That is the slogan on Weaver's t-shirt, with the Obama "o" in "hope", in case you hadn't guessed. I bring this up because I was asked today to go to Chicago to do realtime data analytics for the Obama campaign until the election is over. So, I leave Wednesday morning.

Backing up a little bit, this came about because back while I was in Dublin, somebody at the Google with a relatively high-level connection to the Obama appealed for a volunteer that was an expert at high volume data processing and analytics using mysql. This came to my attention, and I forwarded it to my group. Steve applied, and got the job immediately, because processing high volumes of critical data is our job description exactly. So he has been working for the campaign since the end of September. It might have been my first Official Act as Manager to sign off on his leave of absence.

Now, in the final week, they are going to try to retool Steve's pipelines to handle realtime data on election day.¹ Timeliness is obviously of the essence, since if anything fails on November 4, it doesn't do anybody much good if it's fixed on November 5. Since complex and unfamiliar forms of poker played with blank cards for infinite stakes are our specialty, Steve asked if we could spare any more people. Ian asked if he could go, and I of course said yes. Then I turned around and asked if I could go. Todd said yes, so after some fast talking to take care of the oncall shift I was supposed to do, some meetings that I have to go to, and so on, I bought tickets for the same flights as Ian.

So I will be missing Halloween and won't get to watch the election with my friends, but if things go according to plan, I just might be one of the first people, anywhere, to know how it all turns out. And if I'm really lucky, I'll be listening to Mr. Obama's acceptance speech from somewhere in the back of that big room you will see on TV. Pretty exciting, for me.

¹ I know more or less what this data is and why we are processing it, and could be much more specific about it, but I don't know how much (if any) of the strategy is considered secret by the campaign.

28 Oct 2008 00:57 PT - persistent link - trackback - 2 comments