2025-11-08 –, Room 332
I just moved to Seattle. I came from Los Angeles, a city of freelancers, whether by choice or necessity.
In Seattle, I've met lots of techies who are either unhappily unemployed or unhappily employed. Individually, most can’t build a consultancy or take on the risk of a startup.
But tech workers do collectively have the skills and resources to create more and better jobs for themselves. What if we treated job creation (tech and non-tech) as a community project, just like software creation?
I propose for Seattle a community-driven job-creation project based on the United Nations Open Source Principles. My thoughts draw on what the open-source community has learned about making software projects welcoming, scalable, and sustainable.
Jocelyn (“Joss”) Graf has founded, grown, and sold a biomedical research editing and translation business in South Korea, co-founded a food co-op and a hardware startup, and built a project-based training business for tech workers.
Joss helps small business and tech startup founders answer these questions: Will my business idea work? What would my customers really pay for, how do I find them, and how much should I charge? Can I do good and still make money? Can I get grants or government contracts? What paperwork should I do? Who do I need on my team? How do I work with attorneys, accountants, and tech developers? How can I grow my business, and where do I want to end up?