Lee builds knowledge infrastructure at the edges of what civic technology has been willing to go. He has worked with Alaska Native communities on enrollment navigation tools, built 360-degree immersive environments for Parramore and Clarksdale, created the Our Voices Unbound platform gathering questions from communities across the country, and developed Asili — an intelligence engine that listens across community corpora and surfaces the resonance between them. His practice is rooted in the belief that communities already hold the knowledge. The code is just how that knowledge gets extended, connected, and preserved.

AJ is a documentary filmmaker, educator, and community-engaged practitioner whose work spans continents and disciplines. A Co-Creation Studio Fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, he has spent decades building immersive and interactive spaces for communities to tell their own stories — from street vendor collectives in Mexico to youth centers in the American South. He teaches political science, civic engagement, and sustainability at Florida Gulf Coast University, with a focus on race, class, and the stories power structures leave out. On Code Trip, AJ's lens stays on the human reality unfolding while the tool is being built — the conversation before the code, the doubt in the middle, the moment a community sees something working for the first time. His background as a practitioner and professor means he understands both the academic framing and the street-level truth.