A Couchsurfer's Intro

Hi, I’m patcon 👋 (yes, I go by that in real life)

If you’re reading this page, it might be because you’re considering hosting me for a stay — thanks for thinking on it! Here’s a bit about me, to help decide it you’d like to host.

I’ve spent a lot of my life travelling, and I’m pretty good at taking up minimal space. I travel light, and always pack my things away during the day.

I’ve also been thrilled to stay/live with various friends and collaborators over the years (often those with families) whether just for 1 night or several weeks. I’m proud to say that it’s not uncommon for a stay with a new collaborator to become extended. I also very much enjoy (and am told I’m a good contributor to) family units. I co-parent with my sister and her husband when in Toronto, and have lived for a few months at a time with friends as they wade through parenthood, including toddlers and pre-teens. I am very good at silly ideas.

I’ve been lucky to do lots of silly things as well: living in hammock tents while community organizing one summer, land trust organizing in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth, living in rented shipping containers on vacant lots, doing shipbuilding on a historic boat illegally parked behing the Australian embassy in Berlin, and lots of other random things.

One thing I genuinely love to do while sharing space, is helping people think through transitions and get projects off the ground. If you’re in the middle of something — a new direction, a creative project, an idea you can’t quite articulate yet — I’d love to help push it forward while I’m around.

A bit about my background

As a wide net to understand overlapping interest we might have, I have previously worked with and around: biochemistry (college: 2008), open source (Drupal: 2010-2014), bitcoin/blockchain (2013-2016), alternative open source/culture funding infrastructures (Gittip, Open Collective: 2014 & 2019), infosec community & secure android ROM development (Tor project, TailsOS, Guardian Project: 2015-2016), civic hacknights as missing civic institution of participation and anarchic leadership (2015-now), vTaiwan (2016-now), g0v (2016-now), tech worker cooperative development (Hypha Worker Co-op: 2018-2020), fed gov talent acquisition (https://talent.canada.ca: 2022-2023), polislike tools & deliberative processes (2016-now).

Evolving interests running beneath these: relationship between structure and disorder in governance, complexity science, origins of life, language, operationalising anarchy, boundaries, symbiosis, holobionts, lines between individuals vs collectives, storytelling, plurality, small world networks, human intuitions (curiosity, laughter, surprise, eeriness, etc) as sensory organs for navigating living processes within universe, the evolution of religion and spirituality.

A few kind things people have said

Emilio Sempris (ex Environment Minister to Panama) once said he thought of me like a mentor. And I was flattered to be introduced by Puja Ohlhaver as “a very deep thinker on prosocial mechanism design.”

Get a sense of me

This video might give you a feel for who I am in person:

Links to my socials are at the bottom of the page, and my LinkedIn is quite up-to-date if you want to get a fuller picture before inviting me into your home!

Thanks so much for reading this far, and I’m excited to spend some in-between time hanging out, if I’m so lucky to be hosted.