Tim: Famous on the Interblag, Part II

Another post!, this time about the campaign rally we had at George Mason University in Fairfax, which was BTW pretty frickin’ awesome. When HRC webmail comes back online, I’ll post the picture of me standing directly between Governor Kaine and former Governor slash rockstar Mark Warner. 😀 😀 😀

I’m posting from the Barney Bus — from which we have made more than 10,500 calls today — right now, typing in between calls. The autodialer leaves a recorded message when answering machines pick up, and they had me record the message for tomorrow’s push. My name and voice are about to be on Democratic answering machines all across Fairfax County! :OOO Famous on the Interblag and the ansaphone! Ahh, my friends. The campaign life is a good life.

Though it’s one that’ll be over soon — polls will open in less than ten hours’ time! Exciting? Oh yes. Virginia! Show me what you can do! (<^_^)V

Tim: Famous on the Interblag

I wrote a post for HRC Backstory about the SEIU’s Mobile Action Center (“Barney Bus”), which is a predictive dialing phone-banking beast. Good times!

Of course, it turns out it’s MAC-2 sitting outside, not MAC-1, but what do I know.

Tim: The more things change…

At least three people said to me today “Tim, when you’re gone, we’re going to be totally screwed,” which was frankly sort of alarming (guys they’re going to lock me in the basement and make me do their mail merges) but I guess at least I’m appreciated! I’m a little afraid that the other interns are getting sick of hearing about how awesome I apparently am, particularly since I’m more or less the only one of them who a) isn’t 21 and b) doesn’t have a fake ID, and so c) doesn’t hang out at happy hours with them. Timing is important! Allllllso if you’re at Olin and you want an internship with the HRC, particularly in the policy & strategy group, they will way consider you.

Anyway holy crap it has been a crazy few weeks where do I even BEGIN. Let’s start at the present and work backwards.

Virginia has legislative elections this year, and there’s a chance that we could tip the Senate towards the Democrats. The HRC is understandably thrilled about having the chance to install a fair-minded majority in the Virginia Senate. So, the upshot is that most of the field team & I are going to be working for the Democratic Combined Campaign full-time between now and the elections, and I’m kind of super-excited! I’m at the HRC office on Thursdays and I get Friday and Monday off, and I’m in Tysons for the rest of the week. We started yesterday and did a loooot of phonebanking, which is never my favorite thing to do but it went pretty well. I’m really looking forward to seeing how a real GOTV campaign works.

Meanwhile, my primary project for the last week and a half or so has been writing our first-ever Facebook application. So far I’ve learned:

• PHP isn’t as horrible as its syntax documentation suggests.
• MySQL is a beautiful thing.
• The Facebook application platform is actually quite elegant!

Clearly, I must have come to Washington to learn about software development! Again! But that’s okay, because this is super-fun. Right now, the application is in “soft launch” – it’s on my profile and “in the wild” but it has pretty minimal capabilities and we haven’t started announcing it to anyone. I do have 44 users now without ever mentioning it to anybody outside the intern pod, though. I think we’re all going to start inviting our friends sometime in the next week or so. Go ahead and add it if you support us! Let me know how to make it not suck! I haven’t had a chance to do a proper user-centered design focus (shame on me, I know) — it’s in the works.

Fun Olin Fact: Sean Munson ’06 does research on electronic social networks, and gave me some awesome-looking documents that I have not even started to read yet but which ought to give me a fun framework to use while figuring out where to take this next. ❤ alumni!

And before that was the board meeting and the National Gala Dinner. I escorted board members from Kansas and Missouri around the Hill and learned actually quite a lot about Kansas City, which was more interesting than it sounds. And the next evening, I was in a tuxedo, waving a long blue phallic object around and collecting seriously lots of money from people. It was sweet! but boy was I tired when that week ended.

This is way too long! In conclusion: this semester is rocking hard, and there aren’t many places I’d rather be. 😀 Good-night!

Tim: Pervasive engineering!

It turns out that engineering skills are pretty much useful no matter what you’re doing. At one point last week, I almost got shipped to Iowa before I could convince everyone that I really didn’t know anything about database design. All I did was use Access to find the intersection of a couple of membership lists, and next thing I know one of the regional field directors was on the phone asking me how I like the weather in Des Moines. But everything got straightened out and I was here in DC for what turned out to be a roller-coaster week.

