Practice and approach

About

I am Jamie Burkart, a technical project manager and implementation lead based in Brooklyn.

My work sits where the stakes are human and the operating structure is still forming: civic technology, small-business operations, public-facing tools, cultural infrastructure, coalition work, and knowledge systems.

Across projects, I tend to do the same kind of work: clarify emerging goals, translate between technical and nontechnical stakeholders, map workflows, build documentation, create usable interfaces, coordinate implementation, and leave behind handoffs people can use after the meeting or launch is over.

I am currently focused on technical project management, product operations, implementation, business analysis, civic/govtech delivery, and source-backed knowledge systems.

The through line

Systems people can inhabit

I initiated Open House, a ten-day UCSC gallery experiment in communal living and participatory art whose participants used communal decision-making and many-perspective documentation.^[1]

The same question continues through WOWList, Sunday Dinner and 196, NYC Artist Coalition work, and source-backed team memory: how can a structure help people recognize their relationships, participate, remember what happened, and continue the work? Across that lineage, the practice is artistic, civic, technical, and social.

The practical sequence is recursive: observe relationships, model a system, prototype an interface, test it with people, and document enough for others to continue. Requirements, interfaces, and handoffs matter because people have to inhabit them.

Three systems loops

Each example follows the same movement from observed relationships to a working model, an interface used with people, and a documented way to learn, revise, and continue.

Harry J. Epstein Company

Relationships: customer language, product judgment, public voice, and internal operating habits.

Model: product, content, marketing, ordering, and follow-up treated as one customer and team system rather than separate tasks.

Interface and use: a maintained storefront joining product discovery, content, marketing, ordering, and customer follow-up, released and refined through real customer and team use.

Learning and continuity: recurring operational questions and bounded analytics guided incremental releases, reusable content patterns, and clearer workflows for the team.

NYC Artist Coalition and FairRentNYC

Relationships: lived experience in cultural spaces, recurring meetings, public sources, open questions, and city and state actors.

Model: testimony, policy lineage, unresolved questions, decisions, and accountable actors held in one recoverable civic record.

Interface and use: campaign sites, town halls, hearings, practical sessions, and public action pathways built and used with many collaborators.

Learning and continuity: running minutes, source maps, question logs, and action trackers let collaborators recover context, review decisions, and carry the work forward.

Sunday Dinner and 196

Relationships: hospitality, trust, artist support, shared space, recurring participants, and the rhythms of returning.

Model: invitations, hosting, onboarding, access handoffs, documentation, and follow-up treated as one participation system.

Interface and use: recurring gatherings and artist-residency workflows used with participants and resident artists over time.

Learning and continuity: repeatable invitation, response, attendance, follow-up, and residency handoff patterns helped the practice continue while private participant records remained private.

Additional continuities

Historical systems and current research remain part of the method without being presented as current production deployments.

WOWList

Relationships: the language organizers already used for scenes, interests, places, and venues.

Interface and use: followable keyword communities, event publishing, digests, and embeddable calendars for distributed organizers.

Learning and continuity: organizer distribution needs became reusable publishing and low-cost deployment patterns rather than one central calendar.

Source-backed team memory

Relationships: sources, claims, decisions, contributors, open questions, corrections, and the audiences who need to trust the record.

Interface and use: this portfolio, its checks, and its review reports form an early working method tested through iterative research and human review, not a completed client pilot.

Learning and continuity: citations, decision records, correction paths, evaluation receipts, and explicit human gates let another collaborator inspect what is known and safely continue the work.

I value public benefit, accessibility, source-backed memory, careful claims, collective credit, consent, privacy, repair, and documentation that helps future collaborators safely continue the work.

Sources and notes

These notes preserve what each source supports and where its limits remain. See something that needs correction? Contact Jamie.

View 1 source note

[1] Laura Mattingly, 'Open House,' Good Times, June 28, 2006.
Contemporaneous profile of Open House, earlier Shop Shows, communal governance, public participation, and collaborative documentation.
Boundary: This source does not establish Jamie as sole author of collective activity, consent to republish participant details or images, complete attendance, long-term participant outcomes.
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Next conversation

Looking for technical project management, product operations, implementation, or knowledge-systems support?

Email Jamie about roles, referrals, bounded consulting work, or collaboration.

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