# Good in Progress

> Good in Progress (goodinprogress.org) is a growing collection of true stories about ordinary people using AI to change what they care about: AI for good, told through the person, never the technology. Every story is told in the subject's own words, checked against primary sources before publication, and published with its sources listed at the bottom.

_Last generated: 2026-10-11. This is the index generation date, not a new source-verification date._

Good in Progress is the counter-narrative to doom-and-hype AI coverage, earned with evidence rather than enthusiasm. Every story is about a person who saw a problem, decided not to wait for permission or a perfect system, and used the tools available to them to do something about it. The person is always the hero. AI is the tool.

Editorial standard: every story starts with the subject's own words and is checked against other sources with no stake in how it turns out. Every claim traces to a direct quote from a listed source rather than a paraphrase, and each candidate passes a graded scoring rubric and a reputation check before it runs. Sources are listed on every story page, labeled where a source is the subject's funder, employer, or vendor, so a reader can weigh them. If a claim cannot be sourced, it does not run. Stories are filed under one of six lenses: Ordinary People (people), Social Impact (impact), Breakthrough (breakthrough), Community (community), Adaptation (adaptation), and Org Spotlight (org-uplift).

Read the collection with an ordinary HTTP GET. For Markdown at the same page URL, send Accept: text/markdown. HTML remains the default. GET and HEAD require no credentials. Missing document URLs return HTTP 404; a Markdown request gets recovery links to the index and sitemap.

Cite the canonical story URL and its listed sources. Preserve source attribution, quotations, limitations, and the Sources last verified date when present. A page generation date does not mean the evidence was checked again. Do not turn a local program outcome into a company-wide claim. If a story says it was withdrawn, do not reuse its earlier claims. This site is an editorial collection, not an AI vendor, live news feed, or professional advice service.

## When to use Good in Progress

- [Find practical examples](https://goodinprogress.org/stories): Look for people and communities using AI to address a concrete problem, for lessons, workshops, or evidence-based discussion.
- [Explore organizational change](https://goodinprogress.org/stories?lens=org-uplift): Find published Org Spotlight stories about work and organizational choices. Check the scope and sources of each claim before generalizing.
- [Check a story before citing it](https://goodinprogress.org/llms.txt): Find the canonical story URL, read the full card, and follow its source links to verify the claim you need.
- [Understand the editorial approach](https://goodinprogress.org/about): Read the mission, six lenses, and verification method.
- [Follow the research skill](https://goodinprogress.org/.well-known/agent-skills/find-gip-stories/SKILL.md): Find relevant stories, check their sources, and cite their outcomes with the right scope.
- [Suggest a story](https://goodinprogress.org/nominate): Use the human-facing nomination form with the user's approval. Reading or fetching a page never submits a nomination; there is no public agent publishing interface.

## Collections

- [How teachers and school teams are using AI](https://goodinprogress.org/topics/education): Meet teachers and school teams using AI for writing practice, chemistry songs, and tools they once bought from vendors. Read their stories and sources.
- [Communities keeping their languages alive with AI](https://goodinprogress.org/topics/language-preservation): Read how Te Hiku Media, Michael Running Wolf, and Jared Coleman are building language tools with community knowledge, ownership, and control at the center.
- [People building more accessible lives with AI](https://goodinprogress.org/topics/accessibility): Meet people using AI to find their way through shops and subways, describe images, read distant signs, and communicate. Explore their stories and sources.

