Hi, I'm Matt Ewing
Organizer & Operator.
Co-Founder @ Scoot Networks. Early @ Swing Left, Vote Forward and MoveOn.
I love to build stuff that matters.
About Me
I've spent the last 20 years trying to make the world a better place, primarily by using technology to bring people together.
That's meant everything from co-founding one of the first shared electric vehicle companies (since aquired by Bird), to building national organizing networks that helped to elect President Obama and defeat President Trump, to helping the largest residential solar company in the country overhaul key parts of it's marketing operations.
Along the way, I've played a lot of roles: managing large teams, leading software and product development, heading up marketing, driving fundraising, and designing cutting edge distributed organizing models — to name a few
But, in the end, the thing I love the most is working with a group of talented people to build something that actually matters.
I live in Oakland with the lovely Natalie Foster (@nataliefoster) and our kiddos.
Recent Projects
Here's a running a list of a few of the non-work projects I've put together over the last few years. All are still ongoing, unless there's a date listed.
Ewing & Ewing Toys
One of my favorite things about being a father is that it's inspired me to start making toys. My own father is signficantly handier than I am, so this has morphed into a project for 3 generations of Ewings. Here are a few of our recent creations.
FRED talks
FRED talks are short TED style talks by your friends (or your friends-friends). I've been putting them together in San Francisco for a little while now, along with my wife Natalie, and our friends Ben Rattray and Cathrine Bracy. We try to organize them every two months, and group them around a single topic. Topics have ranged from the future of cities to love (a Valentine's Day special) to the meaning of money.
This Site
I designed and built this site from scratch as part of an effort to increase my basic frontend web skills. It's fully responsive and held together by hand-coded HTML and CSS, with a little bit of javascript thrown in for good measure. It's hosted on GitHub, powered by Jekyll and remains a work in progress.
Icon's are courtesy of Font Awesome by Dave Gandy--which is indeed awesome.
Inequality Hackathon (2011)
Back when Occupy was the big thing, I organized a quick hackathon in SF. We had 60+ people show up and some great projects came out of it. One of them, Occupy Design, ended up becoming an actual organization and did some great work. You can read the details (and enjoy a photo of me very much needing a haircut) here: Venture Beat: Hackers join worldwide protest.