Screenshot of an r/NoLawns post: a Halton Region "Naturalization in Progress" sign on orange fencing, explaining a park lawn is being turned into a native pollinator meadow.

Am I getting interested in civic engineering?

I often joke about using the “dark arts” [AI] for good ~ could this be my outlet?

I’m going to try and start posting some new type of content, something more in the direction of birds and music than tech and AI. I guess you might call it public engineering, civic engineering or something along those lines(?).

The catalyst for this wasn’t just this post I saw on this Sub-Reddit I love: r/NoLawns: My city has started converting a park lawn to a native pollinator meadow (which I think is so frickin cool, and it makes me think “I want one of those in my town!”)

I was originally inspired to write about this sort of thing from an earlier dog walk ~ There's a little park next to me, and I thought it would be awesome to put up a little community bulletin board with everything that happens locally; I know there’s a casual little doggie group gathering some days, the park across the street has (weekly?) roller blading, we could post our house shows there, etc.

So I opened up a Claude session and started talking through that, curious to see what the process would be like. (What forms I would need to fill out, who, where it would go, would I could talk to, etc.)

It’s pretty crazy thinking that these types of projects no longer feel out of reach. And I don’t know if that’s just because I’m getting older + burnt out on fast tech, or if using Claude is what makes these processes feel achievable ~ most likely a hybrid of both.

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