Jed Sundwall

Life goals include never being a charlatan and peaking sometime around the year 2050.

About

I live in Seattle Guilford, Connecticut (until ~January 2025) with my wife, three kids, and a cat.

I’m a pragmatic (never dogmatic) technologist trying to use the Internet to improve human cooperation on global challenges.

I like thinking about organizations, emergence, the Internet, food, liberalism, democracy, democratization, art, religion, policy, music, history, consciousness, governance, Borges, surfing, and data. Swimming in natural bodies of water with my family is my favorite thing to do.

Things I do

• Executive director of Radiant Earth, where we support community-led initiatives that make data easier to access and use.
• Teaching a class about data institutions at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs.
• Producer and host of Techs on Texts, a podcast about the intersection of literature and technology.
• Technical Fellow at the Taylor Geospatial Engine. Technical advisor to Flickr Foundation, PLACE, and the Center for Open Data Enterprise.

Things I’ve done

• Served on the board of directors of NatureServe.
• Accidentally created the Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF.
• Built the AWS Open Data program and created the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (cheesy video).
• Founded Open San Diego.
• Created Measured Voice (RIP), a social media management tool for mission-driven organizations. Here’s a presentation about it from the 2012 Code for America Summit.
• Created the US Social Media Registry which I’m pretty sure is the first open source software that USA.gov ever produced. It lives on today as the US Digital Registry.
• Studied Brazilian open source policy while getting my master’s from UCSD (graduation speech).
• Tried to make a documentary about cilantro.
• Have lived in Germany, Brazil, and Venezuela. Fluent in Spanish, pretty good at Portuguese, and can passably order food in German.