 So Jenny, it's an honor to have you, and thanks for allowing us to share some of your music up front. That's super cool. So question, you know, I grew up in Seattle in the 90s where, you know, grunge was big and feminist punk. But for those who don't know, tell us more about the DIY music scene at that time and sort of that digital music revolution. Okay. Well, I grew up in Washington DC, which is credited as being one of the homes of DIY, although DIY happens anywhere. Someone teaches themselves how to build something. But, you know, DIY, every punk scene had a different quality to it. Seattle had a really interesting quality because they had some pop which became this kind of worldwide commercial phenomenon. And so they had this sort of really interesting small town big world quality to them in DC, you know, every, every, every city has a different quality and in DC it's the government right so you've got these high performing globally focused individuals, you know, and all of the NGOs of the world are there and all of the major marches that happened back in the 80s and 90s would all happen in Washington. So it had this kind of mixture of kind of workaholism, political engagement, and sort of a sense that you really were at the center of a place where you could change the world and I think all of those things influenced the kids that made up the punk scene. And it's hard to even imagine in the same way that like it's hard to imagine a world before all of the sort of major tech that, you know, before Google search or any of this kind of stuff. But back then when I was in high school there really wasn't an infrastructure for, you know, national tours and independent music didn't have a place to be played on mainstream radio. And some people thought that was really good, because you know you had all these pockets of creativity and a lot of people looking intently at their own scenes and it created this kind of nurturing environment that sometimes goes away when everyone's chasing the big wins that happened. But it was a really interesting moment where people were basically building everything. So if they wanted to put out a record no one was going to put their record out because there wasn't a label that cared about this stuff. So they actually had to figure out how to, you know, do the artwork and find the pressing plant and go into the studio and put out the records themselves. And because everybody was doing that everyone helped each other do that, and it created this kind of environment that was really enabling. One of the things I love about that technologists and why I think in my later life I've spent so much time with them is that they have a lot of the same kind of can do spirit and ability to imagine the future that artists have as well. So that's that's with the DCC and the DIY movement that I came up in. Cool. So you sort of evolved from sort of, well, still a musician, but you became an advocate for independent musicians. Tell me about that. Well, I was an advocate before I was a musician. So there was a there was an organization called Positive Force in DC, which was really unique in the sense that like a lot of people like care about an issue and then they joined Greenpeace or they joined some established nonprofit organizations and and volunteer for them. But Positive Force was basically empowering these really really young kids to do whatever. And so it was this collective so if I was like a 13 year old and I was concerned about suicide or I wanted to put on a concert in a park. The 21 year old who was part of the collective would help me go down and get a permit from the local government to have that concert. Before we would sort of design the kind of activism we wanted to do ourselves. So it was really this crazily empowering environment, which was less about like, you know, someone handing me a clipboard intent telling me to go get a lot of signatures outside somebody's, you know, you know, some shop in town, it really allowed us to do whatever we wanted to do. Sometimes it was efficient, you know, where we do some incredible thing like organized concerts in front of the White House because you could do that back then. And sometimes it was really inefficient like we decide we want to feed the homeless so we're going to make a pot of soup and try to find them and hand them soup. But what was great was you really could use all of your creativity and you really could work on anything you cared about so it was really really empowering organization. So I did that before I was a musician. And it was just sort of the water we swam in the positive force did a lot of benefit concerts, and I started being in bands. And then when I came out of that work. I had this record label. I had put out, you know, 70 releases with my friend Kristen Thompson for simple machines records, because again no one was going to put out my tsunami records so I had to put them out myself. And I was working at the Washington Post, in a silly job where I was writing the ads for for the newspaper, and I had a fast internet connection. And that was really unique back then it's hard to imagine that but like, I had a fast desktop, because I needed it in order to design And in that I saw everything beginning like you know my thrift store may then saw eBay for the first time you're like all this stuff was coming in. And because we have this catalog all the music labels that were starting at that time the online music labels all came to us and said you know can we license your catalog. One thing we'd been known for when we were in the, you know, what I world was we put a guide to putting out records together it was like a 16 page thing if you sent us 50 cents, we put two stamps on it and send it to you, and it sort of gave you all the recipe of how you put out a