 in an organization called Ragtag. We work with folks who work in tech in their day jobs and we help them basically find a way to use their skills for nonprofits, progressive organizations, activist groups, things like that. I'll talk just a little bit more about that later. But yeah, so day three for sure. Congratulations for making it this far. Who did go to the party Z-trip shenanigan last night? Yay. I was so excited when I heard that he was playing because I have been a fan of his since I wanna say. Oh, okay. Yeah, so I think the first time I saw a show of his was in like 2005, which makes me feel old, but you know. Yeah, 2005, long time ago before there was even a Twitter. And speaking of Twitter, everything is terrible. Who here does the Twitter? Yeah. Who here looks at it every day? Every morning, first thing in the morning, before you even get out of bed? What a shit way to start the day. Why do I don't even? I don't know why I do that, but I do compulsively. And it's terrible because we really are living in the worst timeline. I did a quick Twitter search of worst timeline and it's like the words worst timeline, it's just infinite. Yeah, politics, total trash fire, technology, garbage heap, world events, both literal and figurative, fire, sports. Like you can't even stick with the sports. And domestic events in the US. I left up here the placeholder picture from Keynote because it was just too much. Didn't wanna ruin your morning before you've fully metabolized that coffee. But yeah, it's hard to see that. It's hard to see it first thing in the morning. It's hard to have that going on in the background of your life every day. Yeah, so the whole worst timeline thing sounds, sounds like an overstatement sometimes. It sounds like total hyperbole. Obviously a lot of us learned a lesson in 2017 and 2018 about how things could always get worse. Even after you've declared 2016 is the worst year ever. Can't wait for 2017. And then it comes and slaps you in the face. We all know that it's the terrible stories that actually pull us in. They get us to click, they get us to engage. It's easier to make a quick connection with someone you don't know over something bad than something good. It's harder to share joy sometimes with people than to complain about things together or lament the days we're in. And that's really what our media right now, social and not, is really counting on. It's getting us to engage, getting us to click on that thing, getting us to watch. But there's something else going on. And the internet in general, social media in particular, they've really given a broader voice to folks who haven't been able to tell their stories outside of their immediate circles. The internet just in general has been able to give give that broader voice and get those personal stories from people who are outside of your circle and bring it in. Things like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the whole internet give us a chance to experience what's important in other people's lives. Movements like Black Lives Matter, Say Her Name, Me Too, and all the other ones we've had in the last few years have brought the realities of sexual assault, institutional racism, and police brutality to the front of our collective consciousness. And they did it through personal stories and connection and humanizing folks. Movements like these would not have been able to happen without the open internet. It's been really hard for many of us, maybe most of us, to see things like this every day. But it's been hard to hear these stories because we know they're from people. We know they're from other humans who are real and exist now. But sometimes it can also be easy to pretend that the real people who are facing these issues are far away, that they're other folks. They're not. They're people all around you. They're the people you work with. They're the people you care about. They're the people you see walking down the street. And this is a hard one, but it's important, I think, to never forget that the injustice you read about in today's morning news is really the life experience of another human being. And that life experience could be happening to really anyone you interact with. And it's important to be kind to people and understand that everyone has their own struggle and their own internal things going on and it's affected by the external things that we all see and face every day. I'm sorry, definitely getting a little overwhelmed. I hope I'm not overwhelming you all as well. But it's important, I think, for everyone in their daily interactions, especially interactions on Twitter or interactions at work, to give people the benefit of the doubt, to assume the best in people, to give people space, to not maybe not see the best or not act their best because you don't know what's going on in their lives. You don't know how international events are really affecting them personally. So I don't know. Figure out a way to share a joy, not just share a fear or an anxiety, but to leave room for other people to have their own. So thank you for noticing that everything's terrible. And yes, even though everything's terrible, it's no fair hiding. So I have a five-year-old and I am an expert now on what is and is not fair. But yeah, all of this is super rough. It's really hard sometimes, it maybe even seems unbearable to hear about all the horribleness and the injustices and the tragedies in the world. But you can't hide your head in the sand. You can't hide under the quilt all the time. You have a moral duty to bear witness. And this does not mean that you have to watch every video or read every first-hand account. It's absolutely okay and probably a very good idea to set limits. And for the love of everything, turn off the autoplay video on the Twitter. It's a bad plan. But what's really not okay is to deny that the terribleness in the world is happening or deny the truth of the people telling you about it because it's more comfortable for you. You have a moral obligation to bear