Big Goals with Christina Warren and DSA's National Tech Committee

Christina Warren (she/her) has been an organizer in DSA for four years. She has served on the National Tech Committee's Steering Committee for two years, and as Co-Chair for her home chapter of San Francisco. For her day job, she works as a software engineer.

Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is the largest socialist organization in the United States. DSA’s members are building progressive movements for social change while establishing an openly democratic socialist presence in American communities and politics. DSA’s National Tech Committee (NTC) is a collection of volunteer tech workers (broadly defined!) from across the country who research and implement tech solutions to meet the various needs of DSA’s national leadership and local chapters, particularly with respect to collaboration and communication.

The Five-Year Plan

MOLLY I only learned about the NTC a couple months ago, and it’s very cool. So let's just start there. What is the NTC? 

CHRISTINA So the NTC, National Tech Committee, is—DSA's national tech committee! It’s a place for tech folks, or people interested in tech, to come together and help support DSA. We do a lot of projects that help the national organization, that help chapters, that provide some of the infrastructure that helps keep DSA running. 

The origins would have been before my time in the organization, but in 2021 there was sort of a reformation because it had become very decayed. People weren't really doing much, it wasn't very active. And so a few people came together. That's the origin of this five-year plan that we're gonna talk about in a little bit. 

So we have the website, tech.dsausa.org, that has this plan, that has our bylaws and everything, and all of that came out of this reconstitution where we wanted to position ourselves as helping to set the direction for national DSA in our tech and infrastructure. 

MOLLY Let’s get into the five-year plan! What is it? When did it go into effect, and how is it going? 

CHRISTINA Our five-year work plan was formulated through a very collaborative, collective process and formally adopted in the summer of 2022. So we're now two years into the plan. It lays out goals in a few categories: do more outreach to DSA chapters, be active in supporting the organizers of our organization in their work, and be active in advising our national leadership on tech. Also, the five-year plan has specific project plans, like, we want to create this technology and deploy it in this way for the organization.

In terms of how the plan is going, I would say overall so-so, which is OK!  

Our growth has been good. We have a lot of interest from across DSA. A lot of people who join are people who are like, well, I joined the organization and I'm a tech worker or an admin worker or I know data really well, and I'm interested in using my skills to contribute to DSA, this seems like the place for me! And they join. So we have a lot of capacity and people who are enthusiastic about helping out with organizational tech, which is great. 

Overall I think the projects we've been doing are going really well. We had a project called myDSA, which has shifted a bit into a membership portal. We're pretty far along on getting that ready to be used widely by members.

Another project is a VAN alternative. If you're familiar at all with VAN, we're building an in-house alternative. We haven't started building it yet, but now is around when we wanted to be ideating and actually spinning up interest, and that's where we are right now. There's a few developers and a project lead who has a whole plan on how to do it. 

MOLLY And that will be an interface that will go over voter file data, that DSA will then be able to use to work on electoral campaigns and other kinds of civic engagement work? 

CHRISTINA Yes, it'll be an application that people can use. And then, yeah, exactly, it uses voter data as the engine.

The reason I say parts aren't going well, and again, I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, is there are some projects we're doing that aren't in the plan. We've pivoted to what has become important in the organization. We will build something, it gets really popular, so we're like, oh, let's focus on that, people seem to really like that. 

So I think overall, even though we aren't sticking exactly to what we said we were gonna do, that's okay. We have a lot of big goals. 

MOLLY Can we talk more about the membership portal? That comes up a lot in organizations I'm involved with in various ways. What do you hope the membership portal will make possible that isn’t possible right now?

CHRISTINA So the process for members updating their data in the organization is that they will email national staff and sometime in the next few months, they'll hear back and say, I changed a line in the member database, you're good now. That's wildly inefficient on the staff side because it's a lot of manual time. And then also on the member side, because it takes a long time. And you also wouldn't know to do that unless you know the right person to ask. So the whole reason for this project is to make that process very seamless and make it really easy for members if they wanna change their email, their home address, their name, they can just log in and do that by themselves. So it really was a labor-saving kind of innovation.

Another piece that was very important in terms of what national leadership wanted was being able to update membership dues. DSA is a member-funded organization, so all of our money comes from member dues, or the vast majority of it comes from member dues. 

So, [we’ve done] dues drives where we reach out to members and encourage them to try to update their dues and increase their dues. And that process, again, was very hard. It was slightly more automated than the changes I described before—you could sort of re-fill out a form—but there were errors that came up, people would get double charged accidentally or people would end up accidentally canceling. It was very unclear what you needed to do to update dues, which made the dues drives very, very difficult to execute on. 

MOLLY Membership drives are a big lift for an organization, even if all of the logistics are flawless. If the tech is additionally making it hard for folks, that can really throw a wrench in the works. 