physical record. And so when we started getting all these requests we thought all right it's time to update this we need to figure out what's the right thing to recommend for people to do in the digital environment. We realized, you know, as we were learning this that they were like 60 different companies and they had all these roles like you can own your copyrights or you can sign a contract or you don't have to sign a contract all these different options. But as the bubble burst, the first tech bubble, all those companies either went out of business or merged or were purchased by other companies, and very quickly we saw things like, you know, the company music which had sort of created itself as like the renegade punk rock version of this was purchased by Universal Music, which was like the man, you know, the most major label. And what we realized was like it's not going to be enough everything's happening. It's too early to know what the right things to do in the space are. So we realized it wasn't enough to say like go to this company or sign this kind of contract or do this with your copyrights, we actually realized it was all happening in real time. And so we started Future of Music Coalition, which was specifically trying to complexify some very simple narratives like all the, all of the sort of open copyright people were saying that you know any sort of copyright was theft, and all of the major labels were saying any sharing of anything was theft. And frankly, you know, we felt that most musicians were somewhere, you know, they didn't want everything to be free, they needed to make a living and they also didn't want to give more power to the overlords who had controlled the radio and controlled the record labels. So I did that for about seven years, and that's how I got the bug, thinking about the way that technology was changing everything in the world. Right. Yeah, I think there's so many commonalities from the open source movement, which really was sort of happening at the same time that you were leading the Future of Music Coalition so super interesting. So I mean you look at some of your work today, you know the World Wide Web is really seen as a public resource, yet it still often can bring socio economic disparities and other issues. So, you know, sort of bridging what you've learned and all that you've brought as being an advocate. What are some of the current challenges you're seeing at the Ford Foundation and sort of what commonalities and sort of threads, are you among some of these social issues for the web. Yeah, I mean there's, there's so many of them and you know I've been at Ford forever, like, you know I've basically, you know if I was a dog when a puppy when I came to Ford I probably wouldn't be alive. A long time ago. But when I came I came actually because I received a grant from Ford to work on these copyright issues because I was sort of right at the center of it. And, and Ford cared about access to information, and they also cared about artists and arts. So, so I sort of fit that job perfectly. And we had a brand new president and he said to me, do you want to work on cultural policy or media policy because the position was called media and cultural policy. It's like you can't do both we're all doing too many things you can't do both which one. And I said I want to work on internet policy. And he says well what's that I'm like well there's no rules in relation to the internet environment yet he's like aren't all those rules already created I'm like no no none of them are created at all. And so that's how it started and so the early challenges of the portfolio were that. You know a lot of them are the same challenges they're just showing up in a different way, but were that technology was transforming every aspect of our lives. That were indisible to the majority of the public, and all of the systems that try to protect the public. You know, imperfectly at times, but in a democratic environment so the government who can actually sort of regulate companies who are acting in bad in bad ways, or civil society organizations like I said Greenpeace before who can go out there and try to raise awareness and you know environmental issues, all of the established protectors of the public for the most part, didn't notice that everything was transforming and couldn't see it. And the sad fact is that so many of the people in positions of power in government and in philanthropy and in civil society were of an age that they never had that fast internet connection on their desk. And so they're in charge of the world, but they don't really understand the change, and they always think of technology in a transactional way, as opposed to in a systems way. And so I think that's that was the biggest problem back then that we had no advocates who could actually say you know net neutrality is the important because, you know, if we don't have it it's like paola for the entire internet and only the wealthy and connected can be on the fast lane. We needed people to be able to understand those systemic questions back in the day and now we still need it, you know, I think the challenges a lot of the people who are in leadership positions are made to feel very stupid by technology so they ignore it. Well I'm only going to be here for a couple more years so someone after me will fix it and that keeps getting kicking it down the down the road. And while that's happening the private sector is in a completely on. It's like a race to the bottom, really, and not just a race to the bottom among themselves but among the world, you know. If we're competing with companies in other parts of the world that don't have laws around freedom of expression or privacy, you know, they're they're creating their technology to compete with the world in a way that