Why Your CEO Should Give You An Election Day Vacation
TakeOffElectionDay & Civic Literacy for the Tech Industry
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I woke on Election Day 2012 with control of Barack Obama’s Twitter account. And Rihanna’s. And Ashley Judd, Eva Longoria, Donna Brazile plus several hundred other celebrities and Democratic Party influencers (not to mention hundreds of thousands of everyday citizens). Along with some friends, I’d built an app called Picswitch that made it easy to overlay graphics atop your Twitter and Facebook profile pics. The Obama campaign adopted it as their official campaign tool, and from there it was off to the races during the Fall election season. The way Twitter’s API permissions worked at the time, in order to sign into the Picswitch tool and allow it to change your avatar, you also had to grant the app the ability to tweet on your behalf. We obviously kept all of this software quite secure. But, still, wow.
It wasn’t my first experience using simple tech tools to help people spread a message across social media. Earlier in 2012, we deployed a simpler version of Picswitch in the battle against SOPA/PIPA legislation. Nearly 90,000 people used that tool to reach tens of millions of their followers.
While I was proud to have a hand in these two efforts, they were both a step removed from what actually matters in elections: voting. So, for this 2016 election I decided to get out of people’s social media and into their startups.
This time I wanted to seek out CEOs and founders of tech companies who would be encouraging their teams to vote and proactively give them time off if necessary.
The TakeOffElectionDay campaign started about a week ago with some tweets (sidenote: this awesome website was made by two brothers who saw the beginning of the effort and ran with it). Since then, more than 100 companies have signed-up, including Spotify, TaskRabbit, Survey Monkey, Wikimedia and The Skimm.
While I might be partisan (#ImWithHer), this voter effort is not. For too long the tech community has been accused of apathy around social issues. I know this to not be the case from my daily interactions with passionate…
