being dominant queer and with the gender ratios.
Communities are outpourings of their founders. I once heard a coworker express this idea in the context of tech jobs: comparing cultures across Google, Facebook (not yet “Meta”), Uber, Snap as, to some extent, outgrowths of their founders’ personalities and values. I think that’s true for organized communities as well, as long as founders are involved, and I imagine it’s still true for non-founder leaders depending on how they influence the community. In SQPS’ case, we purported to be a queer + polyam group —- but there were some noticeable traits from our leadership team that we saw in most of the group: social, extroverted, neurodivergent, stoners, leaning femme.
Similary, values continuity across leadership is unlikely. When handling our final incident that led to the end of SQPS, Ava was hoping to continue the group after the rest of us stepped down. But by the end of that incident, Ava realized they differed enough from the community’s originally established values (i.e. largely mine and Dani’s) that they couldn’t operate the group as the community wanted, while being in alignment with their own values.

During this, one member asked me if I would hand over the group’s reins to her — and with that lesson from Ava fresh in mind, the answer was clearly “no”. SQPS had its own values that were tightly coupled to mine and Dani’s original views and direction, and without any values-aligned leadership team left to continue it, handing it to her was likely just setting up for future problems. Instead, I closed the group, and recommended she start her own, with her own values embedded in it from the start — and even encouraged her to invite everyone from SQPS! But I think different leads will inherently create different groups, and it’s better to accept that and lean into that than to force an existing community structure to continue.
Space was surprisingly hard to come by. We had more challenges than I would have thought with where to host events, especially in our peak growth phase when events were regularly 20-30 people, and with a membership that leaned COVID-cautious. Movie nights and crafting events at apartments became tougher at that size. Over our group’s lifetime, three of our leads had houses that could host, but by 2024 all four leads (and the entire event planning posse) lived in apartments. This might be more of a specific problem to being in a major city.
Incident handling is the hardest part. Even though we only had a handful of reports of problem behavior, or times we had to step in to mediate a conversation, they were always the most stressful. Conflict mediation is its own skillset that many of us leads don’t come with. Decisions about removing someone from a community can drastically impact someone’s life and can often split that community, even if handled well. Getting these things right is stressful, and missteps are often difficult to take back or repair. The main thing I learned was to make sure I was making decisions that I felt ethically aligned with, where even if there was loud disagreement, I could feel confident about the decisions I’d made with the information I had.

Closing words

Thanks for reading. If you’re starting or managing a community like this, I hope you found something in here helpful. Please take and reuse whatever you want from what I’ve shared! And reach out to me if you want to chat more about these topics, I’m happy to talk.

By the numbers

5 years, 4 days
161 events
172 members over lifetime, 66 remaining by the end
many new relationships <3

I took a 10-month sabbatical

2024-04-06T22:40:00+00:00

Synopsis: I took a 10-month sabbatical between tech jobs. Here’s how it went for me, and what worked and didn’t!

A year ago, I was ready for a change at work. I’d spent nearly four years working in government contracting, a USDS-inspired jaunt leaving big tech for the world of mission-driven work to make government services more functional. I loved the work, but boy oh boy did government contracting come with a lot of unique frustrations (a blog post for a separate time). Plus, I had fried my ability to focus on anything for more than five minutes! I’d spent those four years in manager/director-level roles, rushing between fires and being supremely available to whoever needed me on Slack. I started looking for new jobs, but I pretty quickly realized I wouldn’t be able to show up to a new job with the spark and enthusiasm it deserved. I was burnt out.

So when a friend mentioned he was taking the summer off before looking for his next job, I immediately knew — that’s what I need! I gave a two-month notice (honestly, too long), wrapped up my work, and started planning for a fun summer starting in June. I planned to give myself at least three months before I started looking for work, but knew I could comfortably afford a whole year off if needed. And for the first time in my life, I had no plans for my next occupation, and stepped out into a break.

I’m writing now from the other side. It turned into a ten-month break, a well-needed respite, and a personal rollercoaster. So here’s what my experience was like, some tips on what worked for me, and thoughts on what I’d do differently next time. I appreciated reading others’ experiences before doing this myself, so this is my contribution!

Timeline

Planning

I made a big list of plans and ideas: festivals to attend, hobbies to dive into, games and TV shows to binge, books to read, cuisines to try cooking a bunch of, home decor and renovation projects to do. I didn’t have a big, central project—no six-month backpacking trip, no Great American Novel to write—just open-ended time and an infinite list of things I’d do, “if only I had the time”.