Personal highlight? I met Senator Chris Dodd on Thursday! We asked the campaigns to sign an HRC Iowa shirt that we’ll be auctioning off at the upcoming National Dinner (featuring Nancy Pelosi, Tim Gunn, Sarah Jessica Parker, and people from Ugly Betty — it’ll be hella awesome, guys) and the Dodd campaign headquarters is only a couple blocks away from the HRC building. I caught a glimpse of Sen. Dodd on the way out the door, and got to thank him for his vote on the Hate Crimes Act! Speaking of which…

The good news out of this week is that the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act, which makes certain hate crimes based on sexual orientation and gender identity federal offenses, was approved by the Senate as an amendment to the FY ’08 Defense Authorization Act! We were all watching on C-SPAN2 on Thursday morning as it unfolded on the floor. We needed 60 votes to achieve cloture in the Senate and vote on the amendment — and we got 60 votes, with 39 opposed and Sen. McCain not voting. The amendment was approved immediately afterwards by a voice vote.

The celebration didn’t last long, though. The real political drama this week was around the news that the Employment Non-Discrimination Act is being split into two bills by the House leadership, one of which includes transgender individuals and one of which does not. Transgender inclusion in ENDA is a hugely divisive issue within the GLBT community and this is pretty much the outcome the policy team has been trying its damnedest to avoid. There’s a bit more to read about this at HRC Back Story. The deputy field director cracked a sardonic line about how at least we were around to see politics at its best. It’s certainly true. Sometimes, things don’t go the way you were hoping, and you get to pick up the pieces.

So the next week will be busy and interesting! Last week started a bit slowly, and I retaliated by writing up a proposal for an internal HRC Field Wiki and automating the political interns’ work for them. And reading Wonkette. Christ, I love Wonkette.

Back to the fray! Hopefully I’ll be published this week…

Ben: Organizing My Time

The most surprising thing about this year is the fact that I have a lot of “flex-time.” When I wake up in the morning, I get to decide what I work on. Throughout the day, I decide what I want to do. In the evenings, I decide what I want to do.

This has been interesting because I’ve never really had this much time to do my bidding with before. During the year, there’s always been classes, and the summers had jobs and activities.

Needless to say, (except by Uncle Ben), “with great freedom, comes even greater responsibility.” With all this time, I have to figure out what I do with it and, well, use it.

I started out the year with the idea that I would work on a different project each day. This, I figured, would make it easy for me to focus on what I was doing, and would help me insure that I did everything I needed. After trying this for a week or two, I realized that this did not work at all.

No matter how I tried, I couldn’t stay focused on one activity all day, when there were so many other things that I could do. I fought myself to continue doing this for a while, but finally gave up when I realized that I was going against my style.

Now, on any given day, I will work on many different things for varying amounts of time. I might interview someone for one project for a while, and then send an e-mail regarding another. Later, I’ll start working on something new. I have found that this works incredibly well for me.

I must just like the scattered lifestyle.

Tim: Week 1

I started on Monday at the HRC headquarters at Rhode Island and 17th St in Northwest, a few blocks southeast of Dupont Circle. The “Policy and Strategy” team at HRC is split into two wings, political and field. I’m in field. The political staff deal directly with Capitol Hill, and we in field deal with pretty much everyone else. Daily field intern responsibilities include maintaining the field@hrc.org inbox, friending people on HRC’s MySpace page (not even kidding), and playing Field Staff Crisis Whack-A-Mole.

Highlight of my week: the HRC is running a summit for students from historically black colleges and universities. Thursday was lobby day. While I was forwarding emails and shipping packages earlier in the week, the legislative interns were frantically stuffing folders with talking points and fact sheets about some legislation that the HRC is pushing this session, most notably the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) and the Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007. On lobby day, students from each school attended meetings with staff from each of their rep.’s and senator’s offices. The political staff asked for volunteers to lead students around, so I made the rounds with a totally awesome student from Hampton University, meeting with staff from Rep. Cantor’s, Sen. Webb’s, and Sen. John Warner’s offices. (The staffer from Jim Webb’s office is, as of Thursday, one of my favorite people ever.)

I think my least favorite thing about the internship so far is the drive between my house and Metrorail. NoVa traffic. So. Slow. AUGH.

I’m really looking forward to the rest of the fall. Even the mundane intern chores are teaching me about non-profit work and how organizations interact with decision-making processes. Being in Virginia also means I get to play with Virginia politics! I volunteered to help out with the Chap Petersen state Senate campaign today, and I’m playing around with Mark Warner’s 2008 US Senate bid on Facebook. This will be awesome.

Oh! And I failed the Olin Challenge today. I was in town with my parents and some relatives to see the Edward Hopper exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, and I ran into Class of 2007 alumna Sarah Boman on an escalator at L’Enfant Plaza. Small world!