Seattle Social Good Series

The 2017 series brought together more than 300 people, but the operating knowledge was scattered across event folders, forms, decks, and individual organizers. When the original leadership group dispersed, the program had no clear way to explain what had happened, recruit the next cohort, or carry promising work forward.

I audited the surviving materials: agendas, logistics, participant records, project folders, evaluation forms, brand work, and unfinished retrospectives. The evidence showed both momentum and fragility. Twenty starting projects narrowed to eight active folders and four hackathon finalists, while incomplete records and only six organization survey responses made long-term learning difficult.

Treat the series as a designed system rather than a sequence of events. The proposed model connected a civic mixer, project matching, research and ideation, design, launch, and follow-up. It defined roles, onboarding, project artifacts, feedback loops, and a 100-day horizon intended to help small multidisciplinary teams produce something testable in the world.

The series was developed with IxDA Seattle, community organizations, facilitators, designers, engineers, recent graduates, and volunteers looking for meaningful ways to contribute. The format paired people who arrived with a social challenge with contributors who brought research, design, technology, and organizing skills.

The 2017 program engaged 300-plus participants and moved 20 proposed projects through a narrowing process to eight working groups and four hackathon projects. The 2018 document captured my plan to run the series again with a more durable operating model in Seattle and Portland. That relaunch was planned, not completed, so the document is evidence of the strategy and retrospective—not a second delivered program.