Katja Durrani

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When people ask me what I do as a job, I mostly reply “web developer”, that's easy and I don't need to explain much. But in 2023 I walked away from a well-paid job as a “software engineer” at an American company, and soon after enrolled in the Shift PSC (Practical Sustainability Course) which is unique to Bristol. I wanted to get away from all the technology, but it keeps catching up with me.

For Growing the Commons, I set up this knowledge base and migrated content from the Lowimpact site, as well as styling the grids to accommodate Otto's beautiful pictures. I also set up the GtC forum, and made the websites for both Growing the Commons and the Bristol Commons .

While I enjoyed much of this, I see these as my main roles at GtC:

being part of the editorial team and writing articles
contributing to the wiki structure and possibly content

Here is a bit more about my background:

My early career in the pharma industry
After a masters degree in biology, I worked for SmithKline Beecham in Munich, in Clinical Research (an admin-heavy job that was not suited to me at all; nor was I suited to it) and was there for the merger with Glaxo-Wellcome to form GSK; I then switched to Medical Information which was better; after moving to the UK, I worked for Bayer for 10 months, again in Medical Information

Stay-at-home mum and web dev
Having been fascinated by the web from early on – I created my first website in 2000 with Dreamweaver – after the birth of my second child, I started getting interested in this PHP thing and created a website for a toddler group and then a Saturday School. Via Twitter, I met some people from Bristol's thriving tech scene, and gradually moved into doing payed web dev jobs; freelance, for agencies, a startup and eventually the aforementioned corporate; you can find more details on my website

Organising
I co-founded two groups in Bristol: the German Saturday School (in 2008) and a “social coding community” called CodeHub (in 2014). With CodeHub, we also used to run a mentorship programme and various study groups (Javascript, WebDev and Haskell). I am not involved with running either now, but pleased to see that both groups are still alive and kicking.

Out of those activities, being a mum has been by far the most rewarding, but apart from that, it was setting up those two groups and running them for a while – the Saturday School and CodeHub. (I also for some years ran a Code Club at my children's school, that was great, too.)

And they were commons! I did not realise that at the time. We created something which we benefited from and looked after it in a mostly self-organising way.

In the last few years, I have developed a strong interest in the topic of Collaborative Finance (CoFi), and have been educating myself about it. I am glad I can dedicate some time to promoting the Commons and CoFi at the moment – always wondering about how best to do that – but I will be looking to do more paid work again. It is all in flux, but there are plans.

The Bristol Commons

katja@growingthecommons.org

I don't have topics I curate, but these are the ones I am most interested in and aspire to contribute to: