Why a sidewalk
Before Buildspace, before the sensors, there was a question I could not put down. It was about me as much as anyone.
Journal entryRead
Journal
The development record, in order
record · artifact · protocol proposal · hypothesis · pending journal entry
Lineage01
Before the sidewalk had a name
The observation habit came first. Four projects from 2021 to 2023 show the Lab's method before the framework existed.
Published-research retrospectiveRead entry
Buildspace02
The sidewalk came before the sensors
Digital Sidewalk began with a question about how people learn by being around one another. The instruments came later.
Research retrospectiveRead entry
The first thing I asked
July 15, 2023. My first conversation with the assistant I have now worked beside for three years was about how to tell what lasts.
Journal entryRead
Nights and weekends, from a kitchen table
The program was six weeks, online, and the name told you exactly when it happened. I did it twice while working full time, and then I studied why it worked.
Journal entryRead
Fort Mason, from the top of the hill
The walk down to the building is the part I would keep if I could only keep one thing.
Journal entryRead
What I built in Erevald
An album of girlie pop. I wrote every song, sang a vibe track for each one, produced them with Suno, and spent the whole season making videos.
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The last one
Eleven hundred people in a building by the bay, and then, two weeks later, an announcement that the program was closing. I was still writing about it.
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Movement. Characters. Safety.
Three dimensions for noticing what an activity counter cannot tell you about a community.
Published-research explanationRead entry
Holy smokes
March 2025. What I typed, more or less exactly, in the hour after my committee told me what I had done.
Journal entryRead
Naming03
Two names, one lab
In April 2025 the Lab was named, and a decision made then still shapes how the company is organized.
Historical decision recordRead entry
Physics04
One cavity, three domains
Sound in a room, heat in a building envelope, and airflow in a duct are all energy moving inside a bounded space. The January 2026 specification treated them with one model.
Design recordRead entry
Digital Sidewalk for energy
A proposal from January 2026 to turn home thermal scans into a shared, place-indexed record. It was written, costed, and not built.
Proposal, not builtRead entry
StormNet05
From the sidewalk to the StormNet field test
The January 2026 prototype brought cameras, maps, thermal exploration, and observations into one research surface.
Historical design recordRead entry
Four surfaces, one observation problem
A camera wall, a map, a thermal view, and a log each answer a different question. None is the whole story.
Design retrospectiveRead entry
The 0.71 question
A delay parameter near 0.71 kept turning up in the Lab's simulations. The ice storm gave a real signal to test it against. It is a hypothesis, and it is labeled as one.
Hypothesis, not validatedRead entry
Prime resonance as an exploratory detector
A scoring rule that rewards clean, prime-indexed peaks in a spectrum. It was run on the storm data as an exploration, and that is all it is.
ExploratoryRead entry
Listening is the first instrument
Why a lab about community learning has a microphone in it. Everything I have built, going back to 1999, has been a version of this.
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No one here knows why I'm doing this
January 24, 2026, late. Ice rain had started. I had a phone in a freezer bag by the door and a heat blanket, and I typed a question I want to keep.
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Seventeen and a half hours of ice
On January 24–25, 2026, a two-phone rig in Clemson recorded a real ice storm end to end. Here is the dataset and its limits.
Dataset, published with its limitsRead entry
Method06
Listen before you predict
Atmospheric audio is an observation channel. Forecast skill is a separate claim that needs a separate test.
Measurement protocolRead entry
What should we measure next?
An observation-design instrument, its one frozen failure, and how a failure became the calibration.
Validated on synthetic agents; shelved pending real useRead entry
Inside the August architecture bundle
What survives in the v0.1 archive — a source registry, observation schemas, missingness definitions, and a validation plan.
Archive inspectedRead entry
Missing is part of the map
No observation, a late observation, and a restricted observation are different things. A useful system says which one it means.
Schema designRead entry
What makes a public research tool?
A prototype becomes useful to others when they can install it, inspect a sample, repeat a result, and report a problem.
Readiness planRead entry
Atom, signal, pattern, hypothesis
In August 2026 the Lab declared a parent frame over every research thread — four levels of claim and four ledgers a claim may live in.
Framework, adoptedRead entry
A global sidewalk is a testable question
The global protocol asks which community conditions travel across settings, and which do not.
Research protocolRead entry
An honest inventory
Two AI systems built the Lab's long-term harness in August 2026. The most useful artifact they produced was a list of what was real and what was a stub.
Archive inspectedRead entry
Calibrating a fleet of strangers' phones
A citizen sensing network runs on whatever devices people already own. Blind calibration turns that from a weakness into the measurement.
Measurement protocol, prior art citedRead entry
Open source07
Building with AI, keeping the record
A long-running project needs an archive that survives a change of tool, model, or workspace. Here is how this journal was assembled and what it does not contain.
Editorial methodRead entry
The platform is open; the detector is a provider
The sensing platform is being released under an open license with a pluggable detection interface. The Lab's own engine plugs into it and is not part of it.
Open-source package prepared; public release pendingRead entry
Three names, one root
In September 2026 StormNet was retired into Digital Sidewalk Lab, and a rule was written so that three uses of one name stop drifting into each other.
Governance recordRead entry