August 2021 Update
What I've been up to these past five months
Unexpected opportunities took some precedence over what I had hoped to work on, but the outcome has been quite good! In particular: I built a tool for the Board of Education Recall campaign to validate their signatures and ensure their success, and I have started working with Sachin Agarwal on Grow SF.
Open Source Political Tools
My original pitch when I quit Google to work in politics full time was that I would start developing a bunch of open source tools for political activists, campaigns, and interested onlookers. My original list of ideas is still online over on my GitHub sponsors page, but only one of the projects listed there has had much progress.
Rather than spending most of every day working on these tools, I had the opportunity to help the Board of Education Recall campaign. I am a huge supporter of this effort (as you can see in "Four Reasons to Recall the School Board"), and I was excited to help! I offered advice, offered up my experience working with the Department of Elections, and most importantly built an app to validate the signatures on the recall petition. Typically, these tools cost a lot of money and have terrible UX, but I volunteered my time to build them one completely for free. It lets volunteers churn through thousands of signatures per day with a simple-yet-powerful search and easy and fast UI, while surfacing all the information campaigns need to know to achieve their goals.
I don't currently plan to open source this tool or make it available as a paid product. Instead, I plan to join future ballot proposition campaigns as a volunteer and help them use it. If you want to run a ballot prop, please reach out to me on Twitter. If we are aligned, then I'll be happy to help! And everything I do will always be offered completely for free.
While most of my weeks were spent volunteering, rather than doing the work my GitHub sponsors are paying for, I have made some progress on a cool tool to visualize the network of power and money in San Francisco politics. Now that the Recall campaign is winding down and they'll almost surely qualify for the ballot, I can focus more time on this open source tool.
This tool requires a big database of past endorsements and a digital archive of political mailers. Luckily, I've been keeping a paper archive in a filing cabinet since 2017. In the past couple months I have been digitizing them, spending many hours manually transcribing the endorsements. My next steps are to import the SF Ethics and California FPPC databases, to understand who funded which mailers.
Finally, I will present all of this information in an easy to explore website so we can better understand what dark money groups are funding the far-left. I'll announce it on my substack when it's ready to open source.
Grow SF
I'm super pleased to say that I've been working with Sachin Agarwal on Grow SF. Neither of us are being paid, so it's completely a labor of love. Grow SF believes in a San Francisco that is growing and changing — a city that welcomes new businesses and new residents with better regulations, a safer city where public safety is adequately funded, a more family-friendly city with properly managed public schools, and a city with taller, denser, more affordable housing.
Cities are either growing or dying, and our elected officials are trying their hardest to strangle the life out of San Francisco.
I am so proud to have helped on the Save Outdoor Dining campaign , which successfully saved San Francisco's outdoor dining from the anti-growth far-left. Most recently, we produced one of the only voter guides that actually tries to inform you of your choices in the Gavin Newsom recall. We will put out a voter guide in every election, put on education events, and help train people to run for office.
Sachin and I are now planning what's next for Grow SF. We're building a fundraising plan, an execution plan, and learning from more experienced organizers. It's too early to announce everything, but you can read a bit more about us in The Examiner.
If you're interested in helping us win, donate to the Grow SF PAC or DM me on twitter.
Substack
I've been having a blast writing this weekly1 newsletter, and I've been considering making all of the posts free. Unfortunately, since I'm still doing all of this political work as a volunteer, I need to keep a little money flowing. But I'm hoping I can figure out a way to make it free.
I am thankful for all of you, especially those of you who are paid subscribers, for helping me live this dream and deeming my thoughts worthy of your inbox! If you can't tell, I'm not a trained writer, so the fact anyone subscribes at all is a huge honor.
I particularly like the deadline pressure that running a weekly newsletter imposes on me. I have had so many essay ideas kicking around my head for years and only now have I actually written them down. I'll keep this up as long as I can.
What's Next
A LOT is happening in the next 18 months: the Board of Education and the Chesa Boudin recall, a California Assembly race alongside an SF District Supervisor special election (if you believe the rumors...), the June Primary and the November General Election which, like always, will have a dozen or more ballot props.
I will volunteer my time and energy for as many good candidates, good causes, and good ballot props as I possibly can. I will get this campaign finance and power network visualization tool online, and hopefully develop a few more open source tools. I will help Grow SF expand its influence and win elections. I will keep writing, though I'll probably miss a week here-and-there during campaign season.
And I couldn't do any of this without you. So thank you, all of you, for helping me be able to do this. Thank you to the paid subscribers for helping me pay my bills, and the free subscribers for sharing essays you like. Thank you to my GitHub sponsors for believing in open source political tools, even though I've been slower than I expected in releasing them.
We're making a real difference already.
ok… I've missed two weeks. Sorry!