witness to the truth, even when it's inconvenient, even when it's deeply troubling. It will be uncomfortable. But that's okay. In your personal lives or in your interactions online, when someone tells you something that's hard for them to say or tells you that someone's done something to them, believe them. Give them the benefit of the doubt that they're telling the truth. When someone tells you they've been discriminated against or mistreated, believe them. When someone tells you they've been harassed or assaulted, believe them. Even if they're talking about your friend or your boss or someone you hired or someone who vaguely reminds you of yourself in your younger days, even if it's your beloved activist idol or your senator or your favorite candidate, if someone says something like that has happened to them, believe them. The first step to making good in this world is bearing witness to the terribleness, acknowledging that it exists, but that doesn't mean you have to accept it. In other words, be a hope. Who here watched the Beyonce Homecoming Netflix shenanigan? The rest of y'all, I'm sure you have lives and jobs and things, but like, get your shit together. Okay. This is a Cornell West quote that was actually in the Beyonce special, and it really just popped out at me at the time. He's talking here about the difference between having hope and being a hope, that it's hard in the face of all this injustice and this tragedy and the terribleness to feel like you have hope, but there's something deeper and stronger that you can do, and that's to be a hope. And it's courageously bearing witness regardless of what the circumstance is because you're choosing to be the kind of person of integrity to the best of your ability before the worms get your body. It's really the embodiment of the idea of hope, knowing that things are bad, refusing to accept that that is how it has to be, and knowing that it's bad, refusing to accept that that is how it has to be is the beginning, but then you do have to do something. In the face of all of the terribleness, sometimes we can get stuck. We all get stuck. We get sucked in. We keep watching the news, looking for some sort of resolution. We keep reading and refreshing our Twitter feed, looking for something. I have no idea what. I just know I keep refreshing. It's easy to get stuck in that. It's easy to start to feel powerless. It's hard to act. You have to try. You have to care. You can't get sucked down into this swamp of sadness. Sometimes it's really overwhelming, and it can be hard to imagine where to start. Some folks think that it has to be big. That they have to quit their job and go all in in order to make a difference. You totally can do that. It would be great. Act blue is around if you wanna. There you are. But maybe that's too much. Maybe you're not in a place where you can uproot your entire life and devote your whole self to making good in the world. So begs the question, what can you do? Might be thinking, how can I, little or me, make any difference when the problems that we're facing are so big? What's the point of even trying when anything I do would only be a drop in the bucket? Be a drop in the bucket. All the terribleness the problems we're facing are big ones, but that doesn't mean the only solution is one big action. Many people working together, taking small actions, can make a real difference. Your actions matter. All of your actions matter. Even your inactions matter. Be a drop in the bucket, but choose which bucket you're going to be a drop in with purpose. The obvious example of the idea of the importance of being a drop in the bucket is voting. For the love of everything, please vote. I can't stress that enough. It is rare, but not entirely unheard of, for an election to be determined by a single vote. But does that mean you shouldn't vote? What do you think? Of course you should vote. We should all, as PJ O'Rourke said to me once, vote like hell. We should vote every single chance we get. We should vote for our own interests. We should vote for the interests of others. We should vote for the collective interests. We should vote to put one more drop in the bucket we believe is good. Win or lose, you should vote. Be just one of the millions of people who voted for that thing that you believe in, even if that thing or that person doesn't win. Here is a list of great buckets to be a drop in. Call your reps, call your reps, don't call other people's reps. Local reps, state reps, federal reps, call their offices, call their home offices, call their DC offices. Tell them what you think is good, what you think is important. Tell them when they're doing something wrong and tell them when they're doing something right. Boycott things. One person making the decision not to buy something is a drop in the bucket, yes. On its own, not significant. But as a part of a larger movement, it can be. Check out Sleeping Giants if you're interested. That's one organization doing boycott-like things. They've got some kind of gnarly mentions these days, but they're making the best of it. Walkouts, walkouts are great. If your company or your school is doing something that you find morally reprehensible or even just deeply troubling and the other folks in your company, other workers there feel the same way, absolutely do a walkout. It's getting together and taking a stand as a group of people is hugely effective and hugely important. Make a donation. Make a $5 donation to every candidate you like. You can do it through Act Blue. Petitions. Some of you might think I'm a little bananas for suggesting petitions. Petitions are a great example of when it's important to choose the bucket you're even gonna be a drop in. Petitions can be really, really effective in getting companies and representatives and other large organizations to change the way they're doing things. But you've got to think about a couple of things with petitions. One, who are you asking to do something? Two, does that person actually have the power to do