Today was my last day at the Citizen Engagement Lab, after three years of working with a band of incredibly hard working, smart, passionate people.

It is a bittersweet farewell, but I am looking forward to the future, and to a new life of freelance work.

To my colleagues, comrades, and friends:

Today is my last day with you in the CEL technology team. In the three years that I’ve been here, we have grown from a small team in Berkeley to a nationwide network of kick-ass individuals working in half a dozen organizations representing over three million people. Together we have designed, built and launched a whole new website for each organization (including finally, our own), over twenty campaign microsites, and countless petitions, signup sheets, and action pages.

We have taken on, and taken down, media moguls from Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs to Mark Zuckerberg and Rick Ross. We have built twitter blasters and email drippers, crowd-sourced databases and videogames, registered voters online and given away money to artists. We have stayed up late and gotten up early, on a tireless quest to build technology to make the world closer to the more equal one we all know is just, and believe is possible.

I am honored to have found a group of incredibly smart, passionate, and dedicated people to work alongside. You are taking the fight to the opposition: calling out racism, sexism, climate change denial, and regressive politics, wherever the source. In a movement that is too often playing catch-up, you are pressing forward.

I am incredibly proud of the hard work we have done, the victories we have won, and the team we have built that continues to churn out hits. I have the utmost confidence in Ted to continue to lead the team, in Mike to design beautiful and effective user interfaces, and in Mark to keep the servers running smoothly and explore the next generation of organizing tools.

While I don’t know exactly where my next adventure will take me, I am confident that I will continue to follow the arc of social justice, and I hope that our paths will cross again in the future. Please feel free to contact me via my personal email [email protected], on social media, or out for drinks in Oakland, New York, or Washington. I can’t wait to see what we all do next.

No pasaran!
– Josh