Short version. You'll have to read the entire site to get the long version. Mostly.

This is the personal site of Michael Bishop. Here I write and share mostly about my explorations with building for the indie and open web. But it’s my personal site, I’m apt to write about anything. Maybe moreso going forward.

On the professional side I build data pipelines and interactive maps from public records to make local government more transparent — election results, city council proceedings, property data, and campaign finance for Hillsborough County, Florida.

My current project is Tampa Monitor (tampamonitor.com), where I scrape, process, and publish civic data as open-source tools. That includes automated meeting transparency for Tampa City Council (agendas, transcripts synced to YouTube video, full-text search), precinct-level election maps, a Datasette instance tracking development applications, and an iCal feed for city events that the City of Tampa’s own tech staff contributed back to.

I use GitHub Copilot and Claude daily — not just for code generation, but for architectural planning and building custom AI agents and instruction files that guide LLM behavior in domain-specific workflows. I can help organizations adopt these tools practically, not theoretically.

Before civic data, I spent 15+ years in WordPress development — managing 300+ sites on Multisite, building custom plugins against third-party APIs, and optimizing high-traffic e-commerce sites. Before that, I was an executive chef. The throughline is systems thinking, whether it’s a kitchen or a data pipeline.

I’m an open web advocate, IndieWeb contributor, and was invited to speak at GitHub Connect 2019 about disaster response mapping work I did with Code for America, FEMA, and the Red Cross after Hurricane Irma.

Based in Tampa. Open to civic tech, nonprofit, and government consulting. If you have a project you’d like to discuss, get in touch.