I walked into the San Francisco Nonprofit Technology Center not knowing what would become of my summer. It was foggy, early, and terribly packed on BART that morning. I wondered if I had somehow stumbled upon a glimpse of ‘real world’ 9-5 drudgery. As I stepped further into the office, however, I was quickly reminded of the reason I loved that place and the magic created there by heroes of the nonprofit technology frontier. Posters of direct action events and photos from hack nights lined the walls. “Good things are happening here,” I thought to myself. I strolled down the hall and into one of the Radical Designs rooms and was greeted by a few members of the RD team. They were all super friendly and glad to have me on board. David gave me the run-down on who does what for the company, and the projects currently in the works.

I found a desk and quickly got to work on my first project, a site for the Sea Turtle Restoration Project. Radical Designs creates sites that use the AMP (Activist Mobilization Platform) content management system. It took a while to get accustomed to the structure and interface of AMP; I’ve become pretty well-versed in Joomla! and Drupal, but every Content Management System has its own logic to be learned. It’s a great tool, especially in that its functionality is geared towards... well, mobilizing activists. I also got to peek at CrabGrass, a yet-to-be-released social networking platform built with Ruby on Rails. Over the course of the summer, I set up a few sites from scratch, while other projects required me to recreate existing static sites in AMP. I was even given the opportunity to meet with and train clients on AMP myself!

The Radical Designs team made me feel like a valuable member right from the start. Although I had plenty of questions, I never felt like a ‘lowly intern’. Everyone was eager to teach me new things, and I had a few chances to bring my knowledge to the table. As the summer winded down, David approached me to say that the company and clients were quite pleased with my work, and asked if I would like to have a ‘real job’ after the summer was over. I accepted eagerly, and will be working part-time for them during the school year, and then... who knows?

One of the greatest perks of this internship was learning about the work being done by grassroots organizations around the Bay Area. Creating sites was a strange sort of voyeurism into the information, communication, and direct actions being put forth by these passionate groups. It felt good to do work that enabled the world’s problem-solvers to have their voices heard. Meta-activism, I suppose.

It was a great summer and I look forward to continuing to work with Radical Designs. This has been an invaluable experience and I hope to incorporate what I have learned into my work with GIIP this year. For more information visit: radicaldesigns.org.