Stimpunks is a family affair. We’re autistic, ADHD, bipolar, dyslexic, dyspraxic, and dyscalculic. We know what it’s like to be disabled and different in our systems. Disabled and neurodivergent people are always edge cases, and edge cases are stress cases. We can help you design for the edges, because we live at the edges. We are the canaries. We are “the fish that must fight the current to swim upstream.“
All we did was refuse to believe that we were the problem.
Rolling Warrior: The Incredible, Sometimes Awkward, True Story of a Rebel Girl on Wheels Who Helped Spark a Revolution
Ryan Boren
Ryan is a former WordPress lead developer who retired from tech in 2021 after 15 years at Automattic, the distributed company he helped start. He finished his time at Automattic working on the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion team and helping create and run the Neurodiversity Employee Resource Group. Building a community, a company, a platform, and an ERG was an intense ride full of mistakes and learning that Ryan distills into Stimpunks.
Inna Boren
Inna went from big tech project manager to family case worker. Her skills managing software and hardware teams are now used to manage teams of doctors, care workers, and educators. She’s our motive force as we “fight the current to swim upstream.”
Ronan Boren
Ronan loves music, particularly The Beatles. He writes the lyrics for Josephmooon, a distributed musical collaboration.
Chase Boren
Chase is a fantasy, history, and social studies buff who is probably reading right now.
Chelsea Adams
Chelsea served as a combat medic in the United States Army for 6 years. After leaving the army in 2014, she went back to school with the goal of getting her nursing degree. During this time she worked on the oncology floor of St. David’s South Austin. She decided to go in a different direction career wise, but wants to continue her passion of helping people.
Us
We do not have sociology degrees. We are former technologists turned wannabe-sociologists interpreting and applying the work of experts.
Stimpunks.com is organized as a philanthropic LLC that makes money from consulting and gives money from our fund.
Complementing Stimpunks Philanthropic LLC is the non-profit Stimpunks Foundation at stimpunks.org.
We are a NeurodiVenture and a Teal organization running on the advice process, psychological safety, self-determination theory, the prosocial framework, mutual trust, collaborative niche construction, and open source. We do it in a trauma and neurodiversity informed way using polyvagal theory and the neuroscience of community.
NeurodiVenture : an inclusive non-hierarchical organisation operated by neurodivergent people that provides a safe and nurturing environment for divergent thinking, creativity, exploration, and collaborative niche construction.
NeurodiVerse : human scale cultures created by neurodiversity within the human species
Source: NeurodiVentures | Autistic Collaboration
Psychological safety is increasingly recognised as central to mental health & wellbeing. The polyvagal theory offers a ‘Science of Safety’ which can help inform clinical practice to promote wellbeing, resilience & post-traumatic growth, whilst mitigating trauma. To date, there is no standardised measure of psychological safety comprising psychological, physiological & social components. The current study aims to develop this.
Source: (PDF) Developing a standardised measure of psychological safety.
The Polyvagal Theory discovered by Dr. Stephen Porges is a working model of the autonomic nervous system which connects safety and social connection with health, well being, and recovery.
Source: The Vagus Nerve & Chronic Illness — Trauma Geek
We aspire to do the “truly essential work”.
What Lorde and other black feminists such as bell hooks, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison realized was that the more dehumanized groups a person belongs to, the more their experience forces them to understand about the way society is structured: what and who it takes for granted, the truths about itself it chooses to ignore, who is doing the truly essential work.
Source: Letters To My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism
Every right now Is the next chorus And everyday is a bright new day Every right now Is the next chorus And we can all do something good --Ronan Boren of Stimpunks and Josephmooon
