Guest Blogger Marc Chadwick: DFA's Duct Tape

Written by: Zephyr Teachout on Feb 16, 2004 11:55 AM EST

IT Infrastructure: We are DFA’s Duct Tape

When anybody in DFA has a technical issue, they come straight to our cube. The phone rings, or somebody walks over. Each time that happens, one of us looks up from a task like monitoring the mail server (over a million served and counting!) and says “I can help!”

My name is Marc Chadwick. I’ve worked in IT here in Burlington for the last year or so, and I’ve seen a lot of changes. When I started here, the Blog was… well, it wasn’t. Shortly after we started our Call to Action blog --Who here remembers the Call to Action blog? – somebody asked me to take a look at the code; we drew a picture, and I started building. About a month later, we were ready to launch the Blog for America, and things have never been the same since.

As the campaign has grown, so has the IT infrastructure group. Now there are about 15 people who work together to make sure that the tech side of the campaign stays up and running. We spend a lot of time making sure that all our users have stable and secure internet, e-mail and telephone service. We keep track of computer hardware, cell phones, phone systems, network infrastructures, internet connectivity and data – lots of data. This part of our job is about information and communication. Every time you see an e-mail update from the campaign, it gets to you because of the work we do here every day.

Another big part of our work is supporting DFA field offices; for instance, Wisconsin has three field offices, and each of them has different IT needs. Every time we open a new office, folks from infrastructure are some of the first people on the ground. We do whatever it takes – almost. That could mean laying cable, hauling boxes, or scrounging for equipment and making sure the various bits and pieces can talk to each other. If you volunteer at a DFA office near you making make phone calls or stuff envelopes for the campaign, chances are that one of us set up the phone bank you’re using and another one of us networked the computers that made the mailing labels and the letters.

When a field operation is finished, we are there to break the whole thing down. We collect the data, evaluate the equipment, and figure out where everything should go next. Then the whole process starts all over again. Out in the field, the days and nights are long, but as our delegate count goes up, we know we’ve made a real difference.

The people I work with in IT are great. We came together from different places and different situations. Some of us are students, others took leave of absence from a job; some have families, others found somebody to watch the cats and one of our IT staffers brought the cat with him from Seattle. We could all probably be working somewhere else for more money and shorter hours; but each of us heard Governor Dean’s message about change, and we are all proud to put our technical skills and experience to work to help send that message far and wide.

In this campaign, some people do their part with pen and paper, others do theirs with phone calls and yard signs. In IT, we harness the power of CAT-5 and duct tape.

If we all do our part, together, we can take our country back.

Marc Chadwick is a founding member of DFA’s IT team. He lives in Burlington year round. February 26 is his one-year anniversary with the campaign. He is registered at the Burlington House of Overwork.

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