Major Issues¶
Major Issues is Big Nerd Idea's editorial series on the structural patterns — economic, technological, regulatory, infrastructural — that shape the populations BNI projects serve.
This is the place where the BNI team writes about the conditions our products exist inside rather than the products themselves. Coal-extraction history and the AI data center buildout. The regulatory geometry of benefits cliffs. Absentee ownership patterns in Appalachia. The carbon footprint of "free" cloud services. The narrowing of local political voice under preemption statutes. The slow withdrawal of grocery access from rural and historically marginalized neighborhoods.
These posts are editorial positions, grounded in evidence and labeled as such — not research papers, not neutral explainers. They follow the Epistemic Honesty Standing Directive: documented claims are cited; analytical claims are marked [HYPOTHESIS]; the BNI editorial position is named as such. Counter-arguments are steelmanned, not strawmanned.
The series exists because Big Nerd Idea's product strategy only makes sense in the context of these patterns. A solar-first mobile food trike is not an aesthetic choice — it is a response to a specific extractive history. A peer-to-peer mutual aid network is not a technical preference — it is a response to centralized systems that have historically extracted from the populations we work with. The Major Issues series makes the connection between the conditions and the products legible to readers, funders, and partners who might not otherwise see why we build the way we build.
Read the series¶
A chronological index of every post in this series is auto-generated at:
Contribute¶
Major Issues welcomes guest posts from BNI partners, advisors, and the broader open-source-for-social-good community. To contribute:
- Sign in at the Content Manager with your GitHub account, select Blog, and set
categories: [Major Issues]on your post. - Or open a pull request directly against
docs/blog/posts/with frontmatter matching the existing posts.
All submissions are reviewed against the Epistemic Honesty directive before publication — claims need to either be sourced or labeled.