BraceLand

People, Chill. Charles Ramsey isn't Antoine Dodson

Fri, 10 May 2013 09:28:58 -0400

There’s been a lot of talk these last few days about Charles Ramsey, the man who is responsible for rescuing the three women who were being held captive in Cleveland (we all know the story at this point). He became an instant Internet superstar, mostly because of this interview he gave to a local TV reporter just after the women were rescued. And predictably there’s now a controversy emerging about just how racist the portrayals of him in the media have been. Now, I’m a good liberal. I usually nod my head in agreement when someone calls out some subtle racist nonsense. But this one I can’t get behind, especially the comparisons to Antoine Dodson. Here’s why:

Ramsey had agency. In fact, I find it really patronizing that all this talk of minstrelsy and stereotyping assumes that Ramsey couldn’t have been in on it himself. As far as I was concerned (and I understand reasonable people can disagree on this interpretation) we were laughing with him rather than at him. The thumbs up, the chuckles, the thing he said about the white girls. Watch that original interview with the local reporter without the sound on and tell me that Ramsey isn’t completely in control of the narrative. Dodson clearly wasn’t trying to be funny.

More important than that, even if white people are laughing at Ramsey and there is some racial animosity below the surface of the jokes (I’m sure not everyone making memes is purehearted) they still have to reckon with the fact that Ramsey is a hero. Dodson wasn’t the hero, he was the man on the street. Through all Ramsey’s performance, he’s telling the story of a ridiculously dramatic rescue that he executed. The guy most people would avoid saved lives, lives of white people! That is sinking in.

In that sense, a more apt comparison might be to Wesley Autrey. Remember him? He’s the black guy who jumped onto the subway tracks in New York—while a train was coming!—to throw his body over that of a young white male seizure victim. Oh yeah, and his daughters were standing on the train platform the whole time. That one still completely blows my mind. (If you have time you should watch the Letterman interview) While he doesn’t challenge our stereotypes the way Ramsey does (Autrey is a family man, a Navy veteran, a construction worker, he gets his hair cut, he has all his teeth, etc.) he still doesn’t fit our image of the hero, especially the hero that saves white people. But that was some Captain America shit he did and it forced people to rethink, even if that wasn’t the dominant narrative.

So, from my seat on the Liberal Committee on How We’re Allowed to Talk About Colored People in the Media (LCHWATACPitM) my vote goes for letting this one just be funny. We don’t have to hand-wring every damn time. First, it’s exhausting. Second, it’s not effective.

#SupportAdria

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 13:21:40 -0400

It’s a low day for the tech industry: it seems that SendGrid has fired Adria Richards.

For those who don’t know, Adria was at PyCon sitting through a plenary session when some men behind her starting making “dongle” jokes. You get the idea. Adria (who was SendGrid’s developer evangelist), fed up with having to sit through sexist crap at tech conferences all the time, took a picture of the offenders and tweeted it at the conference organizers. She’s documented the exchange with context on her blog though you may or may not be able to see it since last I checked it was under DDoS attack. You can read more at VentureBeat.

There’s an unconfirmed rumor that one of the men Adria took a picture of got fired. That’s when the high-minded defenders of liberty (liberty, apparently, to make sexist jokes in a public and professional environment full of strangers and colleagues) decided this couldn’t stand and started DDoSing both Adria and SendGrid, not to mention threatening her personally.

Before I go further, I’d like to say that we have no way to know the full reason either of these people was fired. This could have been the straw that broke the camel’s back in either case. So there could be many reasons either or both of these individuals is out of a job today (it’s also not confirmed that the man in the picture was actually fired).

But let’s assume for the moment that both of these people, Adria and the man she took a picture of, had perfectly fine employment records and there were no pre-existing reasons that either would have been let go. Assuming that’s the case, it’s a very sad moment for the tech industry when the woman who calls out misogynistic bullshit gets fired and has to deal with death threats and more.

One can imagine a world where SendGrid stood up for Adria. Maybe said something like “the behavior Adria witnessed at PyCon was unacceptable in our industry. We’re proud to have someone on our staff who refuses to remain quiet in the face of such sexist and inappropriate behavior.”

Or at least a world where SendGrid would have been too ashamed to let Adria go based on her speaking out against sexism.

Unfortunately we don’t live in that world yet. The myth of the tech meritocracy is officially dead.

[REPOST] American

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 13:31:00 -0400

In honor of the dude who asked me last night on BART whether I was “South American or Asian,” (clearly the only two options) I’m reposting something I wrote a few years ago. Some additional thoughts:

1) Asking random people on the train about their ethnic background isn’t really acceptable small talk. I’m not interested in explaining my family tree to you, dude, I’m just trying to get home.