completely forgives themselves of any of their responsibilities to the public so those are the really, really big challenges how do we get technologists and not just any but the right kinds of them in all these places so that we can be safe in the future. Yes, I mean there is so much to tackle so how has what sort of strategies and solutions are you implementing at the Ford Foundation to tackle these. Well there there's a lot I mean some of it's just building a field of experts who can actually say oh well you know when this tech company says that no one cares about privacy this is what they need, you know and this is why that's what they need or they're actually controlling the market in a way where there's no competition if anybody could vote with their feet or their pocketbook they would but there's no market competition in this environment. So we need people who can actually make the arguments about the dangers of unconstrained or or I'd also say like if you're a strong capitalist, uncapitalistic technology environment because there's really not competition in so many places, you know there's such winter take all power dynamics with some of these companies, but putting all of that aside, I think you know the the biggest most interesting thing for me right now is when I first came to Ford, I flew out to California and I sat with a lot of the companies that seem to have a civic mind to them like the Wikipedia's or the kivas, you know at that time was a big deal and it just started, and like, ask them, are you concerned about net neutrality, you know, if you know if people had a certain amount of money to be on the web wouldn't that undermine your business model, you know, would to make it hard for people to access this information. And what we found is there was a bias on the west coast, which most tech companies and most technologists felt like tech was always going to be speedy efficient and would do no evil. And if there were any problems they would root around it with the technical solution. They really weren't interested in Washington. And what we found historically is that most companies aren't interested in Washington till they get sued, then they get, then they get a policy shop, and then they spent a lot of time usually publicly denying that they're doing what they're actually doing or trying to change what people think about what they're doing. But what was interesting to me is we've seen this enormous shift and it's really what makes me so optimistic right now like open source people always knew that how you design something will determine whether it is rights undermining or rights undermining they just know that and that having competing models is what keeps people honest. So if someone builds a technology that's doing something you don't like a technology that does something different than that gives gives the market the opportunity to move in a better direction. So, but, but you are small, you hit you open source people are small in the world in relation to all of the public in the world. What I love right now though is that all the change in the world, whether it is the racial reckoning we're going through around the lack of diversity and the way that black people have been held it down. Women have been, you know, made to feel like second class citizens in these environments, or the kinds of scary disinformation that we're seeing and the confusing media environment that we're in, or the total lack of privacy and the constant hacking, you know, and things that we're experiencing we know something's wrong. And what I love is that the technologists of this generation are less quick to say tech will always be good. They understand that it's neither good nor bad, until we make it so. And so what I'm seeing is an enormous hunger at companies, and not at companies at universities, by students to really take these very rare and valuable skills they have, and to use them in a different way that actually builds the world they want to live in, as opposed to the one that they're afraid of living in. So I do think we're in this kind of critical moment where we're going to have different kinds of technologists, we're going to come out and go different kinds of places, not just to the five companies but out into the world. And, and hopefully that'll be enough to save us. Let's hope. I know I had listened to an NPR story with you and I think 2004 and you talked about sort of the voice of the musician was lost in policy debates. Do you think that's changing I mean you mentioned the university students so you do see a shift more where the individual voice of developers, for example, and those of us in technology have a voice. Yeah, I mean, I mean the problem with the musicians is like, and again this is a little sometimes this is a little bit the open source thing as well, is that you know, we're so interested in what we're interested in. We're interested in writing the song, or that spectacular song that that other person wrote that is so much better than your song that it kicks your butt and makes you want to write an even better like you're so focused on the thing that really fires you up and I'm sure the same thing is true with technology you're so focused on open source project. Exactly. All this other stuff around like, what is this policy, what is this rule, what is this law, you know, or, you know, all that other stuff seems less pure and kind of distracting from what you most care about. But the, and, you know, the challenges that you know in the case of the music landscape. It was only too easy for both the major tech companies and the major music companies to find some artists to be mascots that stood in front of these positions that were really business decisions around like well it's all open we can make all this money or if it's all