Political Activists at the Tech Conference
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This October at the Bay Area Drupal Camp (BADCamp,) we soaked up Drupal talks, gave a few of our own, high-fived friends, and fomented literary political activism. How? In line with this year’s circus theme, we turned our sponsor booth into a place for BADCampers to step right up...and send messages to their elected representatives. It was also a chance for folks to talk with others about those messages and direct our swag budget to one of three nonprofits. Find out who BADCampers wrote to, what they had to say, and which nonprofits got our swag money.
But, it’s a tech conference…
BADCamp is a place for Drupalisas to Drupal out. But, obviously, there’s more going on in the world outside of our conference, and we use our Drupal skills to affect change in that world. So, we brought the outside into BADCamp, enabling attendees to write postcards to their elected representatives about issues that matter to them, which we pinned to our booth wall and later mailed.
Project Manager Kristin Sartain and Director of Technology Rob Loach affix tape to attendees’ postcards
Some of the blank postcards we offered BADCampers
Support technologist Meg Epperly raises her fist in front of our BADCamp booth wall.
The backside of Meg’s postcard.
But there’s more
When a BADCamper finished a postcard, they pinned it to one of three sections of our booth wall to indicate which of staff-chosen nonprofit would get $10 of our conference swag budget. The three nonprofits they could choose from were the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (See why and how we chose these organizations
Hannah Oliver sent her part of our swag budget to Planned Parenthood.
Rob Bayliss sent his part of our swag budget to the ACLU.
Jack Aponte diverted part of our swag budget to Planned Parenthood.
Julio Feliciano gave to the ACLU.
Gian Weld pinned her postcard to our ACLU section, too.
In total, BADCampers sent 90 donations to the three orgs. Here’s the breakdown:
We did it!
Thank you to all the folks who came by to write postcards to their elected representatives. They’re in the mail! And, extra thanks to the BADCamp organizers for creating a forum for the open source community to come together to help make our technology accessible to more people. We hope our sponsor booth action inspires people to connect their daily work with their values.
Project Manager Kristin Sartain almost gets carried away.
The Kalamuna Team
Kalamuna partners with socially impactful institutions, associations, agencies, and governments to help them solve today’s most pressing problems. We do this by empowering them with the research, strategy, design, and technology that will transform their organizations so they can better serve the needs of their audiences and communities.