2) In any situation, if you are going to ask someone about their ethnic background, it’s best not to presume what the answer will be. Just wait for them to tell you. And if they blow you off, don’t fucking be offended. You asked kind of a shitty question.

3) Despite my annoyance, I’m kind of jazzed that someone thought I was Asian. Never heard that one before so I can add it to the list. And, since this guy was Asian, it further goes to prove my point that this is mostly about people trying to project themselves onto you so they can figure out how to deal with your ambiguousness. This is my whole theory behind the Obama presidency, by the way, but that’s a whole ‘nother post. Or even a book. Maybe I’ll write it someday.

************************************

American (originally posted November 2009)

Stranger: Where are you from?
Me: Ummm, I live in Cambridge?
Stranger: No, I mean, originally.
Me: Well, I grew up in Michigan
[awkward pause]
Stranger: But where are your parents from?
Me: My dad’s from Chicago and my mom’s from upstate New York
[another awkward pause]
Stranger: yes, but what is your nationality?
Me: Uhh, I’m American

At this point, depending on my mood, I’ll either break the news that my mom’s white and my dad’s black (which always disappoints the inquisitor, who’s expecting something much more interesting), or I’ll ask them where they think I’m from (I’ve heard everything from India to Sicily), or I’ll just let the awkward silence hang.

If only I had a dollar for every time I had this conversation. Or for every time an immigrant spoke Spanish to me conspiratorially when we were alone together in an elevator. Or when a white woman told me what a nice tan I had. Or when a black playmate wanted to run her fingers through my hair.

I was bi-racial before it was cool. Middle school was especially hard, with indifferent white kids and openly hostile blacks. Neither one of my parents’ families was accepting of their marriage, and so we grew up without really close ties to our extended family. I’ve only just recently begun to feel like I fit. And yet, despite not knowing how to articulate why, I’ve always felt deeply American. My roots here run deep, going back generations before the civil war. My family’s story has been personally and viscerally intertwined with just about every defining moment of this country’s history—slavery, the black migration north, the labor movement in industrial northern cities, World War II, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, Vietnam.

The Obama candidacy, and the white populist backlash against it, has had a big impact on me. I remember telling my extremely skeptical brother and sister, in July 2007, that Barack Obama was going to be the next president. They thought I’d been living in Massachusetts for too long. I thought they’d been too crippled by their experience in the South. As per usual, I was right. But their warnings about the deeply entrenched racial animosity that’s alive and well were also justified. Recently, Pat Buchanan (one of my all-time favorite bigots) tried to articulate the sense of why “traditional” Americans—working-class whites—felt like they were losing “their” country, as if people like me have no claim to the idea of America. Andrew Sullivan’s response to Buchanan [this is a dead link now] said it better than I could, as he describes his immigrant experience here:

It struck me almost at once, if only in the music I heard all around me – and then in so many other linguistic, cultural, rhetorical, spiritual ways: white Americans do not realize how black they are. Even their whiteness is partly scavenged from the fear of – and attraction to – its opposite. Even something as stereotypically white as American Catholicism, I discovered to my amazement, was also black from the very start. (Yes, those Maryland slaves. If you’ve never been to a Gospel Mass in an ancient black Catholic parish, try it some time.)

From the beginning, in its very marrow, this country was forged out of that racial and cultural interaction. It fought a brutalizing, bloody, defining civil war over that interaction. Any European student of Tocqueville swiftly opens his eyes at the three races that defined America in the classic text. Has Buchanan read Tocqueville? And that’s why it seems so odd to me that the election of the son of a white mother and a black father is seen as somehow a threat to American identity for some, when, in fact, Obama is the final iteration of the American identity – the oldest one and the deepest one. This newness is, in fact, ancient – or as ancient as America can be. The very names – Ann Dunham and Barack Obama. Is not their union in some ways a faint echo of the union that actually made this country what it is?

That’s what’s so offensive about Buchanan’s position. Not that he recognizes the loss of influence of some white Americans, but that he deems irrelevant the contributions and American-ness of people like me.

I was always hard-pressed to articulate my patriotism in a way that didn’t sound like I was channeling Sarah Palin. It’s definitely not cool to admit that you get teary-eyed on the Fourth of July or that you have a crush on Alexander Hamilton. But Sullivan’s characterization puts a finger on what I had yet to figure out—my identity is tied to this country’s history. I am here because of it, and my family has both benefited from its opportunity, thriving as a result, and been savagely oppressed by its demons.

When I travel to foreign countries, I always expect to be able to blend in. After all, everywhere I go in the US I’m mistaken for whatever ethnic fetish happens to strike someone’s fancy. But for some reason, before I even open my mouth, people tend to know I’m American. Maybe it’s just my American eyes and wide smile, but I tend to think it’s more than that, that I embody the character of this country, all of its good and bad, promise and shortcomings. And the last time someone told me I had a nice tan, I put on my American smile, looked them in the eye, and said thank you.

