About four years ago, I started to get restless. I had been working for a large fruit company for quite some time. I had done pretty well in my job and learned a lot. I was a better engineer, better communicator and better person.
While I felt proud of the fights I had won on behalf of users (every time you type command-comma and it works…), making them more productive at their jobs, I felt I wasn't doing enough to help people directly. I didn't want to just make tools to help other people work on big important problems or give them money — I wanted to work on big, important problems.
I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to volunteer for the Obama campaign in 2008. What started out as a couple of phone calls turned into two months of solid work, helping register hundreds of thousands of voters and making sure folks found their polling places. I didn't lose touch with the grassroots field volunteer in me, either: I was on the phone, too, talking to regular voters.
I wanted to be this inspired by my work all of the time. After shipping another big cat, I left. I spent a month helping Engineers Without Borders Canada (important: not all EWBs are created equal), and went through a leadership development fellowship.
While my number one passion is for the environment and energy efficiency — and I'm not doing that — yet, I have been fortunate to pick and choose some really cool projects:
- creating an online application process for college and university scholarships
- helping EWB Canada win $50,000
- doing strategy/UI/fundraising for a network of student-run food co-ops
- building a text messaging-based tool to remind people to vote
Now I'm working on TurboVote, a nonprofit service that makes voting by mail as easy as renting a DVD from Netflix. If you've ever tried to track down an absentee ballot request form, voter registration form and county clerk mailing address, you know what a hassle that is. We make it easy.
Where this becomes a big deal is not in presidential elections, where turnout is 50-60% (which is pretty shameful), but in local, primary and special elections, where it drops to 10%. But once you're signed up to vote by mail, you just get the ballots … and you vote … and maybe we get turnout to 15%. It's not a lot, but relatively speaking, it's a big deal.
If this sounds like fun, we're hiring a rails developer:
http://blog.turbovote.org/2011/07/were-hiring/