EchoDitto - Company News

On building teams and foosball tables - posted by Meaghan Lamarre

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 05:45:11 -0800

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.

Several hours after its arrival, and a few missteps later (we had to take it apart around step 5 upon realizing we’d gone wrong at step 2; and once it was uprighted, we had to reassemble the rods as we’d inadvertently made it a left-handed table), we played an inaugural game. For the record, JP and Tom beat Chris and me, 3-0.

Although we joke about it being a team building exercise, it actually was. I just started as a strategy architect a couple of weeks ago, and this served as a good exercise in EchoDitto culture. As a project manager, I suppose it’s no surprise that I assumed the role of a sort of foreperson of our foosball construction crew. And those missteps I mentioned, well, they were good lessons in conflict management, not to mention the wisdom of following a work plan. But the real lesson is in how much fun it is to be here.

So I personally challenge you to a game next time you’re in town. I’d better go get practicing!

Here are a few more photos.

Life in the Bullpen - posted by Gisele Toueg

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 11:40:09 -0700

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.

Eight years later, I'm back in the bullpen with Phil, Jason, and sometimes Ethan, and the education continues. Not only do I just have to turn my head to get help doing a drop shadow in Photoshop or shout over the Japanese Peace Lily to get answers to any and every Drupal question imaginable, but I've been let in (on occasion), to the secret world of developers. They know about all these websites, widgets and gadgets that are practially life changing. For example, ever been to woot.com? Wait 'till the next "Woot Off" and try to stop yourself from ordering a deeply discounted Rumba. Feel like getting your voicemails over email? No problem! Need helping setting up your iPhone? Look no further.

While I may drive my developer friends a little crazy with my constant giggling and never-ending conference calls, I, for one, love life in the bullpen. Have a great weekend everyone.

Hunting for Sysadminius Stevejobius - posted by Justin Pinder

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 11:54:09 -0700

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.

Earth Day for every flight. (Share this with your out-of-town consultants!) - posted by Michael Silberman

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 20:50:23 -0700

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.

The ideal solution would have been to try and reduce our travel, but as much as we're eager to experiment with all sorts of technology for conference calls, video-conferencing, and screen-sharing, there's just no replacement for face-to-face meetings.

The short answer is that we jumped on the carbon offsetting bandwagon early last fall. We simply plug our flight information into TerraPass, and it tells us how much we need to pay them to invest in renewable energy projects to "balance out" the impact of our flight. (We're not wedded to TerraPass over other solutions, but their website makes it very easy to calculate our flight emissions.)

The more interesting piece is that we're sharing the responsibility of these offsets with our clients. Since the fees are modest, this is primarily an educational tool to remind both our clients and ourselves that there are real environmental costs and externalities associated with our work.

Here's the language that we've added to every single proposal and agreement since late last year:

Travel costs will be pre-approved and invoiced separately. In keeping with EchoDitto's commitment to social and environmental responsibility, your invoice will also include fifty percent of the cost of carbon offsets purchased to neutralize the carbon dioxide emissions generated by our travel on this project. We will share this cost with you by covering the other fifty percent. By capturing some of the social and environmental costs of our work with you, we are together helping to slow climate change.

We've received some great feedback from our clients and partners thus far. If you like it, I hope you'll consider using it or adapting it for your own organization or consultancy. If you do, please let us know by commenting here. And happy Earth Day!

"Cutting-Edge Campaigning" - posted by Michael Silberman

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 06:55:05 -0700

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!

Since Sliced Bread was awarded the Best Online Community Response Effort, which is given to a "campaign that used technology to solve a local or civic problem." And Pearl Harbor Stories was honored for Best Podcast Series. You can read more about our work on these projects here and here.

We're really proud of our work on both projects -- they were truly successful partnerships with our clients and labors of love by our entire team.

So, a huge thanks to both the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) here in DC and the Pearl Harbor Memorial Fund out in Honolulu for their creativity and willingness to experiment with us. We're pretty darn lucky to be able to work with organizations like these, committed to surfacing and supporting the greatest citizen-generated ideas for America and, in the case of the Pear Harbor Memorial Fund, to creating a much needed oral and living history of the attacks on Pearl Harbor.

Also, a special shout out to PRsolutions and MacWilliams Robinson our talented media partners on SinceSlicedBread. And the same to both Trellon and our friends at Brodeur, without whom the Pearl Harbor project wouldn't be nearly the success it is!

DrupalCamp NYC 2007 - posted by Harish Rao

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 05:57:52 -0800

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

(a) wanted to meet people that could possibly work with us and

(b) learn more about Drupal, especially its new release, version 5.0.

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.

A few anecdotal takeaways that might be useful to you:

(1) The crowd at Drupalcamp NYC split into two camps: those who already knew a lot about Drupal (let's call them super-users), and folks who were there just to get a feel for Drupal or to learn more (we'll call them newbies). The latter was in the definite majority. That said, I thought the super-users--like the good folks at Advomatic--generally did a good job being helpful to the newbies.

(2) What's most interesting to me, though, is that many of the super-users (including, of course, the EchoDitto contingent) were actively looking for people to hire. In fact, that was pretty much the purpose of a lot of super-users there. It's also useful for me to note that the super-users were not always part of companies like EchoDitto -- many of them were well-versed freelancers. Which is interesting to me -- clearly, there's a lot of demand for Drupal-based websites, but not enough people building them. Somewhat counter-intuitively, I will say that as good as these events are from a social + learning perspective, they may not be the best place for recruiting talent.

