I am not a hugely political beast. I am a registered Republican, and there are times when I regret that. I find that my personal opinions tend toward the middle of the road, and both Democrats and Republicans are often too extreme for me. And, I’m sure I don’t fully agree with Dan on everything, but I respect him as a person, as a business person, and as a thoughtful politician who earnestly desires to do good. He’s running a “come from behind” campaign against a well known, well-financed, and thoroughly experienced incumbent, Zoe Lofgren, and he has a lot of work to do to win this election.

A political campaign, especially for one as high-profile as a run for Congress, is essentially a non-profit business. It’s a business, however, that’s only operating for a very short time; in this case, the work of the campaign will be over by November 3rd.

Like all businesses, it needs a certain amount of infrastructure and technology to keep things running. In addition to setting up and managing Dan’s website (running WordPress 3.0.1, by the way), I’ve set up Google Apps on his domain, so that we now all have unified email, calendaring, and document sharing. I’ve set up a virtual phone system using My1Voice, and I’m running his Facebook page and his Twitter account, both of which get automatically generated posts via TwitterFeed.

I’ve still got a to-do list a mile long, and very little time to get things done. However, I have to admit that there’s a ton of free or low-cost applications out there on the web that can handle the vast amount of things we need to do. We’ve already hit some headaches—for example, we discovered a bug in Google Docs where, instead of creating a new document for you, it redirects you to a help page if you happen to be signed in to more than one Google account at the moment. My personal goal, however, is to be unnoticed; if I do my job well, then things should just work, and Dan can focus on the important issues of running his campaign.