Who am I?

My name is Kipling Crossing and this is my family

image

with wife Moii and son Gideon

What I like to do

Open-Source

I’m a big believer in open-source. I lead a few open-source communities; and by lead, I mean, facilitate a healthy positive culture and nurture their growth. I also do open-source consulting on the side; recommending licenses and that type of stuff. I’m also a big fan of the late Pieter Hintjens and his work.

Geo-spatial Data Science

I enjoy geospatial data science with Python. I do not, however, enjoy using the popular geospatial program GDAL and it’s python wrappers. In fact, I refuse to use it. I created and employ a noGDAL philosophy where I write geospatial python while ‘not rely upon GDAL as a dependency’.

I also maintain some noGDAL python packages, so be sure to check out my projects.

Scientific utility apps

Throughout my career, I find myself creating utility apps to improve the quality of my work life. I generally like to make these projects open source so others may fork and use them. These are mainly geospatial data collection apps. If you’re interested to see what I’ve made, be sure to check out my projects.

Political Hacktivism

I believe that the decisions made on the rules that govern our lives should be accessible, open and participatory. To this end:

  • The people MUST have access to existing and upcoming rules (laws)
  • Systems and technology that facilitate the decision making process SHOULD be open-source
  • The people SHOULD have the opportunity to have their say and vote on existing and upcoming rules

The following are my efforts toward this:

I am the project lead and open-source community manager on the Digipol project. The Digipol mission statement is:

Connecting Real People with their Parliament

In it’s current form, DigiPol is an app for iOS and Android that allows users to view and vote on current Australian Federal proposed bills. It’s a decentralized app and is built on a web3 Ethereum smart contract. The bill information is collected using ausbills.

Ausbills is a python library that serves Australian bills for all the state and federal parliaments. This is another project that I lead and is managed by the The OpenGov Australia Project. This library obtains bill information by web-scraping the bills from each of the parliaments websites.

I am also heavily involved in the Flux Network. The Flux Network consists of a network of political parties that aim to implement digital democracy. These digital democracies may include, but are not limited to, direct democracy, liquid democracy, vote swapping democracy and issue based direct democracy.

Micro-Python

I’m also a big fan of micropython and try to use it in my hardware solutions.

Writing

I enjoy writing. Although I’ve been diagnosed with print dyslexia, I have surrounded myself with tools and techniques that help overcome the related challenges. These include:

  • Book: A guide to writing as an engineer
  • spellcheck
  • grammarly
  • voice to text

I like to write, among other things, mean looking documentation, articles, plays and opinion pieces.