## Stories

- [The radio station that decided te reo Māori was worth building for](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/te-hiku-media-maori-ai): When global speech AI had no room for their language, a small radio station in Kaitāia built its own, and made sure the data stayed in Māori hands.
- [Kingsley Jasi didn't wait for an extension officer. He sent a photo instead.](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/kingsley-jasi-ulangizi-malawi): With roughly one agricultural extension officer for every 3,000 farmers in Malawi, a WhatsApp chatbot in Chichewa answered the question no one was coming to answer.
- [David Hughes put the expert in the phone farmers already had](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/david-hughes-plantvillage-nuru): When cassava disease outran the number of trained experts who could diagnose it, a Penn State professor decided the smartphone already in farmers' hands was the delivery system.
- [The 8,500 IKEA workers who got bigger jobs instead of redundancy notices](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/ikea-billie-reskilling): When its chatbot Billie took over routine questions, IKEA's parent company retrained an entire call center function rather than cut it.
- [Racing to read the rainforest's library before it burns](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/panama-peru-ai-moth-monitoring): The forest is the library and every unnamed insect is an unread book. On a Panama island, a 17-year count meets a closing funding window, and a new set of eyes reads faster than time runs out.
- [Heather Minor didn't just fix a job she dreaded. She tells clerks across the country how to fix theirs.](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/heather-minor-clerkminutes-longview): For years, compiling her town's meeting minutes was one of Heather Minor's most dreaded tasks. She fixed it with an AI tool, and now she recommends the fix to clerks across the country.
- [Helen got her eye contact back. Two directors made sure she could keep it.](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/karen-fuller-kingston-oxfordshire-ai-notes): At Kingston and Oxfordshire, two directors chose to give their social workers back the time, and the attention, that paperwork was taking from the people in front of them.
- [He wrote himself a song in a voice his illness had taken](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/patrick-darling-elevenlabs-singing-voice): Motor neurone disease took Patrick Darling's ability to sing. Working with a speech and language therapist and AI voice technology, he rebuilt his singing voice from old recordings, wrote an original song in his own words, and sat on stage in London as it played, his old bandmates playing live beside him.
- [Jorge Bastidas didn't wait for the government. He and his team built the missing-persons list in three hours.](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/jorge-bastidas-desaparecidos-venezuela): After twin earthquakes hit Venezuela and official reports stalled, a 31-year-old programmer in Buenos Aires built a citizen-run missing-persons tracker. He says he and a team of six had it running in three hours, and that it took in more than 30,000 reports in its first two days.
- [Michael Running Wolf left Amazon so Indigenous tribes could own their own AI.](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/michael-running-wolf-flair): Roughly 200 Indigenous languages in North America are endangered, and the AI built to help save them was being built by outsiders. Michael Running Wolf left Amazon's Alexa team to make sure tribes controlled it instead.
- [Jason Eshraghian and Rui-Jie Zhu built an AI that runs on the power of a lightbulb.](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/jason-eshraghian-matmul-free-llm): Large language models are notorious for their energy appetite. A UC Santa Cruz professor and his graduate student found a way to strip the most expensive step out of the math, and in 2024 ran a model with a billion parameters on 13 watts, about the draw of a lightbulb.
- [The Cambridge technologist who built a $50 device to save a language with no written script](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/saving-voices-soliga): Soliga has no written script, and as young people left for city jobs the elders worried it would go quiet. A Cambridge University technologist and an IIIT Dharwad professor built the community a working voice model from five hours of recordings, running offline on hardware that costs less than $50.
- [The city attorney who used AI to find the reports nobody was reading](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/sf-city-attorney-ai-code-declutter): San Francisco's 16-million-word municipal code had quietly grown hundreds of mandatory reports that almost no one read. City Attorney David Chiu and Stanford's RegLab built a tool to find them all, made his own staff check every one by hand, and the Board of Supervisors just voted on what to do about it.
- [Daniela Camberos built the AI that checks a job offer before it can become a trafficking trap.](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/daniela-camberos-ramona-ia): Criminal networks use fake job listings as the first hook to recruit trafficking victims. Daniela Camberos, a Mexican HR specialist, built a free AI bot that checks the offer in real time, before anyone walks into the trap.
- [His grandfather told him stories about the rain prophets. Raul Souza taught a machine to listen.](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/raul-souza-profetas-da-chuva): A 16-year-old in Ceará wrote down what six of Brazil's traditional rain prophets watch for, from the flowering of the mandacaru to the brightness of the Sete-Estrelo, crossed it with weather records going back to 1981, and tested the result against a real rainy season.
