Mila Cooper
Three years ago, I sat in the back row of a city council meeting watching a permit application get stuck for the fourth consecutive month. That evening, I started mapping out why ā not for a client, just out of restless curiosity. That habit of turning frustration into a spreadsheet, then into a narrative, is pretty much how I work.
Writer by trade, analyst by instinct
I spend my mornings reading legislation and civic tech case studies, and my afternoons writing about what I found ā usually with three browser tabs open to compare how different cities solved the same problem. Hackathons fascinate me because they compress months of bureaucratic friction into forty-eight hours of visible progress. I like watching that compression happen, then explaining it clearly to someone who wasn't in the room.
What shapes my approach
- Talking to organizers and participants before writing a single sentence
- Testing civic apps and prototypes myself, not just reading about them
- Keeping explanations useful whether you're new to the field or deeply embedded in it
- Revisiting old assumptions when new data contradicts them
If any of this sounds like your own curiosity, I'd genuinely enjoy hearing from you ā drop me a note through the contact page or browse more at the blog.