EchoDitto

It's like Christmas in the EchoDitto office in D.C. today. This morning we received a special delivery — our new foosball table! But it didn’t look much like a foosball table when it arrived: it looked like a box with lots and lots of parts.

So that begs the question: how many Dittos does it take to assemble a foosball table? Answer: Five Dittos … plus five cups of coffee (refilled at least once), four screwdrivers, two Allen wrenches, one level, some wood glue, and duct tape. After all, I never heard of a project (an offline one anyway) completed by a bunch of geeks that didn’t involve duct tape.

As most of you know from previous blog posts, EchoDitto New York recently moved offices. One of the best parts of the move, aside from the shorter commute home to Brooklyn, is that I now get to sit in the bullpen with the developers. I've been working closely with web developers for almost ten years now, and I never cease to be amazed at how much you can soak up just by being in the general proximity of certified web nerds. It's actually kind of amazing.

My second job out of school was at a startup Internet radio company called SOUNDSBIG.com. While the company ultimately went the way of many 1999 dot coms, it opened the doors to a world that has become my professional home. And while the work I did at SOUNDSBIG was fun and interesting, the best part of the job was sitting in the bullpen with the developers. I learned HTML, dabbled in Adobe Photoshop, and even got to borrow a copy of ASP for Dummies (technically speaking, that's where it ended for me, but I did get a lot of admiring glances from MIT grad students on the train ride home from work that day). I learned the merits of Quake (I still remember silently willing my coworkers to stop screaming about the previous night's events), became comfortable with technology, and was introduced to Napster. Ahh...Napster.

As you may know, we're always in the lookout for great talent to add to our strategy and technology teams here at EchoDitto. This time around, we're in the hunt for the elusive Mac enthusiast with *NIX chops -- a rare breed indeed, in a land mostly populated by the more commonplace microsoftae closedsourcius.

Are you an open source obsessed Mac-loving hacker, or know someone who is? Learn more at http://www.echoditto.com/careers.

My last greenish post here was almost a year ago, where I outlined a few of things we did to lessen EchoDitto's environmental footprint as we moved into our own new digs.

At first, we thought we were in the clear given that we're not in the business of manufacturing or shipping lawn ornaments or other products. But then our rough self-assessment quickly revealed that our extensive aerial globe-trotting was easily our largest contribution to global warming. As would probably be true for other consultants, technologists, or similar organizations, our flight emissions were more than negating any good we were doing to limit our footprint in other areas.

Great news! On Thursday night, two EchoDitto projects were recognized at the 2007 Golden Dot Awards Ceremony, sponsored by GWU's Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet.

We tend to get shy around here when it comes to talking about our work, but we couldn't hold back on this one. The Golden Dot Awards honor "innovative, revolutionary uses of the Internet as a political tool. The 2007 Golden Dot award winners truly represent the movers and shakers of cutting-edge campaigning.” Alright!

This last Saturday, I was at DrupalCamp here in New York. I went because I:

It was wicked fun, and I have some musings about what I learned later. Skip this paragraph if you already know about Drupal...in case you don't know what Drupal is, it's a feature-rich open-source web Content Management System that simplifies publishing web content. For example, it has a What-you-see-if-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) content editor, so you don't necessarily have to learn HTML to publish web pages. Several organizations, notably MTV UK as well as certain clients of EchoDitto, like the Pearl Harbor Stories Project, use Drupal. I should note that Drupal can be a partial alternative to the packages that the two companies Michael talks about in this post, although there are pros and cons to making that choice.

We changed our phone greeting, and our email auto-responders are on! We're all off in The Woods of West Virginia for our annual staff retreat. Some of our non-Ditto colleagues and clients have been making jabs about trust falls and such, but that's only 'cause they're jealous and probably don't get a staff retreat of their own. Right?

We have a ton of inward-facing work ahead of us over the next two and a half days, but it should also be a blast. There's a lot remarkable about this. First, with all of the crazy travel schedules going on and two different offices, it's rare that we're all ever in the same place at once. Second, this is also the last drop of internet we'll see until we return and plug back in later in the weekend. For an organization and group of people parading around telling people that "we live online," going offline for this long is a pretty big deal.

It was kind of hard to believe that the time had rolled around for the third annual EchoDitto Holiday Dinner; hard to believe that much time has gone by. But calendars don't lie, so there must be some truth to the saying, "Time flies when you're having fun," because we are having fun. So much that before we knew it, the time had come again for another holiday dinner.

But we did it a little differently this time. Before sitting down for our meal at D.C.'s A.V. Ristorante Italiano, we spent some time preparing food for others.

I shouldn't be surprised, but I can't help but be impressed with how we heard back from the RootsCamp DC organizers only moments after signing-on as sponsors. It wasn't just the typical 'thank you' that you might expect. Instead Roz told us exactly who we were enabling to attend through our sponsorship -- the real name of the real internet director coming off a campaign in CA who wouldn't otherwise be able to participate in this post-election debrief.

The email we received is exactly what we try so hard to emphasize across all of our projects and client work: making clear the true, real-world impact of every action or contribution that we ask of others. And following-up as quickly as possible to close the loop and show how every person's contribution is part of something larger than themself. So Roz's note brought a smile to our--ok, my--face.

Nicco's recent post about his support for Senator John McCain has caused quite a lot of ruckus. We at EchoDitto disagree with his decision. While Nicco does not work for Senator McCain, his support for a possible McCain candidacy runs contrary to many of our core beliefs at EchoDitto.

As a firm, EchoDitto is committed to progressive campaigns and organizations. We started in the political space and have been privileged to work with a lot of progressive candidates and campaigns as well as clients in the non-profit and corporate spaces. We're proud of the work we've done over the past three years with our partners, and we look forward to all the great work ahead.