Why the GOP's Problem is Not Technology

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 13:21:10 -0500

I imagine everyone in my orbit is reading this article from the Sunday Times Magazine today (if they haven’t already). I was skeptical going in because I thought it was going to be yet another attempt to give credit for Obama’s victory to technology. But pretty quickly it’s clear that the writer is using technology as a metaphor for what’s really wrong with the GOP: their ideas suck. David Plouffe, unsurprisingly, drops knowledge:

Pouncing, he replied: “Let me tell you something. The Hispanic voters in Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico don’t give a damn about Marco Rubio, the Tea Party Cuban-American from Florida. You know what? We won the Cuban vote! And it’s because younger Cubans are behaving differently than their parents. It’s probably my favorite stat of the whole campaign. So this notion that Marco Rubio is going to heal their problems — it’s not even sophomoric; it’s juvenile! And by the way: the bigger problem they’ve got with Latinos isn’t immigration. It’s their economic policies and health care. The group that supported the president’s health care bill the most? Latinos.”
Plouffe readily conceded that he and his generation held no iron grip on political wisdom, but then he flashed a grin when I brought up the R.N.C.’s Growth and Opportunity Project, composed of party stalwarts. “If there’s a review board the Democrats put together in 2032, or even 2020, and I’m on it,” he said, “we’re screwed.”

I often get the sense that Republicans (at least the ones in power) don’t actually know anybody who’s different from them. And so while it’s self-evident to David Plouffe that Hispanics might care about things other than immigration, Republicans trot out poor Marco Rubio as the answer to all their problems. Just recycle the same tired ideas but do it in Spanish—you’ll be fine!! It’s really no surprise to me that the Republicans who are trying to bring their party back from the brink all live in cities where they have to interact with other human beings and at least consider developing some sort of empathy. I really hope they succeed because our country is much better off with a Republican party that comes back to the middle than one that goes off the cliff.

The Cult of Engineering

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 20:17:00 -0500

I’m going to say something controversial: I do not want to write code. I’m eager to learn the basic concepts of computer science, if only for my own curiosity and to understand the how and why of software, but I don’t have any burning desire to build software myself. However, over the the last couple years I’ve become increasingly insecure with my lack of coding skills, to the point where I sometimes feel unqualified to work in this space without learning.

A lot of that insecurity is personal, but I think another big part of it is the rising trend of elevating the engineer. Let’s call it the Cult of Engineering (CofE) for shorthand. In the Bay Area at least, we can’t turn a corner without people telling us how important engineers are. There is more and more talk about universal coding literacy. And the rise of the brogrammer and shows like Bravo’s Start-Ups: Silicon Valley can only be a function of the Cult of Engineering.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I feel strongly that we need more people getting into the engineering game (especially women and minorities!). And I love my engineering friends and colleagues and think it’s imperative that we expand engineering thinking into more sectors (hence my work at Code for America). But I worry that the CofE is having unintended consequences, like:

1) Subjugating non-engineers/programmers to second-class status, devaluing skills like relationship-building and communication. Whether we’re willing to admit it or not, human networks are still vastly more important than technical ones. And the most important new technologies are simply platforms to make it easier for humans to do what they do: talk to each other. Communicating, building consensus, and organizing are all non-negotiable elements of any world-changing undertaking including technology endeavors. We should be fostering and elevating these skills as much as we foster and elevate engineering.

2) Making it more intimidating for women and minorities to come into the tech space. If the ability to code—or the deep desire to learn—becomes a de facto prerequisite to being a part of the community, are we making the barrier to entry too high? And are we discouraging groups that are already disproportionately susceptible to self-doubt?

When tossing this around with some friends, I got really great feedback. Here’s what resonated with me:

This is a supply and demand issue: If engineers weren’t such a scarce resource we wouldn’t see this phenomenon.
It’s likely no coincidence that the positions that get devalued are jobs that are often seen as “women’s” work BUT it’s important to remember that men are also affected by this. There are men who don’t want to code, and there are also male coders who feel unqualified sometimes.
Everyone does not need to code, but everyone should have the opportunity to learn.
We suffer from a failure of language: Techies and non-techies often don’t know how to talk to each other, and it’s got less to do with a lack of technical skill on one side (or a lack of social skills on the other) as it has to do with a lack of shared reference points. Which leads me to my next point,
And, my personal favorite: we don’t all need to know how to code but we should all understand the basic principles. I wasn’t born to be an engineer and that’s ok. But it’s not ok for me to be in conversations with engineers about what they’re working on and have no interest in the basic elements. It seems like there was agreement that you should at least know if what you’re asking an engineer to do is a complex thing or an easy thing.

