About + Contact

Hi. I’m John.

I’m the Chief Digital Officer for Franklin County Data Center (FCDC) in Columbus, Ohio. I lead two teams:

  • GX Foundry : our digital government experience (GX) team
  • Delivery Services : our business analysis and project leadership team

I’ve worked in tech for nearly 30 years in multiple industries including education, banking, IT consulting, healthcare, nonprofits, public media, and most recently local government. I started in infrastructure engineering, moved into project management, team management, and finally executive leadership.

About Digital Polity (this site)

Digital Polity is my blog, capturing three things:

  • Weeknotes — This is the home for my #weeknote series, in which I recount the ups and downs of my work on a weekly cadence. I include personal notes, too.
  • Essays — Less reliably, I will post occasional essays or commentaries on anything that piques my interest, most likely related to digital government matters.
  • Pixels — I occasionally post photo blogs, sharing either recent or long-lost photos from my collection, with notes for context. I also include a personal photo with each weeknote.

I also have a page on Digital Government Jobs (but that may evolve to focus on public service jobs in central Ohio specifically). And I used to post a weekly Bluesky humor series (but ended that in March 2025).

NOTE: This site and my comments are my own and do not reflect statements or positions of my employer or colleagues.

What are Weeknotes?

Weeknotes are a form of journaling or blogging, mostly around professional topics, but with some personal notes sprinkled in. Anyone can do them, and they are great for keeping a track record of accomplishments, discoveries, challenges, and so forth. It’s a way of working in the open that enables asynchronous coordination of action.

Read more about weeknotes here, then branch out. Or learn all about “agile comms” from the source.

About my pixels

Photography is like quantum teleportation. It captures a particular arrangement of photons at one moment in time, at a specific location. Photos are a degraded copy of that unique arrangement of photons, carried forward in time. We can peer into that moment from any number of future moments. Until the photo is lost or destroyed.

I like photos. Particularly my own. Indeed, I like photos even more than video because of that frozen-in-time element. So in 2023 I created a blog titled Photonic Teleportation that I updated about weekly, until now. I’ve now collapsed that blog into Digital Polity.

I will be sharing—just for fun—selected photos from my collection here. There’s no theme to the selections, except perhaps, “I found this in the proverbial shoebox.”

I am not a professional photographer. Indeed, I wouldn’t even say I’m an amateur photographer. Let’s just say I’ve had cameras—some of them nice—and taken snapshots and occasionally I’ve gotten lucky with lighting, focus, and composition. It probably helps that I’ve traveled a bit, too.

So I’ll share some stuff here, maybe include some notes. No promises beyond “check it out.”

Where else to find (professional) me

No, I am not on any Meta platform (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.). And while I loved Twitter for many years, I deleted my account immediately after Elon Musk arrived.

Subscribe

You can get my Digital Polity posts in your email if you like. It’s completely free (because who would pay for it?). And of course you can unsubscribe any time.

Alternatively, use your favorite RSS reader to follow along. Just FYI… I’m currently using Feedbin as my RSS aggregator and the Reeder app for most reading.

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