In Remembrance of Carl V. Lewis
A civic action hero of the finest degree, Carl is a loss to us all
In the realm of folks who volunteer their time to improve government and civic services, there are quite a few of us who have multiple careers, talents, aptitudes, and passions. Carl Lewis might have been the one to top us all, though. I find the description of his many talents, in his own words, actually quite lacking:
Data visualization developer
Mobile developer
Digital educator
Data journalist
Public interest technologist
Community innovation organizer
Unmentioned: he was a fantastic writer and marketer. He was uniquely talented at communicating the emotional and moral clarity of what we’re trying to do with this whole civic tech thing. Sometimes it feels like explaining how to fix, scale, and remake government takes a good 2 minutes. Carl could put it on a bumper sticker.
In Carl’s words, “Technology alone won’t save local government. But the values of public service and democracy — empowered by the practices of technology and design — can.”
He started and maintained: https://dataviz.tools/
He founded and led Open Savannah.
He was a great writer. You can read his pieces here: https://medium.com/@carlvlewis
I remember Carl’s presence at one of the first National Advisory Council meetings he attended. If I’m remembering correctly, immediately after the meeting, he shared with us a visualization of the words most used in the meeting. He had recorded it (with our permission) and then had it transcribed and visualized. In what seemed like 10 minutes. He was a visual thinker and I don’t doubt that his mind was attracted to working on civic problems because of the many hundreds of ways that we needed his skills. I don’t think that easy problems would have been appealing to Carl.
We hope to honor Carl, his community, and to do so in a way that’s more meaningful than Slack. Because, Carl had thoughts about Slack, too.
To start, we’ve created a slide deck to share photos, thoughts, well wishes, and other things about Carl. You can also share your thoughts for Carl’s family here.
Carl had the moral clarity and passion of someone whose sole purpose was to fix it all— The potholes, streetlights, benefits forms, and the entire realm of civic engagement, too. His absence is a tragic loss to us all.
