USSF Staff Exit Interview
September 8, 2010
Diana Copeland, USSF Personnel Committee
Mallory Knodel, USSF National Technology Coordinator

Did you feel supported?

I felt really well supported. I think that was incredible. If I said that I needed more support, then I would have been taking away a job that someone needed to do elsewhere. I really did feel very well supported both within the ICT and within the Personnel Committee and the OC. One of the things, although it doesn't have to do with me personally, is that there were some opportunities that the ICT was taking political leadership on that weren't followed. If there had been that understanding, then by virtue of that, there would have been more support for some of the things that we were doing. That's more on a political level and people choose their politics. I don't think that people weren't paying attention to us in the right way, just some of the projects and initiatives that we were trying to show leadership on weren't necessarily supported maybe because that political part wasn't there. And that's a struggle that everybody experiences with whatever political perspective that they have. That's just part of all working together, which is the beautiful part of it. It's not necessarily a negative thing. From the beginning compared to the end we were definitely able to gain support for the visions that we had.

I think that the media center was really well supported. There were very few places where I didn't feel supported. I saw my work as a part of a larger team, which helps. Some of the challenges that the ICT faced I faced along with them. Never did I really feel like I had something that I had to do that the ICT wasn't with me on.

What were some challenges?

I think that a challenge in a lot of that work that I was trying to do with the ICT on the national level was made difficult through the budget. We made a lot of decisions based on a scarcity of funds so challenges in-situ related to Internet connectivity could have been mitigated had we not felt like we had to really cut corners. So we spent a great deal of volunteer power instead of doing it the easier way even though it would have been more costly. We just felt so obligated to cut corners that we weren't really thinking strategically abut how we would use our volunteers and how that would affect our team.

Detroit expanded was a really great idea and a lot of people supported it politically but it wasn't in the budget at all. That was a real challenge. It was a failure in a lot of ways. It would have been not so much so had it had a little bit more financial support; and not just financial support, but folks actually supporting the project and really influencing it in terms of how it was going to work. Oya did an amazing job supporting it on top of all the other stuff that she was doing. And by support I mean truly the best sense of the word support: even though she and I definitely had different approaches to it, our dynamic was so healthy. In the end the vision that we had was great it just didn't come to fruition for lots of different reasons. Once we realized that "Oh no, we may not actually be able to do what we've been dreaming about," it maybe was too late to get some of that other stuff in place. I don't know in terms of what it was; it was really kind of open from the beginning. Oya and I worked really hard to figure out "What is Detroit Expanded?". It was really clear what it was in Brazil and I explained how it worked there. I think that, and this is the great part of working with a Detroit team, it wasn't going to be the same as it was in the World Social Forum. We were going to do our own thing. It was going to be based on what seemed reasonable in Detroit. We were going to integrate tours and other things. We were trying to form that all along. Maybe that's why it was confusing to folks about what it was. But I think that active participation in trying to influence what it was was a kind of support and Oya did an amazing job doing that. I think there was material support as well, and to integrate it into what everyone else was doing. For example, Program/Culture is aware of Detroit Expanded so it's going to be part of the program in a certain way. It could be a part of Resources so that we would have the equipment to do the multi-media inter-activities, which was the real crux of it. We didn't get that stuff. We needed volunteers available to troubleshoot issues and camera people on tours. The power and excitement wasn't there. Maybe that lack had something to do with people not knowing what it was and maybe it was, from the beginning, difficult to build a team or a working group. In the end, it was abut the organizing process from beginning to end. I wrote a long evaluation about Detroit Expanded. No real regrets, just trying to be as open as possible to what went wrong so that next time it will be much more integrated into the process.

What were your greatest successes?

I really think that from beginning to end, with a great climax in the end, a great success was building up a team of technologists. We had a really consistent group every other week on the phone. We had incredible work sessions where people drove to New York and we also had folks helping us live from other locations through the Internet. We did these work sessions to get things like the website up and going. For a full 18 months we had a really great team. A lot of them spilled over from 2007 so we had great folks from Atlanta and New York and Detroit. I think that we were missing some participation from folks in Detroit. We started out really strong with a handful of people in Detroit. We had Tdka, who was in Detroit. There were a few months in the middle when we doing drudgery work where we were really East Coast-centric. Once we got to Detroit we were on the ground more. Alfredo and I made a trip there in February then I came to Detroit in mid-May and that's when we also saw a lot more participation from Detroit folks. I think that every facet of the ICT team was good; everybody was really pouring in a lot of work. As is always true in technology work, there needs to be more women and people of color. Those things have got to change. We made a conscious effort to do those things and although we didn't have any way of formally evaluating ourselves for this it was still a bit lacking, just as a subjective judgment. We made a conscious effort to be integrated. We had 30 people staying with us in the tech house! We had people doing polyphasic sleep cycles so that they could work 20 hours per day and only sleep four. It was just amazing the amount of dedication that we got from folks; all of them volunteers from all over the country. It was about the way that we built it, starting in March 2009 when we came up with principles to guide our work. That was an incredible first step because we were able to reel in technologists because of the political positions that we had; it was attractive to them. And they wanted to participate, they learned new skills, and we all worked together. The collaboration that we all got out of it was great. I wish much more that we would have been able to bring that model and to be much more integrated with the OC and NPC, to cast our net wider and really be open. We were conscious of doing that, we tried our best, and that's why things worked out really well, but next time it will even be better.