that? And three, do they care at all what you think? And if you can get a good answer for all of those, absolutely sign a petition, start a petition, get on it. Like doing a petition to the head of HBO to get them to change the storyline and Game of Thrones, like 10 million people sign it. No one cares. It's not gonna happen. Don't waste your time on those. Being a drop in the bucket is important. It is really important for everybody to recognize the power of being one of a large group of people because, this may shock you, basically nothing has ever been done, solved, created or destroyed by one person alone. I hope it's okay to curse, but fuck this whole myth of the lone genius. It's for, I'm glad y'all are with me on that. For everything that someone does, other folks had to make the time, the space, the resources available. Everything happens in an ecosystem. Invisible labor may still be largely invisible, but it is absolutely vital. So, tech is just a tool, but it's great. One of the reasons that I really love working in technology is tech's power to be a tool for other people to achieve their goals and their purpose. I really love technology's capacity to make time and space and be a resource for folks doing in-person real-world work. Once upon a time, several lifetimes ago, I was an intellectual property attorney, and I worked with technologists, artists, and other folks to help them navigate the legal landscape. I helped them use the law to create and distribute art and technology while keeping themselves protected. For example, helping people figure out which open source license made the most sense for them and how to use it, basically. Back in 2011, I made a sharp turn in my career from the law over to the political sphere. I moved to Chicago and joined the Obama 2012 tech team and led tech support there for all of our consumer-facing tech and digital tools. And I totally fell in love with both working on a tech team and working in politics. And building tools for other people to use to achieve their goals. Since then, I've worked on and off with volunteers and developers and political and social justice organizations, really coming together in the winter of 2016, so just post-election when I founded Ragtag, which is where I spend all of my time and energy these days. Ragtag is a 600 strong community of people who work in the tech sector and who want to make some good in this world. Ragtag provides structure, space, community, and project management that our volunteers need to take their coding skills and turn them into drops in buckets that matter. In my by now way overstretched metaphor, you can be a drop in the bucket and Ragtag will provide the bucket for you to be a drop in. The most fun part of what I do is really reaching out and finding other organizations and finding clients for the developer volunteers in Ragtag to work with. It's incredible to be able to find people doing impactful work on the ground in their communities who just need a leg up on the tech front. Take for example, one of our earlier projects. We worked with Spread the Vote, which is an organization that initially helped people get the IDs they needed to vote and they've since expanded to do a lot more things like education around voting. Back in 2017, Kat Calvin, who was the founder of Spread the Vote, quit her job, packed her stuff in a car, drove across the country and just got to work getting people IDs. Now, if anyone's tried to get an ID at the DMV as an adult who doesn't already have an ID, it's a mess and it's a different special mess in every state. So if Kat was really gonna scale her operation, she was gonna need to keep track of what things were needed to get IDs in which states, how each client was going to get those things and where they were on the process. For someone who is just knee deep in the work on the ground, something like a CRM is not something that they know off the top of their heads is going to work. So this is really where Ragtag was able to help. We set up a system for Kat to be able to track all of the things that her volunteers in the field were doing. There were tons of different parts to this project. There was, I mean, it's the same as with building really any tech project. It's a, what did he say the other day, a team sport. There are tons of different roles to play. So we had some folks doing some coding, building some API integrations. We had people doing basically consulting with Kat and with her team. We had folks writing the copy that's on the forms, things like that. So there's a wide variety of different roles to play in a project like that and a huge group of people came together to make that happen. And in the couple of years since we set up that system, Kat has been able to greatly expand her team, her projects and the amount and the number of IDs she's able to get for people. I highly recommend you follow her and follow them on Twitter. I didn't put it up on here, but she posts stories of the folks she's helping and it's really awesome to see. Yeah, so every piece of that project was essential for the whole project to come together and be a success, but no one part of it, no one Ragtag volunteers contribution was essential. The group came together and made a thing that no one individual would have been able to do on their own. And no one, other than Kat, needed to quit their job and drive across country. Now, maybe you don't want to do coding outside of your job, which is fine. There are other ways that you can make some good being part of a group. One way to do it is to get involved in your workplace. I highly recommend you check out the work that Tech Workers Coalition is doing. I know they're very active in the Bay area, but they're also active in other tech hotspots around the country, and they are really working on educating folks who work in the tech industry about the ways they can use their power in their jobs to work for, to bring justice to everyone. One of the things that they did that really impressed me is they work