I spent a few months saving heavily toward a “sabbatical fund”, and deciding how much of my existing savings I was willing to burn. I gave myself a 3-12 month window, figuring I’d start looking for jobs after the summer, or potentially longer if I wasn’t ready to go back yet.

Months 1-3: Decompression

My first few months were about chilling. My stated goal: veg out until I got bored of that and had to start doing things again. Tears of the Kingdom had just come out, so I spent a month mostly just playing that, peppered with some TV-show binging, lots of sleep, and very few social palns.

I also scheduled my early months more densely than “decompression” required. I went to Bonnaroo, my first music festival I’ve camped at, as a cross-country affair. My sibling visited from Belgium and hung out for a week, where we packed it with social plans and home projects.

Six weeks in, I was annoyed that I didn’t feel “rested” yet. Part of that was how densely I’d packed those first weeks, but another part was just an impatient estimate. When I talked with other friends who’d done a break like this, most of them said it took a solid 3-4 months before they felt decompressed. And that lined up with my experience.

Month 4-5: Starting new things

Eventually I hit a point of lethargy—where my low-energy resting turned from restorative to just feeling… blah. It took me a couple weeks to identify that, but I was happy once I had: that was the goal! And I knew it was time for the next phase.

I started taking on projects from my list, as well as some new hobbies. I started playing pinball, working out regularly, reading some books, working on some writing, and doing a few quality-of-life tech projects. I tried a pole class for the first time, and I started on a big tattoo sleeve project! But it quickly became “too many things” with none of them really holding my attention, and it was still easy to fritter time away just scrolling.

So, after reading Johann Hari’s “Deep Focus”, I tried some self-imposed structure: short daily time limits on my phone’s social media apps, blocked-out time for reading, working out, making food, creative time, project time—and even “fun time” to still let myself binge TV shows, just in smaller amounts. I had a couple different daily schedules I’d rotate between to keep things interesting, some focused more on “life maintenance”, some focused more on creative time or reading.

This was one of my favorite periods: some restored energy after a break, and a structure that pushed me to do lots of things I wanted to do!

Months 6-7: turmoil and depression

Unfortunately, it took a turn for the worse. I had some ongoing emotional/relationship challenges through the entire sabbatical that took over a lot of my headspace, and that made it hard for me to focus on the parts I wanted to.

This led to a deeper lethargy and a state of (maybe?) depression. I don’t have a history of depression, I’m generally quite an active, focused, energetic, and upbeat person. But the combination of not having a job (or similarly central commitment) anchoring my life with added emotional turmoil left me spending a lot of days ruminating, with hours spent texting and calling people and journaling.

And without a clear end in sight, I hit a worst point of the sabbatical, getting stuck in a mental cycle of “wow, this feels like it was all a waste.”

So, I started a job search—figuring “well, if my relationship difficulties are going to be affecting my well being this much, I may as well go back to working at least.”

At this point, it’s late fall, which turns out to be a rough time to start a job search. I spent a few weeks doing interview prep, and did a few full interview loops in November, but the promising ones held off getting back to me until after the holidays with deciders on extended vacations. And most other hiring shut down through the holidays. So I took a minute to just chill.

Oh and, then my appendix tried to kill me just before Christmas, so it had to go.

Months 8-9: turning a corner, job search

After the holidays, finding a job took most of my attention.

I found an anxiety medication that worked for me, after trying a few medication options with my doctor. That helped me chill out through some of my personal stress.

In this period, I finally got into cooking! One of my long-running projects was a partial kitchen remodel, that stretched out over 9 months mostly to do 1 month of work. Getting that finished became an opportunity for me to put a burst of energy into cooking, which had been one of my big sabbatical goals that I’d been pretty down about not yet getting to.

One helpful realization I had: even if I was struggling to make headway on bigger creative projects, I could still do a cooking adventure in just a single day: finding an interesting recipe, going to the grocery store, and cooking that new dish. I adjusted my social media feeds to start bringing me lots of cooking content, and pushed myself to make something new every opportunity I had! And as a result got to make a lot of interesting dishes (mostly Japanese and Italian, with a little Korean and Indian cooking).