(3) Setting aside sociological phenomena that I believe informs the drive toward more independent contractors I observed at Drupalcamp (for example, read this book), it was fairly clear to me that a higher level of coordination (does NOT mean collusion) amongst the different Drupal developers/companies could be useful. I don't know what that entails necessarily but perhaps a shared opportunities/business development portal is a useful thing? I'm open to ideas here, I admit that this is not a clear idea, but what do you all think? I'd like to presume positive intent on all parties' if we get into this conversation on this blog...there's a great deal of demand for Drupal services, and no one entity (company or individual contractor) is filling all of it.

One last note: props to Noel Hidalgo, who I thought did a great job making the conference happen.

Disclosure: EchoDitto was a sponsor of this year's Drupalcamp.

Retreating ... Into the Wormhole we go! - posted by Michael Silberman

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 20:30:32 -0800

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.

I'm most looking forward to the fact that we have two amazing facilitators to lead us through this experience -- our friend (and often mentor) Leda Dederich, and her very impressive colleague, Jeff Balin. I can already tell that beyond whatever happens here, we're about to learn a great deal from Leda and Jeff, through their modeling, about how to be more effective leaders and facilitators.

Leda turned to a very bloodshot me last night when she landed and asked if I was ready to "go through the wormhole." I looked back at her blankly, sadly revealing my apparent lack of inner geekdom. As much as I had been feigning geek for these past few years, I guess you just can't put the Star Wars into a kid who never had it.

Anyway, now you know where we all are and what we're doing. We're going through the wormhole here in beautiful West Virginia-- leaving our to-do lists behind for a few days and figuring how out to, well, be a stronger team and do an even better job of what we do for the clients and communities that we serve.

We'll have photos up soon, of course, but in the meantime, check out our previous retreat photos!

Holiday Done Ditto-Style - posted by Terrance Heath

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 11:40:12 -0800

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.

See, we're not just about online communities. Sure, we live online. But we also live in various "real time" neighborhoods and communities. Sometimes we get away from our computers and engage with our community in a way that doesn't involve pecking away at our keyboards. So, when Jess suggested we put together lunchbag meals for D.C. Central Kitchen, it was a no brainer.

I can't say for sure, but I think that altogether we put together 50 bags containing, fresh fruit, juice boxes, peanut butter crackers, and our own special brand of trail mix ("Trail Bytes", get it?), along with other items.

Matt, our newest strategy Ditto, originated the snowman design for the bags...

Which then was further developed (hacked?) and mass produced by Tom, one of our resident tech gurus.

Afterwards, we closed our laptops and left the office for food, fun, and a gift exchange. Photographic evidence of Dittos living (however briefly) offline (not counting Blackberrys and other wifi-enabled gadgets) is available under the "echoholiday" tag.

NOI/RootsCamp modeling good organizing (of course!) - posted by Michael Silberman

Sun, 03 Dec 2006 14:40:31 -0800

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.

RootsCamp, if you haven't already heard, is a post-election debrief happing in cities across the country in the very un-conference bar-camp tradition. Ours in DC is happening this weekend. Bar camps are open-source, self-organized geek gatherings organized online to take place in real-space, usually around big tech convergences like SXSW, and organized transparently via a basic wiki.

Needless to say, this is right up our alley, so we're psyched to be involved. Between politics, online organizing, and the open sourcing of technology and ideas, RootsCamp is essentially the perfect merger of our greatest obsessions. (There's even one happening every Wednesday in the SecondLife metaverse!) See you this weekend!

A message to our friends - posted by Harish Rao

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 21:27:53 -0700

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.

Everyone in this world has to follow their own heart. Nicco has agreed to, effective immediately, take a leave of absence from our company. We hope he takes some time to re-consider his position. I am assuming Nicco's responsibilities for the duration of his leave of absence.

On a personal note, Nicco is, in addition to being my business partner, my best friend. As an individual and as my friend, I support him tremendously. He is of extraordinary character and integrity.

Update: Comments are now on.

The Move, Cont'd - posted by Terrance Heath

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 07:13:36 -0700

Well, we're in. As usual, we hit the ground running -- unpacking, finding stuff we forgot we had -- and figuring out what (and who) goes where. Of course, the internet was the first thing we got up and running. But, despite the mesmerizing orange walls were, and the fun we had playing with the talking elevator (yes, we have a talking elevator), we quickly got back down to business.

In honor of our first week in the new location, here's one more video of our first day in the new place. Notice how it looks like we unpacked the toys first?

The Fridge - posted by Terrance Heath

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 10:27:16 -0700

We live online, most of the time. Yet sooner or later even we have to tear ourselves away from our keyboards and monitors to eat. Sure,we can order pizza online easily enough. But that means we need a place to put the leftovers. We needed a fridge, but the new office didn't come with one. So Mike donated one wasn't using, and a few Dittos were dispatched to bring it in.

A Scientific Diversion - posted by Terrance Heath

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 10:29:47 -0700

Moving has a way of shaking things loose, and you end up finding stuff you didn't know you had; stuff that you should throw out, excep that you can think of better things to do with it. Little did we know, while the rest of us were in the throes of moving, a few Dittos took off for the rooftop of the old office building for a little experiment with some Mentos & Diet Coke c/o Joshua (or at least c/o Joshua's old desk).

The results? Well.

Dittos on Film (Sorta) - posted by Terrance Heath

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 10:29:13 -0700

Via Jumpcut, the first of a series (more or less) on our move to the new office space.

Dittos on the Move - posted by Terrance Heath

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 10:30:24 -0700

Wondering where we are? Well, we do live online, but there are some things that can only be done offline. For example, moving to a new server can totally be done online. Moving to a new office, however, requires being offline. Fortunately, we're so busy that it'll be late in the day before we really start to notice the withdrawal symptoms.

For example:

The walls are freshly (and brightly) painted.

There are boxes arriving.

There are boxes to unpack.

There's furniture to put together.

And lots more to do before we can kick back and appreciate our new digs!

(Stay tuned for more!)