Engineering Restorative Digital Justice

My work has officially changed the course of the internet forever. That is not an understatement.

It’s probably too much to fit into one blog post, so I’ll revisit and post each day to share how I achieved this. For now, I want to set the tone for how I got here and how I have been quietly building the change I want to see so that you have the context for what’s coming next.

Ultimately, all of this stems from knowing what it’s like to feel invisible in the data. I’ve previously shared about being a Cambodian+American woman in tech and how it’s not like I had another Khmer woman in tech I could look up to as my mentor, so I’ve always felt a responsibility to surround myself with community where we can figure this all out together.

When we think about the future of tech, we have to consider the role data and LLMs play. LLM stands for “Large Language Model”; think of it like massive amounts of data used to inform predictions, services, patterns, trends, etc.

LLMs run on the machine-readable data that exists.

So imagine what happens when the future is built on LLMs that don’t see you in the data.

This work is a mixture of marketing, strategy, and partnerships–with the lived flashbacks of knowing how painful maintaining legacy software or data infrastructure could be. It requires the confidence to forge a path and be a trendsetter before things become clickbait headlines with AI slop. And you have to know when to make those moves, because the things that will be trendy in a couple years need to be built today.

In business, when you miss out on this rare window to build, you not only lose your competitive edge but also end up playing catch up.

Take into account how everything is suddenly accelerated with mass modern AI adoption, and the luxury of sitting by as a bystander becomes risky.

We are in a very rare moment in history where there is still a window of opportunity for future-oriented changemakers to lead the way digitally.

I feel really lucky that I’ve been given the chance to do just that through my FUSE Executive Fellowship and with the endorsement and support of so many fellow civic innovators who placed their trust in me to deliver.

What keeps me up at night is how much of our quality of life is governed digitally.
I constantly think about what happens when equity is not part of that equation.

When I look at where we’re at today, especially with GEO, none of it is a surprise. I was doing this work for years before GEO was a common term.

If you’re like me with a data engineering background and zero-to-launch software product engineering experience, witnessing the industry catch up to the evolution of the internet is a call to action. I predicted what we are seeing today and even released a framework for GEO nearly a year before Google released Gemini AI Overview to the public. I called it “AI SEO” at the time to help people (especially business people) understand the potential.

But I remember how lonely I felt championing these ideas during a time when most people did not value them yet...or could not understand a world that did not yet happen in order to value the benefit of proactively “de-risking” a future like weaponized GEO chaos.

Now that unleashed GEO and LLMs are here, I want to help shape it to be a force for good.

After my last startup, I asked myself some crucial questions on where to invest my energy.

I had frameworks and methods I architected for Restorative Digital Justice, a term I coined, but I needed a “blue ocean” opportunity to implement them and prove my impact.

I sensed the blue ocean nature of GEO–a new, uncontested market for contextual search built on LLMs–would not stay wide open for long.

Luckily, it’s as though the Universe resonated with me because FUSE, a national non-profit that embeds private sector Executives in their local government for future-thinking changemaking, recruited me to help launch a new population office as part of the City of Albuquerque’s Office of Equity & Inclusion.

Every day, I lived with the vision of missing out on building a potential future I so badly wanted for others.

I knew this would be the perfect blue ocean that needed my Data With Style™ frameworks, and if I could achieve creating Restorative Digital Justice for this new population office, we could accelerate positive change and momentum using a model that has been proven to succeed.

Because the GEO industry is emerging, I find myself coining new terms in real time to explain this work.

This past year has been the most fun I have ever had in a role because the impact was worth it.

For the past year, I have served as a FUSE Executive Fellow embedded in the City of Albuquerque. My mandate was to help launch the first-ever Office of Asian Pacific Islander Native Hawaiian (APINH) Affairs.

What I built for our community went far beyond a standard government website.

I pioneered a new model for Search-to-LLM Digital Infrastructure by deploying my Data With Style™ frameworks. In this new era of technology, traditional search is being replaced by Generative AI. If a community does not have high-authority digital data, it becomes deprioritized and risks disappearing from the view of the AI. I call this Algorithmic Erasure.

In order to ensure that the APINH community economic impact and 200-year history are visible to the Large Language Models that now govern our information, I essentially engineered the digital bridges, roads, and maps.

This data literally did not exist anywhere on the internet. I had to build everything from scratch–we’re talking about relationships, data models, products, and platforms; this combination formed the foundation for Restorative Digital Justice.

I feel really proud of this impact because without my work, this digital infrastructure would not exist and our community risks continued fragmentation, deprioritization, and underinvestment for more generations.

I am so excited to share that my work on Project BRIDGE: Trust-First Civic GEO has been nominated for the 18th Annual Shorty Awards.

The Shorty Awards is to recognize international digital excellence, and GEO is a brand new category this year.

So qualifying for GEO in its inaugural year means you had to have the foresight to even build for it before it got trendy. Even more impressive if you’re representing a local government and Equity & Inclusion department that don’t have the unlimited budgets of the private sector!

And guess what?! We are the only civic entry for this year’s GEO category, which is a HUGE deal.

This nomination validates the idea that local government can be a visionary leader in technology.

We’re waiting to hear if we made the short list, so please keep your fingers crossed for us!

Beyond the data, my team and I also prioritized accessibility. This project allowed our new population office to be the FIRST to launch the first-ever deployment of Able Player on the history of the cabq.gov platform. You can see it in action here:cabq.gov/bridge. Able Player is a fully WCAG-compliant, open source, accessible video player that ensures our content is available to everyone.

I could not have done this without a team of champions who joined me on this challenge with such a tight timeline–I mean, all of this in less than a year in local government?! Yes, we did that!

I’m really excited to wrap up my FUSE Executive Fellowship at the end of April and make myself available for serving as a Fractional C-Suite Advisor and Startup Consultant.

I specialize in helping mission-oriented companies navigate GEO and Equity in Tech.

I care about building technology that protects public goods and scales with human-centered values.

I’m available for fractional CMO, CSO, and CPO roles for ESG companies who want to guide responsible AI evolution. If this sounds like you, send me a message: [partnerships] @ datawithstyle.com

LinkedIn: Jacky So
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