2016-06-19
Pete Condon
Much of the last twelve months have been a blur. Mostly I remember late nights of caffeine fuelled development, working with some amazing people, and chasing my toddler until she was tired enough to sleep. It's been a great year.
For me the campaign started at the end of May last year. On a weekend in Melbourne two dozen techs, designers, and campaigners from around the country signed themselves up for an ambitious program of change for The Greens systems. The threat of a double dissolution made traditional IT development processes impossible - every plan needed a contingency, every task needed energy.
Enthusiasm was the main qualification that landed me a role in the small group of ICT WG volunteers tasked with migrating the WA content into our new website. I didn't have much of a background in the technologies that underpinned the new site, but our outstanding, nationwide support network made a huge difference to the website you see today.
Success on the main site provided the confidence to take on a bigger challenge – WA 2.0. The agencies we contacted turned down the job of rebuilding the platform because there wasn't enough time to build a new one from scratch, but greens.org.au is built on a flexible base and I was able to hack it into the required design over the course of a month.
IT development can be obsessive work; some nights I worked past midnight without realising it, some mornings started at 3am because inspiration took hold. The crunch point hit when it was time to load all of the initiatives, which took a lot longer than you might expect, with all of the competing priorities from the campaign. During this time the teamwork between Scott's office, Al Boyd, and ICT WG was a significant factor in having the new pages ready for launch.
There have been some pivotal collaborations and contributions from many ICT WG members in the lead up to the campaign - Grahame reconfigured the office networking and, along with Nick Cooper (Queensland based honorary member), rolled out the Pi phone banking stations in Perth, Albany, and Brisbane. Alan saved us hundreds, maybe thousands, of dollars by sourcing recycled and discounted hardware. Steven provided most of the support to phone banking sessions and to campaigners using Civi.
In many ways the key strengths of ICT WG are the incredible breadth of skills our members offer and the culture of sharing that empowered many people to make a difference. I feel very privileged to be part of such a committed team and very much encourage anyone with time to spare to get involved.