- [The security researcher who built his own sky-searching tools, then found a world that glows](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/dan-caselden-brown-dwarfs): Dan Caselden looks for cold, starless worlds in his spare time. The one he found turned out to be glowing, and when the team reported it in January 2024 the cause was still an open question.
- [He drove thirty minutes at five in the morning to read a thermometer for five seconds. Then Hiroki Tomiyasu built the thing that reads it for him.](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/hiroki-tomiyasu-farm-ai): A liberal-arts graduate who had never written a line of code taught himself to build his own farm software, and now a 100-hectare farm in Hokkaido leans on tools that started with about 7,000 yen of consumer sensors and a winter of evenings.
- [The naturalist who gave almost every humpback in the North Pacific a fingerprint](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/ted-cheeseman-happywhale): Ted Cheeseman built a website where anyone with a whale-tail photo can help identify individual whales, and it grew into the biggest photographic record anyone has built for a whale species.
- [The chemistry professor who set thermodynamics to music](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/oliver-steinbock-chemistry-songs): Oliver Steinbock used AI to turn dense physical-chemistry equations into a playlist of songs, so the ideas would lodge in memory the way a jingle does.
- [The California Teacher of the Year who turned ChatGPT into a writing coach](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/casey-cuny-chatgpt-writing-coach): His students were already using ChatGPT for everything, so Casey Cuny rebuilt his English class around a routine that makes the chatbot quiz them instead of write for them.
- [The radiologist who saw intimate partner violence coming years before anyone said a word](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/bharti-khurana-airs): Asked whether they felt unsafe in their relationship, patients often said no. Bharti Khurana went looking for the answer in their X-rays instead.
- [The volunteer who built Japan's disaster filter, then added twenty people to check the AI's work](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/kenjiro-murakami-spectee): In the wreckage of the 2011 earthquake, Kenjiro Murakami noticed the fastest damage reports were coming from ordinary people's phones, and spent the next decade making them trustworthy enough for a prefecture to reach for.
- [The son who built a missing-persons system during the five months he spent searching for his father](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/jyrone-parker-project-aziz): Jyronna Parker disappeared from Lexington in October 2025. Across the search, his son Jyrone found that the tool his family needed did not exist, so he built it and then gave it to everyone.
- [The engineer who could not read the account number on the wall, so he taught his phone to read it for him](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/sulaiman-adewale-xara): Sulaiman Adewale sometimes walked out of a shop without buying anything, because the account number posted on the wall was a blur. The workaround he built for his own eyes now runs inside tens of thousands of Nigerians' chats.
- [The Afghan refugee who landed in America with no idea where to start, so she started asking](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/amina-irc-alma-resettlement): Amina arrived from Afghanistan alone, with immigration paperwork, a housing search, and a job hunt all waiting. She got through the first stretch of it one question at a time.
- [The geophysicist who put cameras where nobody was looking, and started beating the 911 call](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/neal-driscoll-alertcalifornia): California's worst fires start in the country where no one lives to smell the smoke, so Neal Driscoll made the empty places watched.
- [Catherine Nakalembe walked Eastern Africa's farms for six years. Then she put the cameras on other people's helmets.](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/catherine-nakalembe-helmets-labeling-crops): Satellites could photograph Kenya's farmland but could not tell maize from beans, so a Ugandan geographer, thirteen colleagues, and a network of motorcycle riders went and collected the answer from the roadside.
- [Moshe Nussbaum lost his voice to ALS, so he wrote his way back on air](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/moshe-nussbaum-ai-voice-return): For forty years he was the voice Israelis heard when something bad happened. When ALS took it, he and his newsroom trained a model on his own archive, and he went back to writing the news himself.
- [The public defender who turned down the AI tools on the market, then had one built for public defense](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/jennifer-sellitti-opd-resource-library): Commercial AI could not meet the demands of New Jersey's public defenders, so Jennifer Sellitti's office and a team of Princeton researchers built their own: a plain-language search across 3,000 briefs, 200 internal documents, and 350 directives.
- [The bank that took a 3,000-person job down to 135, and says it moved them rather than cut them](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/dbs-reskilling-singapore): When AI started absorbing routine work, DBS's outgoing chief executive said the part most bank bosses leave out, that he could no longer see how to create jobs. His successor has spent the time since moving people into different ones, and is equally plain about the roughly 4,000 temporary workers her promise was never going to cover.