CHRISTINA Yeah, absolutely. So a big part of [the membership portal] was being able to do easy dues updates. As it will theoretically exist in the future, DSA members would be able to go in through the member portal and update their own dues information. That's a big step for us, to have this kind of national member management system, where it is more standardized across the organization.

MOLLY You were saying some projects have emerged as priorities that were not in the original five-year plan. No plan survives contact with the enemy! Or in a less military metaphor, no plan survives contact with time passing, things changing. What are some things that have emerged that were not in the original vision of the five-year plan? 

CHRISTINA The password manager is definitely one of them. [Right now] chapters all have their own password managers. We have so many chapters that don't talk to each other much, they are managing their own tech stacks by themselves. We saw a need for a password manager to make it cheaper to use both nationally and locally, to make it easier for local chapters to not need to host their own infrastructure, make it easier for people who don't really understand tech or password managers or why they're important. And then also for easy password sharing across the organization. It's a security thing—this is just a much more secure way to share information between national and locals, between people within locals. 

There was a national DSA plan to buy a password manager. It was very expensive, and not very well provisioned, so it was harder to use. NTC stepped in and said, we can just build that, we can host it ourselves. It’ll be cheaper, it'll be easier, it'll be more customizable. 

MOLLY What other projects are in this category? Projects that were not in the original plan but have emerged? 

CHRISTINA  I think the biggest one—both the biggest because it's been a big undertaking, but also it's been very popular, surprisingly—is OpenSlides. OpenSlides is a meeting facilitation and vote tracking software. 

Every two years, DSA has our national convention. Our last one was 2023, and in the lead-up to the convention the NTC was asked to prepare a voting software. We ended up choosing OpenSlides because it is widely used, it's open source, it has good support infrastructure. So we have our own instance of OpenSlides, we have our own servers that host our own data. We built it for national convention and it was a huge hit, everyone really liked it. 

So even though it was meant to be a short-term project, we ended up continuing to support it and building it out for chapters to use, for other national bodies to use. Now we're also starting to do development work on it, contributing to the open source project on behalf of DSA and building new features for us and others to use. 

That wasn't in the plan! But people saw a big need for it, and use for it.

MOLLY At the national convention, or ongoing, what piece of people’s DSA experience do you think OpenSlides is addressing or making more enjoyable? What are people responding to when they're like, “ooh, this is so great”? 

CHRISTINA I think it gives a lot of structure to meetings. Meetings can be really confusing and intimidating. If  you aren't super familiar, it can be hard to figure out what's going on when you're, for instance, hearing resolutions or trying to do card votes. This was especially the case at national convention, because it's like a thousand people. In previous years we would do hand votes, like you would hold your card up and try to count, and that's just very hard to do. So this makes that workflow much, much easier. 

It makes it so easy to follow what's going on because every piece of business or resolution you're hearing will just be shown to you on the screen. The agenda is right there so you can follow along really easily. You can track everyone's votes so you can understand how vote breakdown actually happened. And I think it just makes our democratic process much more accessible to a lot of people. 

And then there’s also the flip side of actually running the meetings. [OpenSlides] makes one central place where you don't have to keep track of like, we're doing votes on this software and we have our slideshow and we have our Google Docs with our resolution and our separate doc with our agenda. And oh, we need to update it and we need to make sure it gets updated across everything. As someone who has run a lot of meetings, that can be extraordinarily confusing and just very hard to keep track of. Having everything in one place where you just have the button you can click to do everything you need, and your use case is very handled and laid out for you, it is custom built exactly for what you're doing, it just makes the process of running meetings much smoother and logistically easier.

MOLLY That's delightful. I am so much more of a visual processor than an auditory processor. So for me, being able to see a resolution or whatever the agenda item is, up on a screen in words, in addition probably to somebody saying it out loud, is great—I can get very lost if there's only audio and nothing to look at. I know I’m not alone! So it feels like an accessibility improvement, probably for lots of members. 

CHRISTINA I think so for sure. Having everything laid out there makes it so much easier to follow.

Centralized/Decentralized

MOLLY Ok so, five-year plan, very cool, we love a long-term plan. But we haven’t talked much about the bread-and-butter of the intersection of tech and data and organizing, which is list work! Just managing lists of our people. Who are they? What's their contact info? What's their deal? You know, all of that foundational data management for a membership organization. How does DSA think about and manage member data? What is NTC doing to facilitate effective list work? 

CHRISTINA I will caveat this section by saying, as the NTC, we don't do as much direct work with member list management. We do work with helping people to manage their data. And we help people plug things into our various tools, to get people onto OpenSlides or onto our password manager or onto our discussion board. And then we do work with things like the membership portal, which is helping people to interface with that data. The idea behind that is easier management of member data, making it a single source of truth that anyone in the organization is able to access. 