But most importantly, I found a job! And somehow lined up two good offers that I was able to negotiate up with. Getting tech jobs has been in a difficult phase for awhile, but I have a good network and a strong resume and was fortunately able to find something without too much difficulty—though the overall process did still take about 5 months from start to finish.

Month 10: sprint to the end

When negotiating my offer, I gave myself a long final window before starting, knowing that with a “deadline” looming I’d probably be able to get through a lot more. And boy did I. I jumped into the next few weeks with a fire under me, trying to do.

I built a new computer (which was a whole ordeal). I fixed nagging issues in my wifi, my refrigerator, my Kindle, and my home‘s smoke detectors (read: I didn’t have working smoke detectors. oops.). I redid my music area and started making music again. I read a whole book. I cleaned out lots of junk and gave dozens of things away on BuyNothing. I wrote a little Go every day to ramp up for my job. I made new recipes. I cleaned my place and got everything organized.

It was the most productive, energetic five weeks of my entire sabbatical. And that really cemented how I look back on the harder periods: with an understanding that open-ended, unstructured time is hard for me, and that I need something extra to keep myself on track.

Takeaways for next time

I’d love to do this again in the future the next time I’m between jobs. So this list is just as much for future me as it is for y’all reading it.

Timing the break

Making sure my last day was at the start of the month (June 2nd) gave me health insurance coverage through June and gave me a little time to figure out the bridge to a state plan.
I quit in June to align with Seattle summer’s “maximum fun” vibes, but I was so burnt out I needed time to decompress first with low plans, and that led to me skipping out on some things I would’ve wanted to do otherwise. Quitting a month or two earlier would have given myself some time to rest before launching into a very full summer.
I gave my manager over two months’ notice, since I had a director role that I assumed would take some time to backfill and hand off responsibilities. What I didn’t know is that the company wouldn’t replace me (out of budget issues that year), so even with a slow transition handing my responsibilities off to peers, I ended up just chilling the last few weeks.
Job search timing was tricky with the tech hiring market being in a slump. I knew that was the case when I started my sabbatical, and hoped it might be better in 6-9 months, but that didn’t happen.
Further, starting my job search in October just meant heading into winter break, where a lot of hiring slowed down. It didn’t seem to pick up again until late January. I think I would have been better served not attempting job search in the fall.
I super appreciated the time between “having a job offer” and “starting my job”. I would definitely recommend making that window as long as possible in the future.

Pre-planning what to do

Having some plans already made and a long list of things I wanted to watch, read, play, and do helped me picture what the time off could look like and get excited about it. While I didn’t have a big “backpack Europe for three months” or “write the next Great American Novel” plan, I had a long list of ideas to draw from that generally kept me from getting stagnant.
That said, not having a big, central commitment or structure to my day still got to me over time, and it was easy to fall into periods of lethargy or maybe-depression. I’d want to take this failure mode more seriously next time.
Friends who’ve taken more extended breaks have talked about pushing through to discover more about themselves, but that it took more like 18+ months to get there. I do wonder what a longer break could do for me.

Scheduling my day-to-day

Having structured days helped me make sure I was keeping a balance of healthy activity, reading, stretching, projects, and fun time—rather than just letting entire days get sucked into a binge. A key insight here was that I typically get just as much “fun” out of 60-90 minutes of gaming as I do in 4+ hours, but that if I stick to the shorter time then I can also enjoy other activities with my time.
I struggled getting out of bed before 10am on days without a forcing function, but I love the feeling of getting up early and having a productive morning. Scheduling phone calls, medical appointments, etc. in the mornings helps me get moving.
Next time, I’d consider hiring a “life coach” or similar—someone to hold me accountable to not just falling into pits of lethargy or distraction. I found self-accountability less effective than other people having expectations of me, whether that’s social commitments to friends or the deadlines and expectations of an actual job.

Budgeting

I planned to keep my lifestyle mostly as-is rather than try to reduce costs to prolong the sabbatical. The thought was, “if I can’t afford the things I want to do, then I shouldn’t be on sabbatical”. More practically, fixed expenses made up the bulk of budget, so a little less spending on eating out or concert tickets wouldn’t have substantially affected the timeline anyways. I’d take this approach again next time.
My baseline expenses are high, and that shortened how long I could do this. I live in a large, party condo with a great view, in a central neighborhood of a HCOL city, and that was fully half of my expenses. Selling my place and moving just to extend the break could have been an option, but would have been quite disruptive and a drag on quality of life. Nothing to be done here, just the reality of the situation.
I went back and forth mentally on “how long can I do this?”, knowing I could dip into investment accounts for years’ worth of sabbatical funds, but the more I did that would dig into eventual retirement years. There wasn’t really an obvious line to draw. But when I ran through my sabbatical set-aside + my 3-month “emergency fund” and started dipping into investments, that “felt” like the right time to find work again. In hindsight, I spent a lot of unnecessary energy stressing about this question.

