Thank you for visiting StewardDB. I'm Derya, the founder and developer of this application.

I'm an immigrant, a mother, and a former academic with a PhD in computational physics with three years of postdoctoral training. After leaving academia, I went into tech and worked as a data scientist and, later, a data engineer. While the work was always engaging and intellectually stimulating, I was never really able to shake the awareness that what I did was either encouraging more consumerism among the American people or pushing them further into debt.

I quit my last position and decided to start working on this project that I had been mulling over since I first started hearing about the various technologies available to labor organizers about seven years ago. My partner worked for a member-led union in Pennsylvania back then and I remember listening to him and his co-workers talk about their transition from a slew of Excel sheets to a database over dinner. But even with this new technology, they had complaints. I thought I could build it better.

In December of 2024, I started by handing out surveys to labor organizers to gather information about their experiences with technology. I did hour-long interviews with friends and friends of friends who are labor organizers to hear about what current tech was doing well and what frustrated them. These conversations crystallized the prototype in my mind: a smooth streamlined data upload experience that would be error- and duplicate-resistant, a table view that would provide information about dues and ongoing campaigns with strong visual signals, a way to take versioned notes not just about individuals, but also departments, shops, and employers, and an outreach experience that would be easily accessed from any part of the application. This is the product I set out to build.

StewardDB is just getting started. There are many more features I want to build to support your organizing. In the meantime, I hope you will set up a demo to grab your promo code for a free 6-week trial period. Your feedback will be invaluable to shaping the future of StewardDB.