closed we can make this kind of money. And what I found was frustrating was, you know, they would hold up a musician and say musicians say this. And if you've ever met a musician I'm sure this is true with the open source people because I've been around them. If you ever have, you know, three musicians together there's like 15 positions on any issue, you know they have very strong and complex positions on things. So the idea that you could just say that musicians want this, or they don't want this is, is a real problem. And the fact that they're so focused on their art is great for us but it's also bad at times because they can be, they would be the best advocates for a better world but they're more focused on the world they want to create which is in art. And that's why we need these hybrids and and what I would say about the technology landscape I'm seeing right now is, it's the investments we're making about building this field that we're calling the field of public interest technology is focused on investments the four foundation made back in the 60s and 70s to build the field of public interest law. And for those of you who are lawyers you almost can't imagine that there was a time where you know the pro the major law firms didn't have a pro bono. There was a practice where you could like be at a firm and work on capital cases or environmental cases for part of your time, or that you know there were pathways into the ACLU or the NAACP legal defense fund. But none of these organizations really existed before the investment to build them. And it was largely built around a similar moment of cultural tumult and change, like the one we're in right now but it was the civil rights movement. And there was a real need to have lawyers that could actually defend people who are doing civil disobedience or bring cases around, you know, voting rights and other kinds of issues. And so what I love about this moment is the sort of, it's this kind of mutual development of a real clear I'd need to do something different with these technology skills and the same way in the 60s and 70s these lawyers were like it's not enough for me just to work with them at this moment. So we're seeing that same kind of phenomenon. And what makes me optimistic about this right now is, they will find much better solutions when they take all that energy they've been focusing on, I don't know, stroking the algorithm, whatever they're trying, and focus on actually how to make these kinds of systemic changes to how you know people get vaccines or how people believe in the news, or how people can pick between social media environments that enshrine their privacy rights and don't just sell all their data to everyone. So there's just an abundance of things to work on and I think we have, I'm seeing just a really willingness to do so, sort of how, from your experience how can people organize to prioritize which issues to work on when you're trying to account for diverse stakeholders. What's your experience. Every single issue that you could care about has a technical component to it at this point this is what I'm always trying to say and this is again this challenge that I have when I'll go to like talk to a president of foundation or, you know, ahead of an NGO and say to them, you know, we really need a technology lens on what you're doing. They'll say, Oh, but we have this person who's building this app or who's organizing this, you know, flash mob or what you know I know that's outdated but you know the point that I'm meaning is there, they think about technology as an instrumentalist tactical, you know, tool, as opposed to the ecosystem. Right. So like a perfect example like the first argument I made for changing to have an Internet portfolio at Ford was like Ford had just made like a $5 million investment in NPR so that they could begin to develop podcasting, like it used to be podcasting. And so this idea was like how do you take this great content, which we listen to on our radio and make it something that's actually going to be in the Internet environment. Okay, we'll think about that in an environment of a non neutral net, you know, public radio has very tight margins, right. Imagine if they actually had to pay for you to be able to access this American life or whatever it was. They weren't thinking about the ecosystem that they assumed would stay the same in the environment where they were creating the tactical solution. And so what I always say to people is like anything you care about if you care about reproductive rights and health and you care about whether you know working mothers can have health care. If you care about the environment. Every single element of this will have technology transforming the ecosystem around it, and potential tech solutions that could actually create greater problems if they weren't applied correctly. And so what's wonderful is if anybody who is trying to build something they care about or trying to invest in something they care about, it's less about building it in a whole cloth by itself like Oh, this will be the solution to that as a tool. It's more about being with the best advocates that you know the most impacted populations and saying, what's not working. And how do we solve it and what I find is that there are going to be parts of it that are rocket science but a lot of it is basically just best practice that most people who don't have a tech mindset, don't have an easy access to understanding how they might approach it so off the shelf solutions that a private sector person would use without thinking, or maybe like, you know, Greek to NGOs that are underfunded they don't have technologists or even a lot of our government systems, which is, which is why they have such a hard time. So, amazing, but still lots of transferable skills. Right. Yeah, I