November 2022: CTA Update
Published November 17, 2022
With election results rolling in, the CTA Team is more energized and motivated than ever to help groups across the movement maximize their impact.
In 2022, we’re proud to have supported the programs of our partner organizations, including Organize Arizona!, Mi Familia Vota, Voter Formation Project, SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania, Supermajority, Equis, The Impact Project, and others. These partners helped register and mobilize voters in key states, including Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.
As we continue to build our tech and data tooling to help propel impact, we want to take a moment to say THANK YOU to every data strategist, engineer, organizer, ED, volunteer, and activist for helping save democracy (yet again!) and ensure we can progress our values from the state house to the Senate. We’re behind you as your biggest fans!
Spotlight: So, What is PAD?
PAD, the Progressive Action Database, is our core data warehouse and integrations platform. Think of PAD (yes, like where a frog lives) as the jumping-off point for all things data.
PAD brings together syncs from tools like EveryAction and OpenField, as well as voter data from Catalist and TargetSmart. We also integrate geocodes, digital ad analytics, and so much more.
When we set out to build PAD we had three core goals in mind (and have stayed true to these): (1) Make data accessible; (2) allow for sustainable growth as technology changes and evolves; and (3) leverage cutting-edge tooling.
Prioritizing Transparency
We spent October making progress on a long-time goal of making available all of our dbt transform code. Our open-source custom Airbyte syncs and custom dbt can be found here.
The bulk of our work was spent designing a new architecture for orchestration of transformations so that partners can have real-time access to code (and the ability to propose changes!) while also ensuring we’re holding ourselves to a high standard on privacy and data security.
In the next two engineering sprints, our data engineering team is working on making all of our custom dbt code across all data sources public. This is a large refactor, but we’re excited to finally be able to do it!
Airbyte syncs are publicly available by default and are published as Docker images to our GitHub packages as well. All code is MIT licensed.
We’re Hiring!
If you’re looking for a post-election gig or you’re interesting in helping organizations across the progressive space leverage smart data, we have a few roles that might be right for you:
Data Product Manager: We’re looking for a product manager that can help us coordinate effective movement-space-focused data products. If you have extensive experience managing data and want a way to impact the space by making the data used by organizations more intuitive, this could be a great opportunity for you.
Partner Success Manager: With so many CTA partners (and new ones joining every month!), we’re also growing our Partnerships team. If you’ve worked with progressive data and would love to make it easier for others, we’re looking for you!
Engineering: We’re firing on all cylinders heading into 2023, and building more capacity across our entire engineering team. Don’t see a role that applies? Email us anyway.
Our full list of open roles can be found on our Careers page. If you’re interested and don’t see a posting that’s the right fit, we’d still love to hear from you — send us an email at jobs@techallies.org!
What We’re Reading (and Listening To)
We made time between refreshing election results to read this month, including:
- Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro: When an author wins a Nobel Prize in Literature, figure their next book is worth the read!
- The World We Make by N.K. Jemisin: A little sci-fi, a little dystopia.
- The Final Revival of Opal And Nev by Dawnie Walton: Technically, we’re listening to the audio book for this one — it’s giving Daisy Jones and the Six.
