About Me

I'm Keith Fuchser. I've always been interested in why towns and cities turn out the way they do. Why did one town grow while the one down the road faded out? What made a neighborhood hold together, or fall apart? Most of the projects on this site are my attempts to work through questions like that.

My Background

I've spent about 35 years in civic technology, and these days I lead innovation, data, and AI work in local government. A lot of that job is figuring out how a process really works before trying to change it. The modeling I do on my own time scratches the same itch, just with older places and older records.

How I Work

My main approach is something I call a historical digital twin. It's an agent-based model of a real place at a particular point in time. The agents stand in for households, businesses, or institutions, and they make choices based on rules I pull from historical sources. Then I let the model run and see what happens.

Once a model is working, I can change things and see how the outcome shifts. What if the interstate had gone five miles south of town? How would the town have handled losing its biggest employer? What would ten years of drought have done to where people settled? The answers aren't proof of anything, but they're a useful way to test ideas against the historical record.

Tools

I mostly use open-source software. QGIS handles mapping and digitizing old maps, NetLogo is where I build and test most of the models, and I use Python with GeoPandas and Mesa when I need more control. There's more detail in the Toolbox section.

Other Interests

Outside of this, I collect old books and maps and work on a native plant garden at our place in the Colorado mountains. At that elevation, it's mostly an exercise in finding out what will survive.

Get in Touch

If you want to talk about any of this or have a project in mind, email me at keith.fuchser@gmail.com or find me on LinkedIn.