Rob Gordon

I am a creative technologist and researcher. I build tools that help groups think, decide, and act together.

AI is advancing faster than the ways teams, organizations, and communities coordinate and govern themselves. Each new capability lands inside groups that still make decisions the old way. My work sits in that gap.

With Nathan Young, I co-built the bot behind the first AI Community Note displayed on X. It is now among the top 50 Community Notes authors, and its notes have been seen by tens of millions of users. At BRKT Labs, I pilot AI-mediated coordination inside small teams and report what actually happens. One line of inquiry runs through all of it, from a handful of volunteers up to a global platform: can groups keep trust and agency as more of their work passes through machines?

Labor is one thread of that question. As AI absorbs more of what people do, I want work to become more meaningful and more individual, not less.

Background

I work at BRKT Labs, a small research group studying AI-mediated collaboration and healthier social fabric. I got there through a grant from the Future of Life Foundation, awarded in late 2025, to research coordination technologies. Earlier that year Nathan Young and I took part in the AI for Human Reasoning Fellowship, where we built the Community Notes bot. Nathan and I had been working together since 2022, building forecasting tools at Goodheart Labs. Before that I built tools alongside machine learning researchers at Mila, and starting in 2017 I built websites for nonprofits at Constructive. I came to software by coding sound and visuals for performance art and installations, after studying music composition at California Institute of the Arts.

Writing

Field Report: AI-Mediated Coordination in a Volunteer Nonprofit — BRKT Labs · Notes from piloting an AI coordination tool with a volunteer team, who read it as surveillance rather than support. The takeaway: coordination at any scale runs on trust, and a tool has to earn it before it can help.

Reading (Updated September 2026)

Let Cities Build Utopia — Elle Griffin / Elysian Collective · A case for why cities, not nations or corporations, should be the ones building better places to live.

Adaptive Democracy — Blaine Hansen · A framework for governance that can actually keep up with the rate things change.

Plurality — E. Glen Weyl & Audrey Tang · How collaborative technology can deepen democracy rather than undermine it.

Projects

TeamSort — Group decision-making without the meeting. Instant polls for prioritizing tasks and settling choices. No login required.

Flowchart Fun — Think in text, see it as a flowchart. The fastest text-to-flowchart tool on the web, maintained since 2021.

Docugram — Upload a document, get an editable diagram of what it says.

If you're working on coordination, collective intelligence, deliberative process, governance, civic tech, institutional design, or anything nearby — I'd love to connect.