About

I’m Josh Carter. I work in higher education and nonprofit leadership, and this site is where I think in public about how we work.

At the University of California, Riverside (UCR), my work spans strategy, finance, administration, and fundraising operations. That means budgets, people, and the systems that help an institution carry out its commitments. Outside of work I tinker: small pieces of software, experiments with how I keep and use what I’ve learned, tools I build mostly to find out whether they’ll work.

I’m interested in how systems shape what we’re able to do, and how much say we have in shaping them. Sometimes that means figuring out how a team can work better. Sometimes it means experimenting with AI, or finding better ways to keep and use what I’ve learned without handing control of my memory and data to someone else.

AI makes those questions feel immediate. I’m excited by what it lets me try, and concerned about what we may give up along the way. What happens to our judgment when we rely on tools we don’t fully understand? Who is accountable when they get things wrong? I want to explore the possibilities and take the problems seriously.

Those questions about control and accountability also connect to why I care about democracy, and at a time when so much of it feels under threat, I want to do
more than worry about its survival. Who gets a say in the decisions that affect their lives? Can the people making those decision be challenged or replaced? I expect to write about the pressures on democratic institutions and what it takes to sustain them, alongside the more practical experiments. I’m trying to understand how we build a future worth belonging to, and what each of us can do to help.

Everything here is written in a personal capacity. I speak for myself, not for UCR.

If any of this sounds like your territory, subscribe and new pieces will land in your inbox. Or just write to me at hey@joshuacarter.me. I’d like to hear from you.