Featured guest
Pamela Belyea is a Seattle-based architect, educator, arts advocate, and community organizer whose work bridges the arts, education, and public service. A Cooper Union–trained architect and co-founder of Gage Academy of Art, she has spent her career creating opportunities for artists, students, and underserved communities. She is the founder of the Grievers Library and works to preserve and share the artistic legacy of her late husband, Northwest artist and educator Gary Faigin.
Before
Gary Faigin kept his records in a Microsoft Access program from the early 2000s — 436 works, 508 editions, 135 patrons, a sales ledger — whose last entry is February 2022, with hand-kept records since.
Done
In a single day, Ivan turned those files into a working PC/Mac application that opens in any browser. Search it, filter it by medium or subject or size, hand a copy to whoever needs one. And it is not one app but two — the catalog, which the room can see, and the patron records, which are Pamela’s alone. Both run on her own computer, in a browser, and the records never leave it.
Workshop
The catalog is one of five systems her practice needs, and nothing about the next one is prepared in advance. On the 22nd Pamela says what she needs and you watch it take shape, decisions and all. How that choosing is done is the part you take to your own records after the break.
What else her practice runs on, in her own words:
- Onboarding a new client.
- Tracking appraisals.
- Research files.
- Communications with institutions.
What you take home
Most people have had AI write something for them. Far fewer have watched a real practice’s records — the ones a life’s work actually lives in — become something you can open, search and hand to someone. The step here is seeing that happen close enough to ask questions, and then not going home empty-handed. What you take with you works without AI — you add and change records yourself — and there is nothing to rent.
You get it
Watch a working system come out of a conversation, for a real practice, in forty minutes. You leave knowing what is possible and what it takes to ask for it.
You get yours
In the second half we turn to your records — what you keep, what you can never find — and you leave with a working start on a link you keep. Drive it yourself, or say what you want and watch it happen, with people either side of you doing the same.
You extend it
A Survey of Software reading list for whatever you need next, and where to find help when you hit a wall.
Workshop facilitator
Ivan Schneider, founder of Model Citizen Developer.
Ivan began his career as a database programmer and then worked in B2B publishing for CMP Media in New York and Boston, covering banking technology from associate to executive editor. He started a custom publishing business in Seattle, with Tata Consultancy Services as the anchor client for fifteen years.
Education: Carnegie Mellon for information and decision systems, an MBA in finance and accounting from Vanderbilt, and a master’s in humanities from Harvard Extension. Student of the Faigin Still-Life Painting Atelier at Gage Academy of Art.
He currently sits on the board of National Speakers Association Northwest.
Ivan has spoken at Puget Sound Programming Python, Seattle Postgres, AI Tinkerers and the Tech SIG for NSA Northwest on the stack behind this room — the one that writes a whole database from a description in plain words, the custom system running Convention City Dispatch, and Survey of Software, a library of two hundred and thirty researched software surveys.
Who it’s for
Your work is spread across the places you put it: a list of what you have made in one file, shows and sales in another, receipts in a drawer, and the people who matter to your career in your head. The money arrives from six directions — sales, teaching, grants, a day job, the odd commission — and no two of them are recorded the same way. You know exactly what your records should hold. This is the room where that becomes something real, and you have been told it is now possible with AI and want to watch it happen — you have to see it to believe it.
Artists
The catalogue and the CV — what you have made, where it has shown, solo and group, what sold and to whom. And the practice behind it: materials, costs, the studio, and where each piece actually is.
Creators
Writers, musicians, makers of anything that adds up to a body of work. The same records in a different medium — what you made, who has it, what it earned, and what you are trying to do next.
Art-adjacent
Galleries, advisors, appraisers, teachers, archivists, estates. You keep records about other people’s work, which means the questions arrive from every direction at once and have to be answerable.
Whichever one you are — same price, same room.
The afternoon
-
12:00
Arrival, coffee, lunch
- Introductions around the room.
-
12:30
Featured guest
You’ll learn:
- How to describe what you keep, in plain words, so it can be built.
- How long it really takes, and where the time goes.
- What stays private, and what the room sees.
- Where it stops, and what still needs a person.
-
1:10
Your records
- What you keep, and what you can never find. Describe it and watch it take shape. You leave with a working start on a link you keep.
- Help each other along the way — everyone at the table is doing the same thing at the same time. A laptop is useful if you have one; a phone still works.
-
1:40
Around the room
- What everyone ended up with, on the monitor. Yours goes home on the link you keep.
- Where to take it next, and where to find help when you hit a wall.
-
2:00
End
Seat and lunch
Seat terms — refunds, transfers, lunch cutoff.
Getting there
- WhereMercer Island Community & Event Center, Room 103, Calkins
8236 SE 24th St, Mercer Island, WA 98040 - WhenTuesday, September 22, 2026. Doors 12:00, session 12:30–2:00.
- Parking211 parking stalls on site.
- BringYour phone for the room. A laptop is useful now, if you have one.
- RecordingThe session is photographed and filmed. Registering means you’re OK appearing in the recording.
- Questionsivan@ivantohelpyou.com