I want to start today with something of a
disclaimer because I'm going to be upfront. We're going to talk about politics today, and I know
that can be a little bit dicey, so I'm afraid that your imagination is going to something that maybe
looks a little bit like this. I love this picture because it's completely ridiculous, and the guy on
the left is really having, I think, a pretty rough day. I don't blame you if this is what you think
of when I say being involved in politics, because if y
ou go to almost any stock art website, you're
going to get a lot of pictures that look exactly like this. Before I was involved, honestly, this
was what my imagination would go to as well. Now that I've been doing this work for a while,
though, I can tell you it looks a lot more like this. It's about people, community, and
conversations, more spreadsheets than I ever could have imagined, and an innumerable
number of clipboards, and, at least to date, I haven't experienced any boxing gloves,
so that's
good. But I want to talk to you about today is, based on my experience, how we, as women in
technology, are uniquely situated to drive political change in our communities. I want to
do that by taking you on my personal journey from knowing literally nothing, I'll show you just
how literally nothing I knew, to being part of the leadership team for one of the fastest-growing
county political parties in the state of Illinois, and it's been a really exciting journey.
Let me introduce
myself first, though. I am Shawna Martell. I do have
a day job at Carta. I want to stress, nothing I'm talking about today has anything to
do with my employer. I don't mix my work and my politics. I definitely don't want to right now. In
my off time, I am a perpetual political volunteer. You'll find me knocking doors, making phone
calls. I'm an elected precinct committee person, and I serve on multiple boards and steering
committees for both partisan and non-partisan political causes. You'
ll see a list of some of
the places I've had the privilege of working with here. I also want to stress, nothing I'm talking
about today should be considered as coming from any of these wonderful organizations either. We're
going to be talking about my personal experience and opinions in doing my work in politics.
At the risk of stating at least some of the probably fairly painfully obvious, I am a white,
cis, straight, middle-class, middle-aged woman, and I know that that gives me a bunch of
privilege
to show up in places that more marginalized communities have a much harder time, and I want
to acknowledge that. I'm also incredibly fortunate to have a partner who is all in on this work. I
have to give a shout-out to my husband, of almost 18 years. This is Joshua. This is a picture of
us at 4:00 in the morning delivering yard signs to polling locations. He is a very patient man.
We don't have any kids, we don't have any pets, so he keeps our household running, and often
you'll
find him finishing dinner, running me a plate in between finishing my day work and moving
on to some political meeting in the evening. I know that my lived experience is different
and that not all of us get to participate in US elections. Maybe you don't live in the
United States. Maybe in your community, there isn't a space that is super welcoming
to you. I know that those things are real, and it's a bunch of work and a bunch of labor,
but if you can find some other like-minded folks and
you're in that situation where there isn't a
place that's welcoming to you, I'd encourage you to see if you can take on the immense amount
of labor it is to create one because our communities really, really need us and our skills.
So I told you I was going to tell you my story. I'm going to start at the beginning. For the first
probably 30 years or so of my life, I was really just politically apathetic, except for this brief
period in high school where I decided I was going to run for presid
ent, and I really can't tell you
why. So I decided to have a mock... We had a mock election in my high school, and I was going to run
a write-in campaign against Al Gore and George W. Bush, and please don't do the math to figure out
how old that makes me because it's distressing sometimes. It's fine. I won in a landslide.
This was not super surprising because there were only seven people in my graduating class,
but after this brief foray into whatever in the world this was, I stopped paying
attention, and I
stopped paying attention for a really long time. It wasn't until the presidential election in the
United States in 2016 that I decided I needed to be involved again. It wouldn't take you too
long on Google to figure out that I am now an elected Democrat. So, to put it mildly, the
results of the 2016 presidential election were not exactly as I'd hoped they'd be. I wanted to
get involved, and I had literally no idea where to start. Literally none. It just so happened
that a
cross my Facebook came a campaign event for a city council candidate. Great. I was
going to figure out if I should vote for this city council person and maybe even figure out
what in the world City Council does. I showed up to this event. I didn't know that there were
districts in the city council. Yeah, this person was running in a part of town that I didn't live.