- [The Nogoyá agronomist who taught a machine to hold 23-plus years of his own judgment](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/diego-alvarez-nogoya-agronomist): An Argentine agronomist spent 23-plus years reading his own land, then built an AI system that can answer like he would, long after he's gone.
- [Doug Gorman turned 8,000 strangers' ideas into a plan for his county](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/doug-gorman-bowling-green-ai-town-hall): Warren County's judge executive replaced a 23-person town hall with an online experiment that let nearly 8,000 residents vote a million times on what Bowling Green, Kentucky should become.
- [The professor who spent decades chasing an unreadable scroll, then handed the finish to a thousand strangers](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/brent-seales-herculaneum-scroll): Brent Seales spent decades building software to read Herculaneum's carbonized scrolls without unrolling them, then handed the last mile to a thousand strangers who finally read one all the way through.
- [Dawn Takeuchi Apuna made Honolulu's building permits work like TurboTax](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/dawn-takeuchi-apuna-honolulu-permits): Honolulu's top permitting official pointed an AI reviewer at building-permit paperwork so applicants find out what's wrong with their plans before they wait months to hear it, and set a date to make it standard for everyone.
- [The legally blind scientist who built himself back into the produce aisle](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/john-ross-rizzo): A physician-scientist who's been legally blind since his teens got tired of being told to just use a delivery app, so he and his lab built the tools that let him shop, ride the subway, and find his way through a building on his own terms.
- [Joshua Tilton built an AI tool that found the heart attacks his own crew was missing](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/joshua-tilton-ems-ai): A rural Ohio paramedic spent his own money on a doctoral AI project, then let it prove him wrong about his own crew's blind spot.
- [Noella Sudbury wrote the law, then built the app that makes a clean slate fast](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/noella-sudbury-rasa-legal): A former public defender spent years passing Utah's Clean Slate law, then built an AI tool that checks eligibility in three minutes instead of hours.
- [The poet who trained an AI on her own poetry, then put it up on the wall at MoMA](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/sasha-stiles-a-living-poem-moma): Sasha Stiles fine-tuned a language model on her own poetry until it could answer back in something like her voice, then let a museum audience watch it think out loud for six months.
- [The Cairo student who taught himself to code after losing his sight, then built the app that let his sister see her own safari](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/mark-morad-scribeme): After losing his sight, Mark Morad taught himself to program by screen reader alone and built ScribeMe so no one would have to describe the world to him again. When his sister Karen lost her sight to the same rare disease, she used it to watch a safari unfold.
- [The Kenyan engineer who built Africa's first AI sign-language translator after watching 300 deaf students share one interpreter](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/elly-savatia-terp-360-sign-language): Elly Savatia turned motion-captured interpreters into 3D avatars that sign Kenyan Sign Language in real time, working with dozens of deaf and hard-of-hearing Kenyans to teach the system to sign like they do.
- [Vyonne Njeri looked again, and caught the heart murmur a busy day almost missed](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/vyonne-njeri-ai-consult-penda-health): A busy clinic day, a software flag, and the moment a clinician trusted her own trained ear over a fast diagnosis.
- [Ivana Drobnjak set out to prove AI doesn't have to waste this much energy, and did](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/ivana-drobnjak-ai-energy): A UCL professor and her research team measured, rather than assumed, how much power generative AI wastes, and found simple fixes that cut it by up to 90 percent without hurting accuracy.
- [The school district CIO who stopped buying software and taught his team to build it](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/kris-hagel-vibe-coding): When Peninsula School District's tech chief got tired of paying vendors for simple software, he picked up Claude Code, taught his colleagues to do the same, and the district started canceling contracts instead of renewing them.
- [Coleman wanted a Rosetta Stone for Owens Valley Paiute. There wasn't one, so Coleman built one.](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/jared-coleman-kubishi-paiute): A computer scientist teaches a language model to speak the endangered tongue of the Big Pine Paiute Tribe, one rule and one elder's sentence at a time.
- [Ivana Feldfeber built the tool that counts what the court files left out](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/ivana-feldfeber-aymurai-court-data): Argentina had almost no data on violence against women and LGBTI people, so a gender-data observatory and one criminal court built software that hides the victims' names and turns what is left into numbers anyone can use.
- [The fifth-grader who started building a wildfire detector, and kept going until a city bought it](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/ryan-honary-sensory-ai): Ryan Honary started building wildfire sensors in fifth grade, and in July 2026 the City of Irvine signed on for the first paid deployment, across the Irvine Open Space Preserve.
