Ron Bronson quarterback

"I use technology in order to hate it more properly." - Nam June Paik

closedtab — Shared memory for human-agent work. A consistent after-action record of what you asked for, what the agent did, and the calls it made on its own. npm
judgment-routing — Primitives for agentic decision-making.
AAR — After-action records as a Claude skill.
beachwave — A deployable reference for live audio rooms on ATProto. Sign in with OAuth, create a room, run your own version.

Consequence Design — An approach to design that takes downstream consequences and the life of systems after launch seriously.
Portland Digital Corps — Founded and ran a volunteer civic tech sprint in 2025; teams helped six Oregon organizations ship projects.
City of Bloomington — Worked on the city's website and content platform, design practice, and public-facing services.
18F — Contributed to government products and open-source methods; built and led design teams and delivery capabilities.
BMG Hack / Code for Bloomington — Helped organize a local Code for America brigade.
Indy Design Week — Founded a citywide design event that continued under new organizers.
Design for the Public — Created an independent two-day conference on public-interest design and technology.
Local Government Design Systems — A directory of reusable state and municipal design systems and pattern libraries.
Tennis Polo / Toccer — An original field sport developed and playtested with campers beginning in 2004, with rules refined over subsequent summers.
Pensulo — A print-and-play card deck for creative prompts and experiments.

OregonTennis.org — A live Oregon high-school tennis rankings site, with original adjusted power ratings, historical results, and models for alternative competition formats. Source
Mallo — A live analytics application for Finnish baseball (pesäpallo), using official results data to explore player and team performance. Source
Cap Buffet — A live salary-cap system constructor. Build rules from reusable mechanisms, test rosters against them, and compare the consequences of different league designs. Source
Viperball — An original football ruleset and collegiate dynasty simulator, built around lateral play, tactical kicking, and its own scoring and league systems.
Play to Clinch — A team-tennis simulation spanning high-school, collegiate, and professional play, including recruiting, player development, coaching, and changing competition structures.
O27 / Alternative Rules Baseball — A baseball–cricket–pesäpallo hybrid with redesigned innings, batting orders, pitching rules, and tactical choices.
Rosterlytics — A roster-management and analytics application for Out of the Park Baseball, extending Hector OOTP Analyzer with player valuations, trades, contracts, team building, and auction tools.

Public Delivery Is Statecraft — Digital public infrastructure, operational capacity, and what it takes to deliver.
The Carrying Costs of Everyday Life — Value, public obligations, and the origins of Public Mechanics.
Design As Repair — Remarks from IxDA Oslo on keeping systems working.
On Public Mechanics (Or Why I'm Done Talking About “Civic Tech”) — Public delivery beyond the civic-tech label.
Libraries Weren't the Point — Fiscal archetypes and speculative civics.
The Interface Trap — How administrative systems manufacture unsolvable problems.
Dark Patterns Won — Deceptive design and the platform economy.
The Bureaucratic Banality of Andor — Popular culture, bureaucracy, and power.
You Don't Always Get a Second Chance (On Civic Moonshots) — Portland baseball, public investments, and missed opportunities.
Ranking the Unrankable — Building and testing a high-school tennis ranking model.
On Developing Leaders — Leadership lessons from coaching high-school tennis.
Some advice on managing your design career upwards — Published in Piccalilli.
On Being Anything Other Than a Designer — The work between finding problems and fixing them.

Leading the Field: Ron Bronson — Code for America, 2025.
The Soft Labor Questionnaire: Ron Bronson — Soft Labor, 2025.
Repairing Service Design for the Age of AI — Service Design Show, 2025.
What? Huh? Me? Huh? What? — Did I Do That? podcast, 2025.
Ron Bronson — Humans of Public Service, 2022.
Revision Path: Episode 409 and Episode 53 — Interviews in 2021 and 2014 about design, development, and public-sector work.
The Directory of Local Government Design Systems — Government Technology, 2019.
Deceptive Design / Consequence Design — Digital.gov / U.S. Web Design System talk, 2020.
Bronson Leads Civic Tech Panels at U-M Service Design Weekend — University of Michigan, 2026.

A dilettante's guide to inventing a sport — Twenty years of Tennis Polo, from its original rules to playtesting in summer camps.
I Asked for a Box Score. I Ended Up Building a Universe. — How Viperball became a sport and a computer simulation.
Building a team chemistry model — Roster composition, team leadership, coach fit, and how they affect outcomes.
How I Fixed Baseball Sim Prospect Development Breaks — Player-development curves, hidden ability, and imperfect scouting information.
Bringing a cricket-style lineup to baseball — Making a reversible batting order an actual strategic choice.
Rebuilding player development in a PC sports sim — Recalibrating a fictional high-school tennis league against real Oregon data.
The Chip Window — A proposed redesign of NBA draft incentives.
Bringing the nerdiest problem in sports to my fake football game — From the Omnivore Rankings to computer ratings for Viperball.

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