Stephen Walter

Stephen Walter leads technology and design at The Hope Group. He is the co-architect, with Chris, of all the Hope Group’s digital tools and interventions, including Project Lookout and Driftwood. He provides technical assistance to small businesses in partnership with the City of Boston’s Office of Small Businesses, and he is the director of the AI Access Lab, an initiative to train an intergenerational corps of digital builders and thinkers to embed in local community to support small businesses and nonprofits navigating their way around AI. He also leads the lab’s work pioneering local, open-weight AI inside the apps it makes to mitigate the environmental, data privacy, and community impacts of Big Tech data centers.

He has been working as a designer, researcher, and program director at the intersections of technology, community, crisis response, and economic justice for the past 15 years. He has worked for organizations such as the International Red Cross and Red Crescent, the UN, the U.S. State Department, and the Boston Mayor’s Office. He was also the founding managing director of the Engagement Lab, an applied research lab that used games and play to design more resilient social safety systems in communities around the globe.

Stephen’s work has ranged from designing Upriver, an SMS-based cell phone game with residents along the Zambezi River, whose whole point was that by the time you finished playing it, you and the villages upstream had built a working early-warning network, texting river levels down the line; to Community PlanIt, an online platform for urban planning deployed in places from Detroit to Bhutan; to the Engagement Center, New England’s lowest-barrier-to-entry harm reduction shelter for those struggling with homelessness and addiction. Currently he is also the lead designer and developer of the Community AI Project, a suite of free, open source AI tools for civic life built to take a deliberate step away from dependence on Big Tech. He has published peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters on issues ranging from technology to public policy, including Meaningful Inefficiencies: Resisting the Logic of Technological Efficiency in the Design of Civic Systems from MIT Press.

His work can be found at weirdmachine.org.