So, to that end, we started to put together a list of resources for people who don’t necessarily want to learn how to code but want to know enough to have some credibility. Here are a few I’m digging into:

Of course, I started with the Wikipedia entry on Computer Science because it’s the best place to start digging into ANYTHING.
Lisa Williams has a ridiculously valuable list of resources geared toward journalists, including Comp Sci 101 classes from Khan Academy and Harvard.
My search on Coursera shows 61 returns for “computer science” courses. I’m checking out this Comp Sci 101 from Stanford.

Once I feel like I have the landscape down I may start digging into a language. But I’ll never be an engineer. I’ll probably never build any piece of software that anyone else uses. I’m (getting better at being) ok with that.

marihuertas: not a beard

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 15:32:46 -0500

marihuertas: not a beard:

marihuertas:

It was a tongue-in-cheek joke on the campaign trail, and I smiled about it for a while – the recurring meme about the “bearded” Obama Technology team, a group of dudes who wore flannels and didn’t shave and didn’t care at all about either, thankyouverymuch. I smiled about it because it was true,…

Mari was my sister-in-arms on the campaign. Really glad she wrote this.

Silicon Valley's Problem: The Musical

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 19:35:06 -0500

Silicon Valley's Problem: The Musical:

OK, it’s not really a musical. But it is a comedy. I’d feel a lot sadder about it if it didn’t perfectly encapsulate the point I made a few weeks back about the ridiculous bubble mentality of Silicon Valley.

When I do write the musical, I’m definitely stealing this line: “Sadly, we live in a world where race still is an issue because some folks haven’t made the leap.”

PS: the title of this post is actually a link (crazy, right?!) to the post I’m referencing. It’s recommended reading, if only to learn how not to talk about race.

The Limits of Aaron's Law

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 12:11:34 -0500

Last summer, as my brother and I were driving a UHaul with all my stuff from Austin to Chicago, an Illinois state trooper pulled us over. I was moving from Austin, where I was in grad school, to Chicago to start my job on the Obama campaign. We had just pulled out of our hotel outside Bloomington, it was first thing in the morning. I wanted to make it to Chicago by lunchtime. The state trooper was parked in the highway median a mile or two after we got on the road. I didn’t think much of it since I didn’t think we could possibly be speeding (the speed limit was 65 and anyone who’s driven a fully-packed UHaul knows it’s hard to go faster than about 70, especially when you’ve just gotten going). The trooper pulled out into traffic and was behind us a for a few minutes. I still didn’t think anything of it. Then he did something strange—he pulled up in the left lane right next to the truck, peered in to look at my brother, who was driving, and then pulled back into traffic behind us. About two minutes later, he turned his lights on and pulled us over.

He wouldn’t tell us why he pulled us over, but he asked my brother to come back to the patrol car with him. My brother went, and I was scared. I took a picture of the cop car and posted it to Twitter just in case I needed my social media army to come to the rescue. About ten minutes later, the trooper came up to my window and, after asking for my ID and a bunch of other documents, said “I thought I smelled marijuana in the truck, am I wrong?”

He let us go, after I informed him he was very wrong about the marijuana. My brother downplayed it but I was furious. Clearly he had looked in to see who was driving the truck and decided us bi-racial kids were the type who fit the drug-smuggler profile. According to my brother, this had happened to him many times before. I didn’t know that. He’d never mentioned it.

I was reminded of this story in the aftermath of Aaron Swartz’s death (which I wrote about here). Much of the immediate reaction has focused on how unfair Aaron’s prosecution was. I agree. But the calls for action have focused on reforming cybercrime law. Which is great and noble, but I can’t help but wonder why people recognize the unfairness of Aaron’s prosecution not as a flaw in cybercrime legislation but as a flaw in the justice system as a whole? Prosecutors treat people unfairly every day, by the thousands. Proposed sentences are ridiculously out of line with alleged crimes. People who can’t afford bail rot in jail for months awaiting trial, and often get shitty legal representation. Prosecutors are gleeful about ruining people’s lives. And that doesn’t even touch on corruption and abuse during the arrest and questioning process, or police harassment like my brother and I endured.

Bryan Stevenson, the Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, gave a searing TED talk last year. He received the longest standing ovation of the conference and raised over a million dollars from the TED community in the days after the talk. At the time, TED committed to making criminal justice reform part of its TEDxCity2.0 program. It’s not clear from the website that that action happened.

