This year’s inaugural Logic School Community Technologist is Adrian Jones, with his project Looking Glass, a community driven augmented reality (AR) project that celebrates the stories, sights and sounds of Black life in Pittsburgh. Combining in-depth, historical research alongside a forward-thinking, liberatory future, Adrian’s project is a model of how technology can engage and be in relationship with community. It’s been inspiring watching Adrian’s project unfold, from the design and implementation of the AR platform to the enormous amount of research Adrian’s been doing in the Teenie Harris archives. Every aspect of his project has threaded in new and existing relations with community members as collaborators, co-conspirators, storytellers, tech builders and visionaries. Tech is part of the project, but it’s history and community that are centered. 

You can read Adrian’s Statement of Purpose, and be sure to watch the video as well. 

“Tech is magic. Tech lets us build worlds and talk across oceans. Whatever kind of freak we are—and most of us are several kinds—tech helps us find other freaks like us”. 

Disruption, A Manifesto, Logic Magazine co-founders

Logic Magazine started in 2015 to fill a gap in tech writing. Neither techno-optimists nor scolds, at Logic Foundation we want to imagine tech otherwise. To imagine tech otherwise, outside the dominant models we have, we need to understand the social, political, cultural and financial entanglements of tech. We need to understand how we got here, so we can know where to go next. 

At Collective Action School, we deeply believe technology has a role to play in building greater community power, sovereignty and self-determination. That’s why we’ve established the Collective Action School Community Technologist program in partnership with Processing Foundation, an open source foundation for community building in arts and technology. This program is a year long, and members from the previous cohorts of Collective Action School are eligible for the program. We support the Community Technologist through mentorship, funding, and new connections.