Mental reset

Taking time off to fully decompress and let myself turn off my brain was great. I had planned to give myself a month for this, but expecting 2-3 months would have been more accurate.
I’ve had mixed results reclaiming focus. Reading Johann Hari’s “Stolen Focus” points to a lot of social and technological reasons why this is the case, but even with some intent and a lot of time I still struggled to put my phone away and be present in other activities. Finding flow state was exciting the handful of times I was able to get there, and I wish I’d done it more, but boy am I into the dopamine that comes from texting friends and partners.
Using a smart watch actually helped with focus—knowing that an important text would buzz my wrist let me set everything else to do-not-disturb and let me avoid picking up my phone every five minutes to check for notifications. I only wore the watch intermittently, but when I stuck to it I was able to focus better.

That’s a wrap

That’s that! I definitely recommend taking time off to decompress between jobs if you’re able—I recognize this is very much a tech-income-with-no-dependents privilege I’ve got. I will do this again, but next time would target either 3-4 months (enough time to decompress but not get lost) or for 18+ months (enough time to get a different kind of life going)—or just need a more specific something in mind to anchor my schedule around.

Writing technical documentation for my personal tech setup has made my life easier

2023-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

“This is the difference between me and you. I don’t write documents with “strategy” in the title for fun.”

– my partner, Emma, seeing a “personal digital backup strategy” doc on my computer

As software developers, we know the importance of good documentation for describing how a technical system works to someone approaching the system, especially for the first time. But in my personal life, the technology I use in my home (or on my website) is its own system that requires configuration and upkeep. And when a home system needs my attention, I keep finding that “me, over six months since I last worked on this system” is often as helpless as if I were a new developer to a software project.

My personal technical projects tend to fall into disrepair with time: access tokens expire, integrations and APIs are deprecated, dependabot demands incompatible library updates, a software update breaks a behavior that had required a niche configuration to set up. When my home media streaming setup stopped working after a system update, I spent more time doing archaeology about how my local services were configured than I did debugging and fixing the actual problem. I had to re-research facts that had once been fresh in my mind, like where Plex’s log files were stored, which configurations I’d overridden, what custom scripts and crons I’d added and how they might fail. It took me doing this a few times before realizing some documentation was worth the time and I started keeping technical documents.

Over the last few years, I’ve written personal design documents for:

How my apps are containerized and orchestrated on my VPS
How my fully automatic CI/CD gets new code in GitHub straight to production
My personal digital backup configuration, using B2 with a few Linux clients
My home media setup, including services for streaming, downloading, and managing content
A playbook for restoring my VPS from a clean install (written after a horrible migration from a 32-bit VPS image I’d run for almost a decade)
How I configure my Yubikeys with my own secured, offline GPG keys that can be used for PGP actions and SSH

I don’t spend the same rigor on a personal “design document” as I do a professional one. For one thing, I’m writing for an audience of one: a future me who’s forgotten all the system details and likely much of my current intent, not a broader organization I need to convince or other engineers to debate trade-offs with. For another, I’m less picky about what does or doesn’t go into the “design document” than I might be professionally; 2-3 pages is usually enough to describe a personal-sized tech system for future-me, so anything relevant can typically fit.

What kind of detail does that look like? I try to document enough to quickly restore the bones of the current mental context that I have loaded in while working on the app. This often means:

a high-level architecture diagram
a list of running services with links to their config files, logs, and dashboards
a list of any users, accounts, or keys I had to create, and how to manage them
a TODO list, if I’m skipping formal issue tracking
playbook directions for debugging, including how to update the service, how to restart it, and how to verify it’s working after changes.

I don’t have a specific template, but having just these details has usually been enough context to boost me straight into productive work on the system at hand.

This method has saved me a lot of time since I started doing it, and helps me feel less anxious about the systems I’ve set up for myself. It’s almost exciting to realize something’s broken, knowing the context will help me fix it in 10-15 minutes instead of an hour.

