When do you want to get involved?

Really, the answer to this question should be, "as soon as possible"! But even more so than in private industry, timing is really everything in politics. That means the timing of your involvement in politics drives what you can and can't get done.

There are a lot of "step functions" in politics: moments when a final and (usually) irrevocable decision occurs. The most famous of these is election day: some candidates are elected to office, some go home, and that's that. But there are numerous other such occasions: legislation that passes or fails, filing deadlines, court decisions, etc.

That's what we mean by "timing is everything", and to put it another way: time is the most precious commodity in politics. That has several consequences for progressive technologists:

• When you get involved in a campaign or advocacy effort can be incredibly important. All other things being equal, it's better to be involved earlier rather than later. If "early money is like yeast" (it helps you raise more dough), then early involvement is even more important.

• Deadlines matter and they're often non-negotiable. More to the point, deadlines can be hidden or not entirely obvious. For example, as more and more states add early voting and other ways to cast ballots early, it's no longer sufficient to consider Election Day a "final deadline" for GOTV efforts. On top of that, any technology which feeds into campaign programs needs to consider the time needed to plan such a program. New technology that arrives the week before Election Day is often useless; the get out the vote program is often devised quite far in advance of Election Day, and it's often difficult to adjust a get out the vote program to accomodate new technology.

• Technology is great, but technology that introduces new efficiencies or more broadly creates more time is absolutely essential. If we think about a typical downballot campaign as a six-month window of time, we have a precious and relatively fixed resource: about 180 days' worth of a candidate's time. Anything which makes the candidate more efficient, so that a given day is more productive, or which creates time for the candidate (for example, by eliminating or offloading some non-essential tasks) helps maximize the value of that time.

• Timelines overlap and to some degree build on each other, sometimes in non-obvious ways. From the point of view of electoral politics, the end of one election season sometimes dovetails closely with the beginning of another. Finding and exploiting these timelines can be a valuable way to push the ball forward on technology. For example, after a major election cycle (in November of an even-numbered year) there are a handful of municipal elections the following spring, and statewide elections in Virginia about a year later. These can be great opportunities to experiment or to "follow-up" on questions from the previous election cycle.