Untangling Systems Information

Untangling Systems is Kate Chapman's practice for helping organizations build the right systems by asking the right questions about people, technology, product, and governance together. Most technical strategy work treats human systems and technical systems as separate problems. Kate treats them as one design problem. The questions she asks are the ones that determine whether the architecture holds: who will use the system, who will resist it, how decisions get made, what the governance model assumes. Seventeen years of building open-source commons and the product layers that turn powerful tools into shared infrastructure. Kate conceptualized and created the original Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) Tasking Manager after the 2010 Haiti earthquake; more than half a million mappers have used it since. She co-founded the HOT, chaired the OpenStreetMap Foundation for five years, led engineering enablement and the architecture team at the Wikimedia Foundation, and served as CTO of Open Supply Hub. The through-line: finding where existing tools stopped short and designing the missing product layer, then driving the adoption. Large-scale system change that sticks, not a recommendations deck. Today Kate works with mission-driven organizations as a fractional technical leader, builds experimental AI projects in the open, and writes essays at untanglingsystems.io about the patterns she finds.