I couldn't vote for them, even if I wanted to. So when I say I knew literally nothing, I knew
literally nothing, but I kept sho
wing up. They were very helpful to explain to me that I probably
wasn't doing this right, but I kept showing up for events. I would literally just scroll through
Facebook looking for political events that I could show up to, and I started going to this
local grassroots organization in central Illinois called The People's Agenda. They were focused on
voter education and voter engagement and helping people understand how local government worked,
which I knew I definitely didn't know those thi
ngs. One day, while one of the organizers
was talking, they mentioned almost in passing how they were struggling with collaborating on
files. They'd been using email. The organization was growing. This wasn't working very well
for them anymore. I went up to one of the organizers afterwards and I said, "I could help
you set up a shared drive if that's something that would be useful to you so that maybe it'd
be easier for you to do this collaboration." That was a really simple conversation, a
nd I look
back on it now, it's been almost seven years. That was the beginning of my community organizing
work. It was a simple conversation about, what to me, wasn't a super complicated technical
problem. I definitely did not know about voting, or government, or politics, but I did understand
how to set up shared drives, and they had people who knew all this other stuff, but they could use
a hand with some of their technology. One of those organizers, her name was Michelle, and I say,
eve
rybody needs a Michelle in their life because she believed in me and she saw something in me. I
don't know why. She sponsored me in becoming the volunteer coordinator for The People's Agenda. I
was like, "Great. I don't know what that means, but sure, yes, Michelle, I will do this work."
It turns out a lot of the problems they were having with volunteer coordination were actually
just technical issues. They needed some piece of software that would help them understand, "Okay,
which volunteer
s are scheduled for which events? Did they show up? Do they know when they're
supposed to show up and when and where?" So I did what I do in my day job. When I'm doing a build
versus buy analysis or when I'm comparing multiple vendors, I look at different software solutions,
I understand the costs, the pros and the cons, and the trade-offs, and then I put together
the options for a wide variety of folks, some of them more technical than others.
This experience was exactly the same as that,
and I brought the options to the organizers, and
we were able to make an educated decision. And, then, since I'd been doing the research
on these software solutions, I was able to provide training and support as we adopted them.
This is something I'm going to say several times. Having the vocabulary to take in the information
about software, especially software documentation, and understand different technical solutions,
these sorts of skills can be incredibly helpful to these kinds of organ
izations, and it's not
just when they're getting started, because as these organizations grow, they need to change and
adapt. You end up doing this iterative process over and over so that you can meet those needs
as they change. So in my experience, listening to Michelle was a good idea, and she encouraged me to
take the next big step in my political experience. She told me to run for office. She told me to
run for precinct committee. She said, "You're going to be a PC." And I said, "I don'
t know what
that means." And that was okay. She said I needed 10 petition signatures. I figured I could manage
that, and then I was going to be on the ballot. I did that. I won in another landslide this time
because I ran unopposed, and now I was elected to a thing I didn't entirely understand, but that was
okay. I had help. I had people around me who were willing to coach me and help me understand, "Okay,
now that you've got this job to help the voters in your precinct, what in the world d
oes that look
like?" It probably looked like what you think of if you think about doing political volunteering.
It meant I did a lot of door-knocking, made a lot of phone calls, wrote a lot of letters, but I also
used technology when I was doing this work as PC. If you talk to a precinct committee person
just about anywhere in the United States, they probably use a piece of software that is pretty
common to manage who to talk to in your precinct and keep track of history of conversations. T
his
software is incredibly powerful. It's not always the most user-friendly, but the documentation is
really, really nice. So I started this work as PC, and I knew I needed to learn how to use
this software. I read the documentation, figured it out, and then I was able to help
other PCs who needed to learn this software too. I am not a data scientist by any stretch of
the imagination. I can understand a basic data set and do some very simple analysis, but that's about
it. If you do have a
data science background, that sort of work is so incredibly useful when you're
doing work as a precinct committee person because you want to be able to understand what's happening
in your precinct and how is it changing over time. This last one I end up doing in just about every
organization that I work with, and I used to do web development in a previous life as a day
job, but I actually tend to do stuff that's a lot simpler for these sorts of organizations
because I want to be able to pas
s it off. Often, a Google site with some drag-and-drop, especially
for something that doesn't have a web presence, is all you really need, and that's something
that you can easily teach somebody else how to maintain going forward. So after I'd
been doing this PC work for a while, I found myself in this situation where I was
literally mobilizing hundreds of volunteers to do voter registration in the county, and it
was very exciting and it was very intimidating. There were technical aspects,
like the volunteer
coordination work I was talking about before, that came into play here. But what I found
was particularly interesting was how, at least in my experience, being a woman doing
this work was really useful. I won't pretend to understand why this is, but very practically,
what this looks like is, you get a whole bunch of volunteers in a room, you explain to them the
work they need to do, you hand them a clipboard, and you send them out to do the work. Inevitably,
some of them
have questions, and I don't know why, but volunteers were more likely to come ask me a
question or one of the other women or non-binary organizers than they were to ask the men, at
least in my experience. My husband Joshua is often with me when I'm doing this work, and he
is just as equipped to answer questions as I am, but he could see he was less likely to get
approached. So I don't know why this is, but this was a spot where, specifically
being a woman, I found to be really helpful. Let
's just recap. In 2016, I went to an event that
was for city council, and I didn't know what city council did or how it worked. By 2019, a friend
of mine said, "I'm going to run for city council. Will you help me?" And I said, "Sure, I've never
done any campaign work, but we'll figure it out." My friend AJ ran a fantastic campaign. He lost,
but we all learned so much in this experience of trying to get a campaign off the ground. I've
never worked at the very beginnings of a startup, but the
entire time we were trying to launch
this campaign, I wished that I had. So if you have experience getting a startup off the ground,
I encourage you, find a campaign in your area. I bet they will be delighted to have you, especially
if it's one of these super local campaigns like city council or school board, because you have to
set up a bunch of internal communication tools and external communication tools and a zillion other
things that we just had to figure out as we went along because
we'd never done this before.
