Blood Socks

All right, enough delay! In just a little over a week, I’ll be heading up to Boston with my essentials, and spending the next 2 and 1/2 months there working for the Obama campaign’s website, at a company called Blue State Digital. They’re the primary builders and caretakers for the Obama campaign site, and I’ll be joining in the work. This decision comes at a cost – chiefly, I’m apart from my loved ones, and I’ll pay double rent – but that hasn’t stopped me from being ridiculously excited. This is exactly what I want to do, and I will be doing it. It’s a temporary role, but not a temporary decision; one way or another, I intend on continuing to work in government and the public interest. Caution has been thrown to the winds.

The process that got me here began about 6 weeks ago. This is when I went to the Personal Democracy Forum, whose slogan is vague (“Technology is changing politics.”), but whose umbrella is wide; it brought a lot of people in. My friends, led by my dear MaryBeth, had banded together to give me the money to let me register; an incredible gift, for something I only mentioned once. To ensure I made the best use of their generosity, I attended each day from start to finish, took copious notes, and took what opportunities I could to meet awesome people. There was an incredible amount of enthusiasm and innovation there, especially for programmers like me, in government transparency and citizen empowerment. It was both informative and inspiring, and as it merged with my already fever-pitch, Obama-intensified interest in politics, I knew that I had seen my future.

But I had no idea how to actually follow through on these emotions. The one meaningful observation I took from the conference was that, though there was a plethora of effort outside of the government, such as ways to bring greater transparency and provide better tools for examining its behavior, there was almost no energy being devoted to working directly inside the government, to improve both its data and its attitudes. One notable exception was Knowledge As Power, who demoed a very cool set of software aimed at helping congressional offices manage constituent email. Using them as inspiration, I decided that one way I could push myself towards politics was to come up with other software ideas to improve congressional internal processes, and even better, improve their public facing websites. So over the course of late June and early July, I developed a few ideas and began contacting the offices that I thought would be most receptive to that sort of risk and innovation, and I set up appointments on Capitol Hill for a late-July trip to Washington.

Midway through July, I realized that I was suggesting ideas that, though uncommon to Congress, were common to most Net-savvy people now (blogs, calendars, forums, etc.). Normal ideas. I decided I could do better, and started coming up with genuinely new ideas. Maybe not ideas nobody’d thought of, or that nobody was working on, but ideas which, to my knowledge, had at least not been executed well enough to become widely visible. Ideas that would turn the traditional methods of representative-citizen interaction on their head, and that I saw as best done directly inside Capitol Hill. This turned my pitch into something more out-there, and substantially more risky, but which I thought I could still explain with enough enthusiasm and confidence to be persuasive. So by the time I actually traveled to DC, I had a couple of site mockups and a head full of ideals.

I met with several House offices and one Senator’s office. On most of the visits, my ideas were well received, and the staffer was interested, but not so psyched that they were ready to overcome the obstacles they presented. A promising exception in the House has convinced me that there is room for this kind of innovation, if not directly inside Capitol Hill, then at least working directly with it. Anyway, that stuff is off-topic, and my progress down that avenue will be documented later. The other important thing I did in DC was to visit the Sunlight Foundation for lunch with someone there who I’d met at PDF, who then introduced me to the rest of the employees. I talked about my ideas and showed them what I’d done, and someone offered to introduce me to Blue State Digital. Blue State is in Boston, and I happened to be visiting there the very next week, so I sent in my resume, went in for an interview, and after an exacting decision making process, here I am.

Though certainly I displayed some initiative, I hold primarily responsible for this turn of events my amazing girlfriend MaryBeth, and every friend who helped send me to PDF last June. My making-a-difference meter has been perilously low a long time now, but without the jolt of inspiration that PDF provided me, and the affection my friends showed me, I don’t think I’d have had the mindset or confidence to do any of this. I would still be wading around in Web 2.0, wondering where the meaning is. As with every good thing that’s come my way, I owe it to my friends.