Legistar Trek, Or, Exploring New York City Legislation

How it feels to explain this

I don't remember ever having explained Legistar before, but teaching my friend about it felt familiar. And that's probably because NYC municipal governance is a complex sociotechnical system I started learning several years ago. And whenever I've learned a complex sociotechnical system well enough to teach others about it, I've usually followed that by helping others learn about some widely-used piece of software, and showing them how to navigate some nonintuitive UI to find what they need.

This phase of understanding, where I not only regularly use the complex domain-specific software and can walk others through it, but also have opinions about pain points and substitutes, feels so much like home to me. I got here with git, and many parts of Wikimedia's tech archipelago, and Python packaging, and more that's harder to dredge up, decades later, and I couldn't count how many thousands? of people I've taught along the way. I'm enough of a maintainer that, while I lament the flaws in this infrastructure, I want to tread carefully when I distinguish bugs and missing features from nice-to-haves. As I said a few years ago, if you ever start maintaining anything as complicated as Python packaging, you will never again use the phrase, "why don't you just?"

I can get to similar levels of expertise with systems that mostly aren't software. I think I got to a similar place with New York City's defibrillator location data, and hope to get there again.

There can be something uncanny about the first time I explain a domain or a tool to someone else. I remember a decade back, at Recurse Center, explaining Python generator functions to one or two other people, and my memory is practically of an out-of-body experience, so distinct were my two different selves, one calmly and helpfully teaching something, the other watching from a foot away bewildered and agape in disbelief. Surely this novice will fail, will propagate errors from her understanding outward; surely the learner ought to find someone more expert to consult. Pretty unexpected.***** When the topic has to do with political activism, I sometimes feel a kinship with everyone over the decades who's resonated to Jerry Garcia's words: Somebody has to do something; it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.

And, as ever with teaching, I only ever get to hold on to the artifacts of teaching, not the act itself, nor the effects, most of which I will never witness.

There's delight, too, of course, pride when I think I've done it well, triumph when the learner understands and then extrapolates, and that at-home feeling I mentioned. It's not all disorientation and wistfulness. It's just that right now it's autumn, and as I started wrapping up this conclusion my thoughts turned to Mel, and I miss them.