Hope this helps you too!

What’s up in govtech?

2021-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

I originally wrote this post on Facebook to share some context on the govtech sector with friends.

With the new administration coming in, I thought I’d share some thoughts + insights from the world of software development for the federal government and what we’re expecting.

There are two agencies in the federal government that more people should know about: the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) and 18F. I’m gonna share a little about each of them and their role in this space.

To talk about USDS, I have to start with Healthcare.gov. If you remember back to 2013, Healthcare.gov was a key piece of the ACA (Obamacare) and was a massive failure on launch; people were mostly unable to load the site, let alone sign up for healthcare. Addressing this involved pulling a bunch of industry tech folks, throwing them in a room together, telling them they had to fix it. It took a few months but was successful.

The next year, a number of those people returned to form the U.S. Digital Service, a group that tries to replicate this model across the federal government. USDS loans out teams of people to federal agencies that want to fix their infrastructure, launch a new website, digitize a paper-driven process. Those teams are staffed from people in industry who do “tours of duty” with the government, coming to USDS for rotations, usually 1-2 years. The idea is to regularly bring modern ideas and practices from industry into government. USDS tries to find federal agencies that are willing to give their placements a lot of autonomy, letting them cut through red tape to get things done.

I get to work with USDS on the regular in my work at VA. I’m on the contractor side, working for a company (Ad Hoc) that was also born from of the Healthcare.gov rescue. USDS works with VA to set technical direction, Ad Hoc builds the websites and infrastructure they want. Before USDS came in, VA.gov was primarily a site about the agency itself and difficult to navigate for anything veterans actually needed; five years later, we’ve fully rebuilt everything, turned many paper forms into online processes, made it easy to manage benefits online — and user research has driven the design and user interfaces. Ask a veteran about VA.gov over the last few years, and you’ll typically hear pretty positive responses, especially compared to the low bar that had been set.

The other agency I mentioned was 18F, named for their location in DC (1800 F Street). They started around the same time as USDS, a web agency group as part of GSA (General Services Administration). My understanding is they initially focused on in-house website development for federal agencies, or doing “meta” work like Login.gov (digital identity) and analytics projects across government websites. I don’t work as closely with them, but I run into them in this space often, especially people who’ve done a stint at 18F and then jumped to another similar job.

In the last couple years, 18F has shifted to get involved in software contract procurement, helping federal agencies understand how best to manage software projects. This has meant helping agencies write better RFPs (requests for proposals) to solicit potential government contractors, helping them evaluate submissions to find quality contractors, then advising those agencies on software development. Last year they even published a website called “De-risking Government Technology”, full of advice on how to have successful software projects in government!

OK, all that was context to talk about what’s happening now. In 2017, it wasn’t clear if Trump would keep USDS around. But they’re still here, and they’ve spent the last four years extending their tendrils into more federal agencies. Add in 18F’s involvement in supporting government software more generally, and these two agencies combined have laid a ton of groundwork for better software development in the future. Some federal agencies are already making a lot of progress on modernization (VA, CMS), others are just getting started, and there’s work to be done everywhere.

Enter Biden. Two major things immediately change. First, we’re no longer under Trump, which means a lot of people who wanted to do this work but weren’t interested in working under a Trump administration might suddenly join. (I don’t hold that against anyone, set your own boundaries — but at the end of the day, people still need their government to be functional and accessible, regardless of who’s in office.) I gather USDS is expecting a major influx of new recruits and has been planning accordingly. Second, he’s intentional staffing key technology positions across federal agencies where meaningful influence can happen on technological transformation. Ideally, these administrators are going to be a strong catalyst in jump-starting us forward.

The staffing part has clearly been in the works for many months. I can’t find it now through the mess of news about the new administration, but there was a public doc floating around at one point listing many of these key positions, how they fit into each agency and what kind of technological influence they had. Even before the election, my coworkers and I were solicited (indirectly / grapevine) for our recommendations on what should be key technology priorities at VA for a Biden administration, and I’m sure this is happening across other agencies. This administration has been meaningfully planning ahead, putting together the pieces and personnel to unblock digital transformation across the board.

Today, Reuters reported that whitehouse.gov has a cute message in the HTML source, followed by a link to the USDS website: “If you’re reading this, we need your help building back better.”

I’m excited to see what happens next. We’ve already been getting the ball rolling the last few years. Come join me, let’s build back better.