Craft + Joy
Backyard Waystation
Inspired by the ethos of digital gardens and Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s art of being a Learner, this personal wiki is a living document for learning out loud.
Hi! I’m Kaitlin Albasi, a technologist, researcher, educator, and organizer/writer, with prior leadership experience in New York state government.
My path ran through community journalism, grassroots organizing, policy research and campaign strategy, while building technology and research for government.
I write about AI safety research, AI governance, and labor policy, as the founder of What We Will – a tech worker cooperative, policy research & advocacy collective, and worker center strategically organizing knowledge workers for a more human-centered technological future.
Code is my language of joy. I started this site in 2024 as a fellow with the Processing Foundation, while also taking an inspiring community class by Kameelah Janan at the School for Poetic Computation. This blog started as an artistic project in the spirit of Maker / hacker movements. As I continue to learn out loud, it is becoming a space where I track what I’m building and reading in AI safety research and AI governance policy.
I collect and illustrate facts. History, archival data, Census records, primary testimonies, zines. I’ve been an avid contributor to Wikipedia, iNaturalist, and LibriVox for over a decade, and have loved being part of an online movement of open source creative commons. Some subjects of interest for me include human genetic and linguistic migration, social movements, urban design, DIY biotechnology, permaculture, and multispecies ethics (Donna Haraway’s cyborgs and dogs as companion species). Obsessed with tiny dogs, birdwatching, butterfly gardening and pollinator plants.
I’m active in open ML research and civic tech communities. I studied mathematics and economics at Columbia, and Data Science for Public Policy at NYU, focusing on informal sector labor and the gig economy. I also studied computer science at the University of Pennsylvania with a postgrad certificate in Machine Learning / AI at MIT.
Other threads
My passion for the craft of code has always been rooted in art and creative hacking: documentary poetry, algo music, computational art, DIY electronics and robotics, solarpunk agrotech, fabric art, sculpture and metalcraft, circus and aerial dance, field recordings and sampling the city as songwriting. The physical world is a playground I hunger for when I’m absorbed in abstract concepts. I delight in experiencing digital things in physical form, and vice versa, and I relish the process of bringing ideas to life.
I’ve started four nonprofits since high school, two of which won state governments awards, in bursts of creative energy for community organizing that I think of as a kind of relational art form. However, at heart, I’m a very introverted person, and require a lot of reading time to recharge every day. I often long for self-erasure to restore quiet. A few communities that inspire me: School of Machines, Tactical Tech, Forensic Architecture, and the School for Computational Poetry.