Bryan Stevenson’s subtle challenge to the TED audience, to have empathy for those who are the victims of injustice in our legal system, resonates now as we think about how to take action in the wake of Aaron’s death. Aaron’s prosecution was not really about unfair cybercrime laws, it was about an unfair justice system. One that ruins lives constantly. From what I know of Aaron’s work he was a geek with overwhelming empathy. He recognized the need to spread the benefits of democratizing technology beyond members of the tech elite. Might it be a more fitting tribute if Aaron’s Law addressed broken sentencing rules for all crimes, not just cybercrime? Do we, in the tech community, have the ability to make our advocacy not just about issues specific to the platform but about making the platform available to address issues of inequality and injustice for everyone affected by it?

Good Signs

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 11:21:57 -0500

Good Signs:

It’s only fair that I highlight examples of the Silicon Valley tech community actually using its influence in the public interest, for an issue that doesn’t directly benefit it. Here’s Ron Conway throwing his weight behind gun control.

How I Remember Aaron Swartz

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 18:49:16 -0500

I’m not really sure I’ve got any place to be writing this. I didn’t know Aaron very well at all—we’d met a couple times at the Berkman Center way back, and at Personal Democracy Forum last summer—so who am I to try and write some sort of remembrance?

So I’ll just say why his work inspires me: he was a participant. He’s most well-known for being a “hacker” whatever that means these days, but he wasn’t cynical like some on the techno-left are. He didn’t heckle from the sidelines, he put his money where his mouth was. And that didn’t just mean downloading content and making it freely available online. It also meant wanting to work for the Obama campaign even while he was under investigation by the Justice Department; to him, the system wasn’t beyond repair. It meant using his tech credentials and skills to raise awareness about issues beyond those that directly affected him. He’s exactly the opposite of the self-absorbed Silicon Valley technologists I described in a post a few weeks ago. As the kids would say, he was legit. He lived his beliefs and he was always trying to leave the world better than he found it.

In truth, I found Aaron difficult. I am probably one of those people who made him feel like banging his head against the wall when we talked. But his work is the most honest, and earnest, work anyone in this civic tech world ever did. When I heard the charges against him for breaking into that storage closet at MIT and downloading those journal articles, I rolled my eyes. Turns out it wasn’t a stunt, he was living his beliefs. So as people who know Aaron much better than I did reflect on his life, his passing has made me think about what it means to actually be who you say you want to be and have your life’s work reflect that. I hope I’ll be a little more honest in my work because of him.

Silicon Valley's Problem

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 12:17:34 -0500

I posted something on Twitter the other day that got a bunch of attention, and I realized I wanted to clarify what I meant. Here’s what I wrote:

“Silicon Valley’s problem in a nutshell: crazed about Instagram’s ToS, not a peep about FISA reauthorization.”

I meant to capture something I’ve been thinking about a lot since I moved to the Bay Area in February: the tension between Silicon Valley’s impact on democracy and its utter lack of interest in or understanding of the institutions and systems of government its companies do business in. Silicon Valley isn’t on a bubble, it’s in a bubble.

But as I tried to make that point in my tweet, I realize I conflated both the Silicon Valley-based tech industry folk and the population of Internet-savvy semi-celebrities who have the ability to—for better or worse—push stories and memes onto everyone else’s agenda. For the purposes of this blog post, I’m going to separate the two groups because my critique is actually different depending on who “Silicon Valley” refers to.

Let’s start with the Bay Area tech community. In addition to living in San Francisco for most of 2012, I’ve gotten to know the tech start-up communities in Chicago and New York, and to a lesser extent Boston’s, and the attitude towards the communities in which Chicago/NYC/Boston companies operate is different from the attitude Bay Area companies have. Maybe because tech is not the dominant industry in those cities like it is in the Bay, but start-ups in those other cities seem much more well integrated into the civic fabric; The founders and employees are living lives that aren’t circumscribed by technology in the same way it is in San Francisco. As much as city officials will deny it, San Francisco is very close to becoming a company town; the Valley itself is already far beyond that status. There are a couple consequences of this:

First, Silicon Valley, including San Francisco, becomes a much less interesting place for world-changing ideas. The well-documented lack of diversity in the Valley would be comical if it wasn’t so harmful. It feels like, and often is, a bunch of Stanford guys making tools to fix their own problems. Sometimes they stumble into a groundbreaking new app that has a more far-reaching impact (see: Twitter) and sometimes they try and shoehorn a social good mission into their business plan (see: a thousand other companies). Barely any of them start from an entrenched social problem and work backwards from there. Very few of them are really fundamentally improving society. They’re making widgets or iterating on things that already exist. Their goal is to make themselves as appealing—or threatening—to a big player as possible so they can get bought out for a few hundred million dollars and then devote the rest of their lives to a) building Burning Man installations, b) investing in other people’s widgets, or c) both. They really don’t care that much about making the world a better place, mostly because they feel like they don’t have to live in it.