think maybe more so with our open source community we are so used to really collaborating with folks with our competitors across countries and things like that. So, what would you say to some of these folks to maybe encourage them to use their skills for the public good for public interest technology or perhaps even going to work for the government or an NGO. Well, it's never been easier to do this, you know what we found, like we had to build a lot of these systems because we need the technologists right so all our grantees. I was a, I was in the field right I had, I was forward grantee before I became a program officer. And I was so proud of myself when I became a program officer because I was going to solve everything I had this $3 million budget now and everything was going to be all for the field. And I'm going to be in the room with the funders I can tell them how important these issues are. Of course, that is not what happened, you know, it's been such a hard slog and you know it's amazing like, you know, it's like somebody with an axe in their head and you're like, you know, we need to take that axe out of your head and they're like what axe, you know, it's just like, there's so much denial about how the world has been transformed, or and I think it's just the denial of being afraid that you won't know how to fix it. And so I'll fix something else, you know, like, I don't know how to get this axe out but I'm you know I'll make myself a cup of tea because I'm a little tired or whatever it is, you know. But, but yeah the punchline about this long winded story that I was telling you is I had all the grantees that was there was about like 10 of them, 10 organizations working on these issues at that time. And I said, Alright, if you had all the money in the world because you do now I've got $3 million right. That's all the money you'll ever need to save the internet. What else would you need. And they all said we need technologists that understand our issues but that we can work with because what we found is, so many of the engineers and the best of them have usually gone through a cycle of pure computer science or pure engineering schools without many humanities, and with this sort of tech solutionism as a sort of Bible that they hold to themselves that the tech will always solve these problems. And what we found was like, these people often didn't have some of the soft skills or the curiosity to be able to figure out how to pick the right problem to solve. And or how to work in an environment that wasn't, you know, fast paced and, and you know, and then there's financial concerns as well like you don't make as much money if you're working in the government or in the NGOs but what we found is, through these pathways I'll ask that question explicitly so I'll say like, there are things like the tech talent project, which is actively done work to try to recruit strong technologists to take tours of duty within government, you know so something like this there are a bunch of organizations like this and we can find some links and you can link to them somewhere. The NGOs are desperate for them now like we have a whole tech fellows program we've done now for five years with Mozilla, where they help vet the tech shops and we do the sort of partnership vetting and we put technologists into NGOs like amnesty international human rights watch. These are places that by the way have nice budgets they actually could hire technologists, but without the kind of system to figure out where to place the technologists and what kind of skills for what kind of work. Usually the first one never gets placed unless we can do that and if we do it properly, then like amnesty has like 20 technologists now. But it takes just sort of someone explaining or helping them to find what they need and matchmaking and then them feeling the joy. And what we find is that a lot of these technologists like the one at amnesty, the first one that went came from Cisco. And, you know, amnesty immediately like wanted to hire him, and he said you know it's going to be very hard to go back and work in the private sector after, after having the experience of the kind of meaningful work that I'm doing here. Amazing. I was going to ask for some of your favorite examples but it sounds like you have so many with ones you just shared do you have any others you'd like to. There is this amazing article that you can Google in the Atlantic about. It's a project called 18 F, and it was set up. It was set up in the aftermath of the failure of the health care.gov website. And it was a way that the government figured out how to recruit a different kind of talent in at a moment of crisis. And this article about these folks in an Airbnb in, I think it was like in Crystal City or Clarendon which is right across the river from Washington, solving the technical problems for like pennies on the $100 bills of what was initially spent. It's just such an exciting, I feel like for me, it's like an action film. And, and again, over and over again, we've heard from individuals who've gone through these as long as they're placed well and treated with respect which part of what was interesting about 18 F was. There wasn't a requirement that there wasn't a guarantee that you'd get an 18 F person you actually had to agree to certain things like you had to agree to place them at a certain level and give them a certain level of power within an agency. And this actually meant that they could actually make the kinds of changes they needed to make at a systemic level because government I think and rightly so is conservative. It's worried. If we do the wrong thing, all these downstream harms will happen. But sometimes that creates a paralysis. So, so the 18 F article in the Atlantic, which is from quite a long