- [The researcher who built a sepsis warning for the hours before anyone suspects it](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/suchi-saria-trews-sepsis): After losing a nephew to sepsis in 2017, Suchi Saria spent years turning a Johns Hopkins lab's early warning system into the first continuous sepsis monitor the FDA has cleared.
- [The Eatons counted seven healthy days in Olivia's year, then started a folder called Genome Detectives](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/hilary-eaton-genome-detectives): Hilary and Matt Eaton are scientists, but they are not doctors and not geneticists. Over about eighteen months of late nights, the two of them worked through their own family's genome with ChatGPT, reading every paper it cited before they believed any of it.
- [The blind runner who helped build the glasses that called his race](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/thomas-panek-ai-glasses-nyc-half): Thomas Panek had already finished the NYC Half with the help of guide dogs. In March, Panek ran it again with AI glasses calling the turns, a safety runner alongside, and a coach watching from Colorado.
- [Andrew Ngui put sixty people and a drone over the same neighborhood, just to see which was faster](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/andrew-ngui-kansas-city-drone-assessment): After a storm, Kansas City counts damaged homes on paper, door to door, before federal aid can move. Andrew Ngui spent one March morning testing whether drones and an AI model could do that count, with about sixty ground assessors working the same blocks as the control.
- [The software engineer who made his town's budget readable, then told his neighbors to audit him](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/andrew-baber-marblehead-budget-data): Andrew Baber pointed an AI at 3,000 pages of Marblehead's own financial documents, published the charts before the override vote, and put the whole repo online so anyone could go looking for the bias.
- [The Nairobi engineer who built a robotic hand to sign chemistry to deaf students](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/norah-kimathi-zerobionic-sign-language): It took Norah Kimathi and the ZeroBionic team seven to nine hours to get one chemical equation across to students who could not hear it, so they built a hand that signs instead, and asked deaf teachers to record the vocabulary it needed.
- [Sylvia Osewe traded evenings of handwritten lesson plans for 30 minutes before class](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/sylvia-osewe-kalasik-lesson-plans): A teacher with up to 200 students a day was close to leaving the profession, then handed the lesson planning to a chatbot and kept the part of the job that mattered.
- [Paula Uzcátegui counted close to 86,000 frailejones from the air, then went back to see which ones lived](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/paula-uzcategui-frailejon-census): A wildfire tore through 317 hectares of Colombian páramo, and counting what was left of its signature plant, one by one, was close to impossible with fieldwork alone, so a student who had studied both biology and systems engineering built the census out of drone images.
- [The mountain rescue volunteers who taught a drone what does not belong on a mountain](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/binks-roach-parsons-mr-maps-drone): Charlie Kelly had been missing on a Scottish mountain for six weeks when three Lake District volunteers drove up with two drones and software they had written in their own time. They found him inside the first hour, and his family got an answer before winter.
- [Maria Navarrete addressed the council in Spanish, and the room followed along on two screens](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/north-las-vegas-ai-meeting-translation): North Las Vegas used to send for whichever city employee could translate. In 2023 it put a laptop on the speakers' podium instead, and by 2026 the city clerk says there is almost no language you cannot bring to City Hall.
- [Sateesh Nori wanted a chatbot for tenants. The team picked the one topic where being wrong wouldn't get anyone evicted.](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/sateesh-nori-roxanne-repair-bot): New York's right to a lawyer stops at eviction, and the nonprofit hotline that picks up the rest cannot reach everyone who needs it. So a team of about five volunteers spent 13 months teaching a bot one corner of tenant law.
- [The alpine commander who would rather a drone guess out loud than say nothing](https://goodinprogress.org/stories/phillip-eberle-frnsw-ai-drone-rescue): Police called for help from the air on a freezing alpine night, and the Jindabyne crew that answered flew a drone that speaks up while it is still unsure, with two hikers out of the park in under five hours.

## About

- [About Good in Progress](https://goodinprogress.org/about): The mission, the six lenses, and how stories are verified: the person's own words, sources with no stake in the outcome, and claims that trace to quotes.
- [Nominate a story](https://goodinprogress.org/nominate): Know someone who got curious enough to try something new with AI? A name, a link, and something that actually changed is all it takes to start.
- [Contact Good in Progress](https://goodinprogress.org/contact): Questions, corrections, privacy requests, and partnership inquiries. Obtain the user's approval before submitting a message.
- [Privacy policy](https://goodinprogress.org/privacy): How contact messages, nominations, and site usage information are handled.

## Optional

- [Sitemap](https://goodinprogress.org/sitemap.xml): Full machine-readable list of all pages.
- [llms-full.txt](https://goodinprogress.org/llms-full.txt): The full text of every story in one file.