This isolation has also deluded them into thinking that they are in fact making the world a better place, simply by building their products and platforms. The Silicon Valley rich are famously stingy philanthropists and a defense I’ve heard more than once is that the tools they spend their time building are inherently good. “Why donate money when people can just download my app and instantly have a better life?”

Second, the lack of forced interaction with different constituencies and the political influence that the tech industry has over local government here means that these companies—and founders—don’t need to reckon with the role of government or governance. Couple this with the libertarian streak of the Valley and you come out with an utter disregard for policymaking and regulatory environments. They should know by now that this is dangerous thinking. Put aside the moral obligation I think they have to be good citizens, they don’t fully understand the impact government has on their ability to do business and they desperately lack the political and organizing skills necessary to help governments come around.

But even if they were politically savvy, the issues the technology industry would be pushing are a different set of interests than consumers (and by that I mean citizens) are concerned with. Which brings me to the second part of what I meant: those who have outsized power and influence through network technology to make their voices heard often put it to use in the most inane and self-centered ways. There was lots of talk after the Internet beat back SOPA and PIPA about the potential for networked models of citizen participation that actually WORKED. The so-far failed opportunity to realize that potential has been starkly revealed in the last few weeks: the tech-savvy in an uproar over Instagram’s terms of service while at the same time sitting idly by as FISA gets reauthorized, and staring helplessly from the sidelines as Congress bungles the fiscal cliff.

What if these two groups—the tech industry and the denizens of the Net—put its economic, political and media clout behind fixing our broken system so it works for everyone? What if, instead of imploring people to vote on Facebook’s privacy policies, we were pushing Florida lawmakers into fixing the state’s broken voting system? What if prison reform advocates could speak as loudly as the anti-SOPA activists? Why can’t we, the tech community, figure out how to harness our talent and influence to fundamentally change the way our democracy works—not just for us, when it suits our interests, but for everyone?

So that’s what I meant: too much focus from the tech community on issues that only matter to us and not enough on issues that affect everyone and that we have the power to address. Before people complain that I’m being way too broad in my characterizations, I’d like to make clear that what I’m describing is the overall culture of what I’m calling Silicon Valley and I don’t mean it to describe every single person who falls into these categories. Despite my criticism, there’s a reason I’m making my home in the Bay Area and it has a lot to do with a really vibrant and inspiring social innovation sector that’s taking root here.

I also realize I’m not offering any solutions. But I really can’t think of a better place than right here to start working on some. More to come soon on what shape that actually takes.

My Experience Leading the Obama Campaign's Tech Field Office

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 21:28:00 -0500

In many ways the Obama campaign’s Tech Field Office, which I launched and ran with Angus Durocher from February-October 2012, was not a leap of the imagination even if it was the first of its kind. Since 2007, one of the defining characteristics of the Obama organization was the extent to which it devolved authority down the chain empowering volunteers and field organizers to be the drivers of activity. Heavy dependence on and integration of network technology was also a major feature of the campaign, which makes sense when you realize that the structure of our grassroots organization (relatively flat, and decentralized) very closely matches the structure of the Internet itself.

The logical extension of these two defining factors coming together was the establishment of a satellite office focused solely on recruiting technologists who wanted to volunteer their skills to help build the campaign’s suite of tools. My understanding is that the genesis of the idea (which predates my arrival on the campaign) came when Michael Slaby (CIIO) and Harper Reed (CTO) traveled to the Bay Area just after the campaign launched to engage tech supporters and recruit engineers to move to Chicago. At some point it occurred: why not bring the campaign to them?

We started talking about a San Francisco office even before I formally started on the campaign in June 2011, but other things in Chicago took precedence at that early stage. I spent the first eight months on the campaign doing product management at headquarters (not a role I was at all qualified for, given that I had very close to zero experience working on software development projects, talk about baptism by fire). Near the end of 2011 as the technology team, and the campaign as a whole, started moving from planning to execution a decision was made that we would go ahead and open the Obama Tech Field Office in San Francisco.

I was to be the non-technical lead and Angus Durocher, a grizzled veteran of the San Francisco start-up scene (he was early at Blogger and served as the first web developer at YouTube) would lead on all the engineering and technical aspects. Angus was one of the very very few members of the Obama 2012 tech team that had any campaign experience. He grew up in New Hampshire working on campaigns and, in 2008, he took five weeks off from working at YouTube to volunteer full time doing digital work in New Mexico for the Obama campaign. In many ways, opening and running this office was a fulfillment of a long-time wish of his—to offer the opportunity for people with tech skills to contribute something they’re good at to an effort they believe in. He likes to tell a story about offering his services to the Kerry campaign in 2004 and being told to head to a phone bank instead.