time ago is, I can't believe there's not more articles about how interesting this stuff is. US digital response, which was an organization that sort of came out of the Code for America, sort of network. Because of COVID, and because of, because of, you know, our racial reckoning moment. And because of, you know, pandemic and quarantine. All of those issues were issues that governments across the country were just struggling with how do we get people checks. How do we deal with whether we're master not how you know how do we make our systems more transparent and helpful at this moment where people are needing so much. So US digital response was an amazing, it stood up for for this moment still exists now and is going to get back bigger, but we're able to sort of recruit private sector, and some other talent to be match made with individuals to solve big problems. And so there's a lot of this stuff that's just sort of developing itself because no one developed it, but it's proved its usefulness so my sense is it's going to become to systematize, you know, and hopefully government will have learned its lesson and we'll start hiring in a different way as well. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, you're right. I've seen some really cool tour duties on folks really making a difference and yeah really appreciate your leadership and sort of that bridge between the public and private sectors. I mean, well, I don't do it. I just fund the geniuses that do it. And I can also say that it was very selfish like we needed these technologists ourselves. You know, you can't you can't make an argument for why a company is doing something that they shouldn't be allowed to do if you can not make the technical technical arguments about what can happen what can't happen. And for so long, you know, people would wander around the hill on behalf of some of these companies and say, you know, those advocates, you know, they're, you know, they just don't understand that you know, we're not doing that and they don't really understand how to make the changes that you want us to change. And you know, it's just not true. But you actually have to put your money where your mouth is and actually show why it's true and to do that we need a different kind of technologist working with government and civil society. Right. Yeah, and I know your website's really been showcasing some of those geniuses who are making a difference. So I encourage you all to take a look. I'm kind of in closing kind of on a lighter note, you know, I love live music and we're sort of fortunate in the US that things are opening up a little bit so kind of my question to fold who's what's the favorite band or musician you've played with and who are you looking forward to hearing live in the future. That's interesting. You know, one of the benefits. I'm a DC girl but because of my job at Ford I've had to live in New York for a long time, you know, some people say had to live like it's tragedy but it's a living living in New York is the free concerts in Central Park in the summertime. It's just there's nothing like it. You know it's a first come first serve to get the tickets, and then you're outside in a beautiful park in the middle of this enormous park. And, you know, anything you see there is going to be joyful I remember we saw Gregory Porter once and it was like all he was so delicious he was playing with an orchestra, and all these strangers were just like buying each other ice cream and having the most fun in the world so something like that where you can, it's not just about seeing music but the idea that you can enjoy it with strangers. You know who you don't know if they've been vaccinated or not or if they're you know like you've, we've been made to feel afraid of our call you know like, think about it we've had a year and a half of crossing the street when someone is walking towards you. And now how we can be next to each other and dance with each other and, you know, and meet strangers is going to be some muscles that I'd like to work on in the future. Yeah, same here it's very likes and live music it really just sort of unifies folks. Yep. I love, I love so much music, like I really miss like going to a jazz club and not knowing who's there. You know, I love that sort of Nick and Nora film thing where you know the jazz is amazing but the conversation is amazing and it doesn't keep you from solving the murder it's just a part of the whole night. Love going to jazz clubs for that reason. And what about you I mean if you were, if you were in the grunge 90s you must have had some favorites that. Yeah, I mean in some again it was the venue it was a crocodile club or they sort of graduated but yeah I think going forward I mean we bought our tickets already for Austin City Limits which is always fun. Yeah, kind of a nice tradition sitting outside it's just yeah really with the jazz fest in New Orleans, which I think they moved to fall which means we might be able to go this year so. Very cool. Well thank you so much for participating in OpenJS world we are so delighted to have you and hope to do more with you and the Ford Foundation. Well we need you so much so much of the web is dependent on the like the toiling, the invisible toiling of the open source community and we need to know more about what you're doing and we need to respect it so tell your stories. We will we have wonderful folks working on the web so. Oh God and I didn't even talk about Michael Brennan which is like we're going to put some links to because there's actually a program officer who does nothing but wake up every day and think about the open web so. Great. You all come and talk to him. So we'll talk to him, and we'll definitely we'll share links and share more in our blog. Awesome. Nice meeting you. Thanks so much.