Almost time to go home...
I've spent most of my time since August 5 in California, to get involved with the battle against Proposition 8. I haven't really said all that much publicly for a variety of reasons (for one thing, I didn't want to get pestered by people to act as a spokesperson for the campaign, especially since that wasn't really my role.)
About 6 weeks before the election I got tapped to take over the technical aspects of the campaign's online presence. This involved some interesting work involving blogger outreach and outreach on social networking sites, some work analyzing data that made me feel nostalgic for the time I was working at Google doing web log analytics, and some work that I'd rather have had someone else do (waking up at 1:30 in the morning to figure out how to stop a DDoS attack on the web site is the prime example.)
In spite of the fact that we lost this election, the campaign managed to do some amazing things. We managed to raise $40 million, a lot of it online from small donors. Eight years ago, California voted 61-39 to prevent marriage equality; the vote earlier this month was 52-48.
Sure, I think the campaign made some mistakes. If you engage me in a private conversation, I might even tell you what I think some of them were. But for the most part, what I want to say right now is that I just spent the last 6 weeks working with some of the most amazing people I've ever worked with (and given my previous experiences at Harvey Mudd College and Google, that's one of the biggest compliments I can give.)
I'm planning on staying involved in this; we may have lost this election, but some day the United States of America will recognize that all of its citizens deserve full equality. And when I say that, I'm not just talking about equality for gay people, but also equality for transgender people, for women, for African Americans, for the disabled, for anyone who might not be able to get their voices heard because they're in a segment of the population that's too small to have power.