We secured office space (leasing desks at StackMob’s offices in SOMA) and opened for business on February 15, 2012. We had a list of initial projects we needed to get built, but we needed some volunteers. My main responsibility those first few weeks was balancing volunteer recruitment with making sure the products were sufficiently well specked out to allow for volunteers (people who mostly had day jobs and would be doing their work remotely/on the weekends) to be productive.

My biggest worry at the start was that we wouldn’t be able to get enough people on board. That worry was quickly assuaged. We were pleasantly surprised at the level of interest. Even in famously libertarian Silicon Valley, we got hundreds of sign-ups and conducted scores of interviews with engineers and other tech professionals who were excited to help out. When we asked them why they were interested almost all of them gave some version of the same answer: “I’ve always wanted to help out but making phone calls and knocking doors wasn’t my thing (not to mention I live in California where this thing is in the bag) and I saw an opportunity to lend my skills to re-elect a president I believe in.” Only a handful of them had ever volunteered for a campaign before. We got to see, in person, what Nate Silver described in a recent post as the benefit Obama got from his support in Silicon Valley. Let’s just say the GOP didn’t have a tech field office in the neighborhood.

We had some stressful weeks at the beginning, scared we’d fail, scared this experiment would be a waste of campaign resources, unsure even what success would look like. But when we launched our first tool and pushed through the frustrating final tweaks to make things deployable I had a sense that we were doing something that would really have an impact. We certainly didn’t do everything right and I’m not even sure the office itself is something that other campaigns or organizations should try and replicate. For one thing we’d added more lanes to the campaign’s development highway without really expanding the capacity of the DevOps team in Chicago to deploy more tools (I’m pretty sure they hated us by the end of it). And campaign’s are, in Angus’ sage words, “interrupt-driven” organizations. The person that’s in your face or the fire that’s currently burning the brightest is the thing that gets the most attention. Since we were safely tucked away in San Francisco we didn’t have the luxury (such as it was) of going over and tapping someone on the shoulder to make sure our particular issue got addressed. And then there was the frustrating amount of volunteer flakiness. It’s something every campaign worker in the field has to deal with, but when your volunteer is doing something like writing code it’s a particular pain in the ass when you can’t get a hold of them for days.

By October, when we were done building tools for the national campaign and turned our attention to the battleground states, we had recruited well over 100 volunteers who built over a dozen tools (not all of which are public, but I’ve linked to some examples below). We experienced the fifty-fifty rule of volunteer organizing: fifty percent of the volunteers we signed up actually did some work, and about fifty percent of them were solid, reliable contributors. Another dozen or so were absolute rock stars, a few of whom put their lives on hold for the last weeks of the campaign to travel to battleground states to support our data and digital teams. Kevin Gates, a former Google data whiz, went to Las Vegas to help the data director there. Johnvey Hwang, another start-up vet who built out later versions of Trip Planner essentially full time, went to Florida to build some reporting tools. Lior Abraham took all of his vacation days for the year from his job at Facebook to come to Chicago for five weeks to build voter protection apps. Matt Douglass, who built a really cool donation app that we ran out of time to launch, ended up in one of our small business videos because of his involvement in the tech office.

Angus led a very successful late-summer volunteer recruitment effort to send techies directly to states. The ask he sent out got thousands of responses which were matched up with states who needed on-the-ground tech help in the last weeks of the campaign. If I were smarter and more organized, I’d follow up with all of them on their experience. I really think that model—of sending tech volunteers into the field to support data and analytics teams on the ground—is a much more sustainable model of tech volunteer engagement for the long term and for smaller campaigns.

When I was in Colorado for the last weeks of GOTV it was stark what a disconnect there seemed to be between the tech team and the people who were using the tools. Centralizing the software development in HQ in part to avoid creation of rogue tools in the states, which is completely understandable, might have killed an important ecosystem for bubbling up innovation. You certainly can’t run a campaign where each state has their own show technologically, but there’s got to be a way to distribute authority at least a little bit down the chain. Much was made about our pod structure: each region had “desks” they reported up to, which had all the main departments of the campaign represented—Digital, Ops, Press, Field, Data, Analytics—but no engineers. Why not add Tech to the pods and then have volunteer technologists on the ground working directly with that regional lead? Putting engineers directly in touch with staff in the states would have gone a long way towards bridging the divide between tech and field.

Now that it’s over, my lasting impressions are all about how amazing our volunteers were. I mentioned a few earlier but Roger Hu, Marc Love, Brandon Liu, Eliza Wee, Carrie Crespo, Gunthar Hartwig, Pete Warden, Deron Aucoin, Shannon Chin, Patrick Cullen and a bunch of others I’m forgetting were total champs. I’m immensely proud that I got to be the one to pull them into the campaign, and I can’t wait to see what they do now that they’ve caught the political technology bug.

