Politics beyond the binary

Studying politics and policy part-time, alongside a full workload of client projects, has been a useful discipline. It's hard to hold a purely partisan view of a policy problem when you've spent the morning debugging a form for a non-profit that just needs to work for the people relying on it.

The most useful positions I've come across — in coursework and in client work alike — rarely sit neatly on one side of a binary. They're usually about trade-offs: between access and complexity, speed and accuracy, local knowledge and centralised systems.

That's the lens I want to bring into more explicitly public-purpose work: less interested in scoring a point, more interested in whether the system in front of someone actually does what it's meant to.