I have been working on a bunch of project in the last 7 months or so. Since Governor Kasich took office in January, and SB5 was introduced soon after, there has been a pushback across the state which I have tried to be a part of. I'm a member of a bunch of new organization that have formed, starting with the
Defend Ohio Campaign and its branches at the University of Cincinnati as well as Miami/Butler County.
Lately, I've been working with about a dozen other activists based in Cincinnati, Baton Rouge, Indianapolis and Michigan to organize against the
American Legislative Exchange Council. We put together the
first protest against them in their 38 year history in April and are organizing another in New Orleans. I've been the computer-dude, as I am for a lot of campaigns that I work on, which is cool, but I always make sure I get to organize on the ground as well. Our efforts helped lead to a leak of all of the organization's model legislation, which was parsed and released by the
Center for Media and Democracy at
ALECexposed.org, the Nation broke the story and it has been covered by Keith Olbermann, Terry Gross and the LA Times.
I have again relaunched my personal site,
dessemundo.com. At the beginning of the year, I took the blog that had sat idle for years down and had been putting up simple, one page, raw html, posts for several months. I recently went ahead and installed wordpress again, but stripped down the standard theme to retain the simple look of the one-off posts but also facilitate easier writing and formatting and the site currently hosts longer articles based around numbers and politics, but the direction could change again any time.
I've worked on a bunch of web-based projects ranging from the simple, to the more complex. The first was
How Many NPR's Does it Cost? which I made after NPR's funding was coming under scrutiny in congress. It only receives $10 million in federal funds, which means, as I write on the site "we save roughly 0.0% ... and lose a whole lot more." I also made
BetterOh.org as a way to shove it to a conservative organization that is pro-SB5 which has the .com domain.
My ongoing project is a map project called "One Big Struggle." In April, I was talking to my friend Mark about how much I loved maps and would love to see one which served as a visual timeline of the progressive movement spanning as far back as there was such a thing. The result was
OneBigStuggle.com which used the google map api to plot points representing meetings, rallies, mass arrests, and the like. It's still under development, but, along with some others, I have begun adding events falling under struggles for workers' rights, gay rights, women's rights, alter-globalization, anti-capitalism and anti-war.
So that's where I'm at right now.