Nature Climate Change, Published online: 01 September 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02415-w

The vulnerability of women and children in West Africa

The Electronic Frontier Alliance is growing and this year we’ve been honored to welcome Open Austin into the EFA. Open Austin began in 2009 as a meetup that successfully advocated for a city-run open data portal, and relaunched as a 501(c)3 in 2018 dedicated to reimagining civic engagement and digital equity by building volunteer open source projects for local social organizations.

As Central Texas’ oldest and largest grassroots civic tech organization, their work has provided hands-on training for over 1,500 members in the hard and soft skills needed to build digital society, not just scroll through it. Recently, I got the chance to speak with Liani Lye, Executive Director of Open Austin, about the organization, its work, and what lies ahead:

There’s so many exciting things happening with Open Austin. Can you tell us about your Civic Digital Lab and your Data Research Hub?

Open Austin's Civic Digital Lab reimagines civic engagement by training central Texans to build technology for the public good. We build freely, openly, and alongside a local community stakeholder to represent community needs. Our lab currently supports 5 products:

• Data Research Hub: Answering residents' questions with detailed information about our city
• Streamlining Austin Public Library’s “book a study room” UX and code
• Mapping landlords and rental properties to support local tenant rights organizing
• Promoting public transit by highlighting points of interest along bus routes
• Creating an interactive exploration of police bodycam data

We’re actively scaling up our Data Research Hub, which started in January 2025 and was inspired by 9b Corp’s Neighborhood Explorer. Through community outreach, we gather residents’ questions about our region and connect the questions with Open Austin’s data analysts. Each answered question adds to a pool of knowledge that equips communities to address local issues. Crucially, the organizing team at EFF, through the EFA, have connected us to local organizations to generate these questions.

Can you discuss your new Civic Data Fellowship cohort and Communities of Civic Practice? 

Launched in 2024, Open Austin’s Civic Data Fellowship trains the next generation of technologically savvy community leaders by pairing aspiring women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ data analysts with mentors to explore Austin’s challenges. These culminate in data projects and talks to advocates and policymakers, which double as powerful portfolio pieces.  While we weren’t able to fully fund Fellow stipends through grants this year, thanks to the generosity of our supporters, we successfully raised 25% through grassroots efforts.

Along with our fellowship and lab, we host monthly Communities of Civic Practice peer-learning circles that build skills for employability and practical civic engagement. Recent sessions include a speaker on service design in healthcare, and co-creating a data visualization on broadband adoption presented to local government staff. Our in-person communities are a great way to learn and build local public interest tech without becoming a full-on Labs contributor.

For those in Austin and Central Texas that want to get involved in-person, how can they plug-in?

If you can only come to one event for the rest of the year, come to our Open Austin’s 2025 Year-End Celebration. Open Austin members plus our freshly graduated Civic Data Fellow cohort will give lightning talks to share how they’ve supported local social advocacy through open source software and open data work. Otherwise, come to a monthly remote volunteer orientation call. There, we'll share how to get involved in our in-person Communities of Civic Practice and our remote Civic Digital Labs (aka, building open source software).

Open Austin welcomes volunteers from all backgrounds, including those with skills in marketing, fundraising, communications, and operations - not just technologists. You can make a difference in various ways. Come to a remote volunteer orientation call to learn more. And, as always, donate. Running multiple open source projects for structured workforce development is expensive, and your contributions help sustain Open Austin's work in the community. Please visit our donation page for ways to give; thanks EFF!

First-person account of someone accidentally catching several Humboldt squid on a fishing line. No photos, though.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

For a long time, Satik Movsesyan envisioned a future of working in finance and also pursuing a full-time master’s degree program at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She says the MITx MicroMasters Program in Finance provides her with the ideal opportunity to directly enhance her career with courses developed and delivered by MIT Sloan faculty.

Movsesyan first began actively pursuing ways to connect with the MIT community as a first-year student in her undergraduate program at the American University of Armenia, where she majored in business with a concentration in accounting and finance. That’s when she discovered the MicroMasters Program in Finance. Led by MIT Open Learning and MIT Sloan, the program offers learners an opportunity to advance in the finance field through a rigorous, comprehensive online curriculum comprising foundational courses, mathematical methods, and advanced modeling. During her senior year, she started taking courses in the program, beginning with 15.516x (Financial Accounting).

“I saw completing the MicroMasters program as a way to accelerate my time at MIT offline, as well as to prepare me for the academic rigor,” says Movsesyan. “The program provides a way for me to streamline my studies, while also working toward transforming capital markets here in Armenia — in a way, also helping me to streamline my career.”

Movsesyan initially started as an intern at C-Quadrat Ampega Asset Management Armenia and was promoted to her current role of financial analyst. The firm is one of two pension asset managers in Armenia. Movsesyan credits the MicroMasters program with helping her to make deeper inferences in terms of analytical tasks and empowering her to create more enhanced dynamic models to support the efficient allocation of assets. Her learning has enabled her to build different valuation models for financial instruments. She is currently developing a portfolio management tool for her company.

“Although the courses are grounded deeply in theory, they never lack a perfect applicability component, which makes them very useful,” says Movsesyan. “Having MIT’s MicroMasters on a CV adds credibility as a professional, and your input becomes more valued by the employer.”

Movsesyan says that the program has helped her to develop resilience, as well as critical and analytical thinking. Her long-term goal is to become a portfolio manager and ultimately establish an asset management company, targeted at offering an extensive range of funds based on diverse risk-return preferences of investors, while promoting transparent and sustainable investment practices. 

“The knowledge I’ve gained from the variety of courses is a perfect blend which supports me day-to-day in building solutions to existing problems in asset management,” says Movsesyan.

In addition to being a learner in the program, Movsesyan serves as a community teaching assistant (CTA). After taking 15.516x, she became a CTA for that course, working with learners around the world. She says that this role of helping and supporting others requires constantly immersing herself in the course content, which also results in challenging herself and mastering the material.

“I think my story with the MITx MicroMasters Program is proof that no matter where you are — even if you’re in a small, developing country with limited resources — if you truly want to do something, you can achieve what you want,” says Movsesyan. “It’s an example for students around the world who also have transformative ideas and determination to take action. They can be a part of the MIT community.”

I just heard about this:

There’s a travel scam warning going around the internet right now: You should keep your baggage tags on your bags until you get home, then shred them, because scammers are using luggage tags to file fraudulent claims for missing baggage with the airline.

First, the scam is possible. I had a bag destroyed by baggage handlers on a recent flight, and all the information I needed to file a claim was on my luggage tag. I have no idea if I will successfully get any money from the airline, or what form it will be in, or how it will be tied to my name, but at least the first step is possible...