One year ago this month, I started arguing with an AI about politics.
That’s not the origin story you’d put on a grant application. But it’s true. In April 2025, I started having conversations in ChatGPT about civic systems, political transparency, and the gap between how government is supposed to work and how it actually works. Not because I had a plan. Because I was frustrated and curious and couldn’t stop pulling at the thread.
By April 7th, those conversations had crystallized into something specific — a speech thought experiment. An imagined address about what civic engagement could look like if someone actually built the infrastructure for it. Nobody asked for that speech. Nobody heard it. But writing it forced me to articulate what I actually believed, and that turned out to be the thing that wouldn’t let go.
From Conversations to a Corporation
By June 2025, the conversations had turned into a vision statement. The Rhoades Institute of Technology — a nonprofit focused on civic literacy, technology education, and community dialogue. Not a think tank. Not a lobbying group. A builder’s organization: identify real problems in how people engage with their communities and government, then build tools and programs that address them.
On July 13, 2025, I filed the Articles of Incorporation with the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions. Thirty-five dollars. One form. RIT became a Wisconsin nonstock corporation, organized under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
That filing didn’t feel like a milestone at the time. It felt like paperwork. But it drew a line between “thinking about this” and “doing this.”
Building in Public, Mostly Alone
I should be honest about what RIT’s first year has actually looked like. It’s been one person — me — working nights and weekends around a full-time job, with AI as a collaborator for research, writing, and development. There’s no office. There’s no staff. There’s no board of seasoned nonprofit veterans guiding strategy.
What there is: a set of projects that work. A community model that’s been tested. A values framework that’s been articulated and pressure-tested across hundreds of conversations. And a willingness to build the thing before asking permission.
That’s not a brag. It’s a constraint. Everything RIT has done in year one has been shaped by the reality of a solo operator with limited resources and unlimited stubbornness.
What Actually Happened
November 2025 — Gamesgiving. RIT’s first community event. The thesis: civic dialogue doesn’t start with “let’s talk about policy.” It starts with shared interests. Get people in a room playing games together, build trust through play, and the harder conversations become possible. Gamesgiving was the first test of that model, and it worked well enough to prove the concept deserves continued investment.
December 2025 — SORS. The Snow Operations Reporting System — a tool for making invisible labor visible through structured data. Built to solve a personal problem, but designed around a principle that extends well beyond snow removal: the people doing the work should have the data to prove it.
Ongoing — The Codex, the values, the infrastructure. Twelve core values, articulated not as aspirational platitudes but as operational commitments. A founding document. A website. The legal and organizational scaffolding that turns “someone should do something” into “here’s the entity that’s doing it.”
What Hasn’t Happened
No major grants. No viral moment. No partnerships with established institutions. No revenue model proven at scale. No team beyond one person and the AI tools that make solo operation feasible.
RIT is not yet a sustainable organization. It’s a founded one. There’s a difference, and being honest about that difference matters more than pretending otherwise.
What Comes Next
Today — April 24, 2026 — RIT has a booth at the Midwest Gaming Classic. A QR code on a table, a website to point it at, and a cooperative game people can play. It’s modest. But it’s real, and it’s public, and it represents something that didn’t exist thirteen months ago.
Year two needs to be about other people. More community events. More collaborators. Moving from “I built this” to “we’re building this.” The infrastructure exists now. The question is whether it can support weight beyond one person’s effort.
I don’t know if RIT becomes what I think it can become. But I know it exists, and I know why, and I know the work done this year was worth doing. That’s enough for now.
If you’re at MGC, come find our booth. If you’re reading this from somewhere else, visit our About page to understand what RIT is building, or reach out — we’re looking for people who want to help build it.