with folks who are developers in these big companies and get them to basically just show up at union negotiations between, say, security workers and management, or cafeteria workers in management. So they help use the power of the well-paid, skilled labor of the developers and leverage that power to help folks who don't have the negotiating power that they need. So yeah, you can do it. Yes, you, each of you is just one person, and you can only do so much, but you can do that much. You can contribute a drop in the bucket. And together, we can make a full-ass bucket that maybe, just maybe, can put out the trash fire of a timeline that we're in. You don't have to be the hero to be a hero. So, personal story time. I have a personal story that I wanna tell you. It's not about tech or about world events. It's really a parable about, that illustrates what I'm thinking about, and it's also something that is big in my life and I can't get out of my head, so I'm sharing it with you. I am a big fan of the musical Hamilton. I'm not, like, the biggest fan because that bar is really high. But I'm a big enough fan that I know all the words, and even the name of my organization, Ragtag, comes from the musical. So there's a line in there. How does a Ragtag volunteer army in need of a shower somehow defeat a global superpower? And that really spoke to me back in the summer of 2016. When I was working a lot and not showering and all of that, I feel like when faced with the choice of showering or getting one more round of QA done before you go live, the choice is obvious. At any rate, this year, or this past year, for a combo Hanukkah Christmas birthday present, I got tickets to see Hamilton. I went in February, I brought my sister, my husband, my good friend, and we went to see the show in San Francisco at the Orpheum. And that is how I made my debut in Rolling Stone. First things first, important lesson to learn. The media basically never gets anything 100% right, like 80% right, and you're lucky. But here's what actually went out. I have no slide for this. There was most likely a medical emergency in the audience. Someone stood up and was moving around and during the very last song of the show, someone saw the person and this age being what it is, they made an assumption that this person standing up, looking around, was a shooter and that we were all in danger. Someone said the word gun, someone screamed, and I, with many, many other audience members, hit the floor, hid behind our seats. Then as more people screamed, we got up and started to run. We just wanted to get out of the building. This line seemed funny when I wrote it, but maybe less. It was around that point when my own heart also decided to leave the building, is what was funny yesterday. So the details of what exactly happened are not entirely clear to really anyone. I was not present. My sister and my husband found me lying on the ground right inside the lobby. I wasn't breathing, had no pulse, my lips were turning blue. I had the absolute incredible fortune to have been in the same audience that night with a couple who also happened to be ER residents at a nearby hospital. They started CPR and kept my body working while my friends ran to see if anyone had an AED to shock my heart back. She found one, they shocked me. The paramedics took me to the hospital. From falling on the ground in the lobby to being shocked back to life took about 10 minutes, which is somehow both mind-bogglingly short and mind-bogglingly long. In those 10 minutes, a dozen or more people helped me and saved my life and cared for me. The doctors who happened to be in the audience, whoever it was that called the ambulance, my sister who ran and convinced some cops that there was not actually an active shooter, but there was none the less an emergency they needed to attend to. My friend who went in search of the defibrillator, the paramedics that took me to the hospital, the doctors who took care of me then and now, I've cobbled together all of this knowledge of what happened over the past few months. I have no memory at all after we started to run from our seats until I woke up in the hospital. I've built up little vignettes in my mind from the stories that other people have told me in all the chaos and mayhem, my sister, my little sister, who has always looked up to me and who I've always wanted to take care of and protect. In the midst of all of this chaos and mayhem at the theater, she started to lose her shit a little bit. She started panicking. Another woman from the audience, at this time most of the audience had started coming back in to retrieve their things, another woman from the audience saw my sister and went and just stood with her, talked to her, calmed her down. I don't know her name, but that was an incredibly kind thing to do and incredibly important in that moment. My sister remembers her mentioning her husband at some point and vaguely gesturing to a dude standing nearby holding her coat. And that's the guy I keep thinking about. I keep thinking about that guy standing a little ways away holding a coat. He's not the hero of the story. He's not the savior. He's not the center. But he did something that mattered. He held someone's coat. He held her coat to give her space, the space she needed to support what she was doing to help a stranger get through a harrowing experience. He made some good in the world in that moment by doing what he could do, even though it was small. He made good in the world by making space for someone else to make their little bit of good. And that's what I think everybody needs to do. Do what it is that you can do. Don't worry about it being too small. The fear of not being good enough and not being able to make a big enough difference. Don't let that stop you from doing something because we all have to do something. Thank you for going on that little journey with me. And I am happy to answer any questions anyone has. Or if you all just want to go hug yourself or call your sister, that's cool too.