Rob Lanphier's Home Page

First, some links:

My blog: robla.blog - just like a diary, except there's no good way to dot the i's with hearts.
Election Methods Mailing List - A mailing list about nitty-gritty details of single-winner election reform, the relative merits of different proportional representation systems, and the technical underpinnings of all election methods. I started this list in 1996 that is still active in 2023.
electowiki - an electoral-reform wiki, started in 2005 as a spinoff from Electorama!.
My GitHub profile - code I've published.
My Twitter account - I still tweet from time-to-time
My Mastodon profiles:
- @robla@mastodon.social - my main Mastodon profile from between 2017 and 2022
- @robla@sfba.social - my main Mastodon profile as of November 2022.
My Wikipedia user page - I waste too much time here (cf my contributions).
My keybase profile - where you can get my PGP key, if that sort of thing matters to you
old links - links that made sense back in 2005, but not-so-much anymore

About Rob Lanphier

(updated March 2022) - Electoral theory wonk, activist, software developer, and engineering management nerd.

Things that keep me busy, and things that used to keep me busy:

2022, 2023, and 2024 — Oh, stuff and things. After leaving Internet Archive in 2019, I thought "I should volunteer for this, and this, and I can't say 'no' to THIS!". Then, the pandemic struck, so all of my volunteering changed. But I finally figured out that there's enough to do around the house that I don't need to volunteer for everything. Check out abiftool to see an example of one of the things I've been working on, but in general, I've cut way back on stuff I just volunteer for without getting paid.
2020 and 2021 — Served a two-year term on the board of Miraheze, a small UK-based non-profit hosting MediaWiki. See my December 2019 blogpost "Why donate to a non-profit with a hard-to-pronounce name?" for what led me to Miraheze. I spent a fair amount of time helping get electowiki.org back into respectable shape, and reviving other wiki-centric dev projects I've had over the years. I also started couple Miraheze-based wikis (myndmess.miraheze.org and robla.miraheze.org) before realizing that taking care of electowiki.org was enough of a chore. It's still fun having free wikis though (go start your own!)
2019 — served as Director for Core Infrastructure at Internet Archive, managing both the operations team and engineers that wrote and maintained the core storage software. See my late 2019 posting for more about that.
2016-2018 - spent some time as a stay-at-home dad and political activist, volunteering with groups like Indivisible SF, Swing Left, and Center for Election Science, while Margaret held the day job.
2010-2016 - Managing a big team at Wikimedia Foundation, the organization responsible for hosting Wikipedia.
2006-2009 - Launching the open source client for Linden Lab (makers of Second Life)
1996-2005 - All sorts of things at RealNetworks, e.g. launching Helix, RTSP and SMIL
1993-1995 - Stuff at Conjungi, Asymetrix, other things here and there

Check out my blog or my LinkedIn profile for the latest.