In 2020, I was asked to take on, by far, the biggest challenge I had done to date. I was
asked to join the leadership for the Champaign County Democratic Party. Champaign County has more
than 200,000 people, and there were six of us on the executive committee. I was terrified, and
I immediately started looking around for like, "Okay, what skills can I bring to bear in
this role?" And it was wild how stuff I did at work came into play here again.
When you're doin
g county party work, a bunch of it is just really bureaucracy. Some
of it's literally in state law about what you can and can't do and how you need to do it. We hadn't
inherited a ton of information from the previous administration. I don't know why. So we had to
figure out a bunch of this stuff on our own. So I went into the mode that I go into when I'm
figuring out what we need to build in software. I started gathering requirements, I solicited
feedback, and I built artifacts. In this cas
e, the artifacts weren't software. There were a
bunch of spreadsheets and checklists, but the process was exactly the same. In the end, we were
able to streamline a bunch of really important workflows to ensure that we were maintaining
consistent and transparent processes. Because when you're doing things like slating candidates
to appear on the ballot or making recommendations to fill county board vacancies, you want to
make sure that those processes are very clear, transparent, and repeat
able. I also did some
work helping them set up social media tooling. Now, I am not a content creator by any stretch of
the imagination. So if you do content creation, if you're a graphic designer, if you like to build
infographics and stuff, places will be clamoring for you. That is a really, really important
skill. I can't do that, but I could set up social media tooling to make it easier for our content
creators to stay engaged. When they had trouble, I was able to help them troubleshoot
the software
that they were using. I did this work for about two years, and then, actually, I moved out
of Champaign and I moved to the Chicago area, and I got started again up north. I'm running for
precinct committee person again. I'll be on the ballot. It's in less than two weeks. I think I'll
win again because I'm running unopposed again. I also have found work doing volunteer
coordination for a state rep candidate in town, and I've been serving on multiple boards
and steering committe
es both for partisan and nonpartisan causes up here in the
Chicagoland area, and it's been really, really exciting. Some of the stuff I
love to do is train other volunteers so that they can figure out how to do their
very best work. I also get to do really, really cool stuff like this. I love the
opportunity to get to talk with and learn from our elected officials. I've gotten to meet
senators and governors. One of my most treasured memories of this experience is, I was having a
conversati
on with Illinois Governor Pritzker, and he asked me to tell him about my experience
as a woman in technology. He was so interested and he was so engaged, and it's really beyond
my wildest dreams that I get to do this work. So that's me. That's my story. I hope that you
found something in here to convince you that our skills are needed right now. The things
that we know how to do today, those things are valuable to the political organizations
and our communities. So I want to leave you with
just a few suggestions. If you're excited
to get started, what might you do? Step zero, show up. When I say show up, I mean show up
anywhere. Show up for a campaign that's not in the part of town that you live. It worked
for me. Go to a city council meeting. If you're not comfortable going in person, find it online.
Listen to your elected officials. What are they saying? What are they concerned about? What are
they doing that you want to understand better? And then reach out to them. They re
present
you. Make sure they understand where you are on the issues that are important to you. If
you really want to jump in with both feet, join your local political party or
grassroots organization. In my experience, these places are delighted to have new people,
and they will be so excited to get you engaged and started right away. It could be that you end
up using your special skills even sooner than you think. Thank you so much for this opportunity.
I am so excited to be at ELEVATE. Th
ank you.
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