At this year's NODES event, Neo4j's Chief Architect and CTO, Jim Webber, wrapped up the day with a keynote featuring interviews with customers and community members. One of the guests was Matt Cloyd, a civic technologist who discussed his work at the intersection of civic technology and graphs. He shared an exciting project on his horizon in conflict resolution and politically-related violence. Matt's journey into graph technology began when he realized that power mapping, a concept from his environmental sustainability course, could be applied to conflicts using graph databases. He developed a language called Aspen, which generates graph data and is specifically designed to be more humane than other graph technologies like Cypher. Aspen allows users to take notes about relationships in a conflict and have them automatically converted into Cypher for use in Neo4j. Matt's advice to newcomers to the graph community is to join the community, meet people, and be open to learning from others. He hopes that his work on graph-based analysis of conflictual events will help forecast and prevent violence in the future.