Edit: Here are those tools I mentioned:

Trip Planner

Ecards

MapMaker

Winning Feels Goooooood

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 11:21:17 -0500

Caveat: this post is stream of consciousness, 36 hours after we won the election. There’s high likelihood it won’t make any sense at all. It is also 100% my personal reaction; I don’t claim to speak for anyone else, and others’ reactions are likely wildly different from mine.

Whoa, winning an election feels really awesome. It’s like I leveled up on life. Everything is just better up here. The coffee tastes better on this level. The sleep is better. Pretty sure that most of the consequences for what just happened have not come close to sinking in yet. But damn, the coffee tastes so good.

Today is the 513th day after I joined the campaign. In that time, I got to do some very awesome things with some very awesome people. I’m immensely proud of the work Angus Durocher and I did with some amazing volunteers (I’ll probably write something more about how awesome they are at some point) at the tech field office in San Francisco. I’m so happy to have gotten to work with Jim Green and Rusty Rueff on Tech4Obama. And working in the campaign headquarters of the President of the United States is something I don’t think I’ll ever top, even if that place did resemble a refugee camp most of the time. Thank you so much, Harper, for giving me the chance.

Maybe because it’s so fresh in my mind, but I have a feeling the most lasting thing I’ll take from this campaign was the time I got to spend in Colorado these last two weeks working in the field. I’ve spent most of the last ~15 years of my life tucked away in reliably liberal/cosmopolitan/intellectual corners of the country, which I found seriously warped my understanding of the US. Walking neighborhoods, knocking on doors, and talking to voters in the exurbs was a pretty humbling experience. I’m also humbled by the breathtaking talent and skill of the organizers I met and worked with. You’re going to read a lot of stories over the next months about how good our ground game was. Whatever you read, multiply by a factor of three. The kicked ass and they deserve even more credit than they will get.

I’m really looking forward to what’s next, in all kinds of ways. First, and most importantly, I’m absolutely giddy about what the President is going to do with the next four years and two months. I predict big things.

Second, I’m in awe of the talent we’re about to unleash on the world. There are some superstars coming off this campaign, and I can’t wait to see what they do. Aside from the organizers I mentioned, there are some kick-ass engineers and other technologists who are going to change the way we think about democracy. It maybe wasn’t as perfect as all these articles that are getting written make it out to seem, but there are now a lot more techies who understand organizing and a lot more organizers who understand tech. I’m looking forward to them coming up with some awesome ideas to improve civic engagement.

Third, I get my own life back. Crazy. Lots of travel over the coming months, and I start a new job pretty soon (more on that to come, but I’m beyond excited about it and hope it’s a place where that organizing-meets-tech thing can play out). The plan, such as it is, is to settle in San Francisco in early 2013. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to catching up with friends in Chicago, Michigan, the east coast, and Paris. And I’m taking suggestions for amazing/relaxing New Years destinations.

Last thing: I want to thank everyone who sent some form of congratulations over the last couple days. Most of this great feeling I’m experiencing right now comes from the love I’ve been receiving from all kinds of awesome people in my life. It really made it all worth it. I imagine this is what it must feel like when people get married. There’s just so much good. I want it to last forever.

My first day on the job this sign said 527. Gulp. (Taken with...

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 17:03:48 -0400

My first day on the job this sign said 527. Gulp. (Taken with Instagram)

I’m gonna miss this view (Taken with Instagram)

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 19:57:56 -0400

I’m gonna miss this view (Taken with Instagram)

humansofnewyork: “I don’t mind the white people moving into the...

Mon, 28 May 2012 22:13:23 -0400

humansofnewyork:

“I don’t mind the white people moving into the neighborhood. They’re like the Indians—they came in peace. And they brought some Whole Foods with em’. And Fleetwood Mac. Plus the police don’t break up our block parties anymore.”

Happy birthday Golden Gate Bridge! (Taken with instagram)

Sun, 27 May 2012 19:03:44 -0400

Happy birthday Golden Gate Bridge! (Taken with instagram)

Happy birthday GGB! (You can kinda see it back there in the...

Fri, 25 May 2012 10:30:16 -0400

Happy birthday GGB! (You can kinda see it back there in the distance) (Taken with instagram)

Good morning, San Francisco! (Taken with instagram)

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 12:59:08 -0400

Good morning, San Francisco! (Taken with instagram)

Sutro Tower looking apocalyptic (Taken with instagram)

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 19:16:57 -0400

Sutro Tower looking apocalyptic (Taken with instagram)