But in terms of our general DSA approach to organizing member data, we have our centralized member database [in ActionKit]. That is everyone; anything that happens at the national level is based off of that. 

A lot of our organizing work happens at the chapter level. We have provisioning to chapters, which is like everyone kind of gets a subset of their members [from the central database]. We have a lot of tools that we use to do that. I think the main way we interact with member data is through Action Network. A lot of our email management, if we ever need a list of members, you get it from there. 

We also use [Sisense, formerly known as Periscope] to do the actual data sharing between national and local, which is fairly new. We've been encouraging people recently to use that sort of automated sharing rather than the manual processes we used to have. It is good to have this automatic process, now [chapters] get immediate updates instead of monthly bulk updates of “here's all your new members.” So that automation has been really helpful.

MOLLY Got it. So ActionKit is the central database. Do chapters have autonomy to choose what kind of system they want to use for their own member management? They get data from national, but they might be choosing different systems based on the chapter? 

CHRISTINA Yeah, chapters get raw data, and they can choose their own systems. I know a lot of chapters use Action Network because it's kind of the default, but not everyone does. I think a lot of people choose Action Network also because there's more support [from members] available, people in DSA know how to use it.

MOLLY Action Network is much more values-aligned with DSA than something like EveryAction or Nation Builder. Have you heard that as a reason why folks are choosing Action Network?

CHRISTINA I haven't actually, which is interesting. I'm sure people do bring it up, but I think most of the discussion around Action Network is more like practical use. How easy is it to use, how easy is it to integrate, etc. 

MOLLY That makes sense. There are plenty of practical reasons why chapters would end up with Action Network. 

Pushing the Limits

MOLLY In terms of projects that are even a little further ahead of the stuff that NTC is working on right now, out on the vanguard of what is possible, what’s most exciting to you personally?

CHRISTINA The VAN replacement project is a big one, because although we're still in the ideation phase, I think that has the potential to be something really, really cool down the line, once it gets built up, if we collaborate with other organizations on having something that's collectively supported. 

MOLLY Yeah! I think other groups, including the Working Families Party, are developing something similar, or are on a similar path. 

CHRISTINA Yeah, exactly. Having external collaboration, especially on a project that is quite admittedly a very big undertaking, would be really great.

A little bit further down the line, we have considered doing replacements for some of the big enterprise software that we use. So for instance, we’ve thought about doing Slack replacements, Google Drive replacements, Zoom replacements.

A Slack replacement is maybe a little bit closer-in, because we have our national DSA discussion forum, which is a Discourse forum. The NTC itself used to use Slack; we completely transitioned onto using the forum instead. We wanted to take the leap on actually trying out, “is this a viable replacement for Slack?” A lot of chapters and a lot of the national organization runs on Slack, but there are severe limitations. We can't really afford the enterprise version—because of its per-user pricing, it gets really, really expensive really quickly. And on the free version, there's severe limitations on the feature set. There's also data concerns, similar to Google Drive, where everything about the organization is on Google Drive and we would just love to have a little bit more ownership over our information and our data. 

So yeah, taking the leap on seeing if [Discourse] is a viable replacement for Slack. And I think the answer is, right now, it's kind of not, but we would love to continue building it out so that it is a place where people in the organization can do our business and have a viable alternative. As the NTC, we are more willing to take that leap than most would be. 

We're also thinking, similarly, what if we wanted to replace Google Drive? Nextcloud is something we looked into. And there's a lot of advantages to that, again, the ownership and customizability. There’s a lot of features we wouldn't be able to have just using Google Docs all the time.

MOLLY That seems like such an important role for the NTC, to have a group really thinking about pushing the organization's tech limits, folks who have the skills and knowledge and just the energy and inclination to even ask those questions. A lot of people are doing other stuff, they're like “I have 15 1:1s scheduled this week, I can't think about replacing Google Drive.” This role feels unusual, in a really cool way, for a membership organization.

CHRISTINA Yeah, absolutely. This is a body of people who are just interested and passionate about tech. Chapter administrative bodies or national staff have stuff that they have to do to keep the organization running, so there isn't as much time to think about, well, what if we tried out this, or what if we did this? 

The NTC does need to keep our password manager running, we need to moderate our discussion board, things like that. But there is a lot of capacity [in the NTC] to experiment, people who don't have responsibilities, or things that they need to keep running, but are just passionate about tech and want to use their spare time to work on something potentially interesting. And I think that is a big part of the NTC's role.

Got an idea for a future post, someone I should talk to, or feedback of any kind? Email me at molly@tallgrassco.com! I'd love to hear from you.

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