Sean Bonner on citizen science, geiger counters, and the secret mailing lists of the tech elite

Sean Bonner is someone that defies easy classification. His Twitter account describes him as a ‘misanthropologist’, while his LinkedIn profile simply states that he ‘ likes working on things that empower people to take care of themselves.’ As the co-founder and global director of Safecast (an open global sensor network currently monitoring radiation levels in Japan), that is probably an understatement. We caught up at Intelligentsia Coffee, which in case you don’t frequent Silverlake or are not a certified LA hipster, turns out to be ground zero for both. With Sean’s geiger counter flashing insouciantly on the table between us, we chatted about citizen science, crowdsourcing invention, neo-minimalism, hacker spaces and the emergence of a maker ecosystem in LA. Then he told me about these secret tech insider mailing lists that if you don’t know about, you are unlikely to ever be invited to join.