Jason Griffey's Blog

I am very, very excited to announce that Nov 3 I will be joining the Open Science Hardware Foundation as their inaugural Executive Director. The OSHF is a US based non-profit with a global community that works to advance open scientific instrumentation to accelerate science and benefit society. We do this through collaboration, policy, advocacy, and community-building along with serving as a fiscal sponsor for projects, all in the service of making the tools of scientific discovery more equi...

I was extremely happy to be invited to deliver the opening keynote at AspenCon 2025…speaking to a room full of people excited to be a part of open source development in libraries is always a great time. I was feeling reflective when I was asked to come up with a topic, and decided to look back on my forays into open source and open hardware products in libraries with two projects that I created.

I called the talk Collaborative Creation and Collective Good; or a List of My Public Failures and ...

The world we dream about

I’m finding it really difficult to find the right words to say goodbye to Hadestown. This show and this cast have been the very best that live theater can be; a moment, a happening, an emergent experience that was so much more than the sum of the parts. The cast, crew, and I worked together for almost four months, and during all of that rehearsal it’s a challenge to see the whole. You’re concentrating on each song, each scene, going over music and choreography and...

It has been quite a month, friends.

Looking for Work

On Monday April 21st, I was informed that I would be leaving NISO. There was no warning, and the reason given was a general economic downturn and the waves hands around chaos of modern non-profit life, primarily from government agencies. I had just days to try and responsibly transfer five years of work to my coworkers, and I hope I did a reasonable job of it. Things that I created are continuing (NISO Plus) and projects that I was ...

On October 15, 2008, I had an essay published in Library Journal called “Stranger Than We Know” which was my attempt to try and understand where the next 10 years would take technology and libraries. Written just after the release of the iPhone 3G, I was trying to think carefully about what the smartphone explosion was going to do to culture and technology and how that would impact the world of information gathering, sharing, and archiving.

While I didn’t get everything right, I am proud of ...

I had the opportunity to see the current production of Cabaret on Broadway (thanks to my wonderful family), and as it is my favorite musical…nay, my favorite staged media full stop…I have thoughts.

It is a radical departure from the previous Broadway productions, and while it was magnificent in its way, it wasn’t the Cabaret that made me fall in love with the show. It felt like a blend of the old and new, the Cabaret of Joel Grey and the 1960s, but also bits and pieces of the Alan Cummin...

This blog has entirely morphed into “Jason talks about theater” it appears.

I’m going to be directing another show! I’m heading up the Millennium Repertory Company’s production of Little Shop of Horrors. We open in late January, so rehearsals and such will be over the holiday season. I’ve got an amazing cast:

The biggest challenge for this show? The puppets. Look for a lot of build pics over on Mastodon or PixelFed.

art by the amazing Alex Torrejon

Warning: enormous amount of theater nerd opinion below

I had the great privilege to see the current Broadway production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street at the Lunt-Fontanne theater the evening of March 15th, and we got lucky that none of the “star” principles were out (Gaten Matarazzo was out the 14th, Josh Groban the 16th, 17th, and matinee on the 18th), so we really threaded that needle. 

As major Sweeney fan, I was really looking forward to hearing the full orchestr...

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee in drag (Franklin High yearbook 1977, page 165)

Tennessee legislators in the State Senate have voted to move forward SB 0003, a bill which will criminalize performance in drag. The bill is not particularly long nor difficult to understand, so I’m going to include the relevant bits here:

SECTION 1. Tennessee Code Annotated, Section 7-51-1401, is amended by adding the following language as a new subdivision:"Adult cabaret performance" means a performance in a lo...

Now that I’ve almost entirely removed myself from Twitter, I’m looking around at how to…well, do whatever it is I want to do now. I’m definitely going to stick to Mastodon for awhile, and now I’m playing around with adding this old blog to ActivityPub and auto-posting to my Mastodon when I write here.

I’m hoping this incentivizes me to do more of that writing here, and less in platforms that I don’t own or control. To that end, I’ve installed ActivityPub here on the blog to give me a fediver...