I was recently asked by a friend to help my local county's Democrats to evaluate and recommend a volunteer organizing app. I sort of expected a medium-sized non-profit with some What I found was an all-volunteer group that is incredibly dedicated, but under-resourced with an extremely shallow tech bench and no technical leadership whatsoever. I saw things that made me shudder as a developer:

- Nobody knows how to use the CMS, so no new content in months.

- Their site lists a dated version of their team, with _personal_ emails on the public web, since nobody knows how how to set up new mail accounts under their domain. They get destroyed with spam.

- I overhead a volunteer clicking really rapid fire, like 100 times in a minute. I probed a bit and found that is how they send out messages. Its something straight out of the excellent "How to Automate the Boring Stuff"

- All data has to be manually entered into 2 systems, and they want to add a 3rd.

All of those things and 100 others could be fixed expediently, but there is literally nobody to do it, and no committee that handles that role. My day job in a journalistic organization means I really cannot engage in partisan political work, but I'm just itching to help.

If you are progressively-minded and want to make a difference in 2020 elections, please show up and help. There is plenty of work to be done, and shockingly few volunteers or staff with the skills you have, HN reader.