About Me
My name is Michael Whitney. I call myself an "interwebologist," which basically means that I use the Internet a bunch, for both work and not-work. I've lived in Washington, DC since 2002, graduating from American University in 2006 and working in the real world ever since.
Currently...
During the day, I am the "New Media Coordinator" at American Rights at Work, a small labor rights nonprofit in DC. I'm involved with all things Internet at ARAW, including managing the website, producing advocacy and email campaigns, and otherwise trying to engage people on the Internet to support workers' rights. AAt night, I use the Internet some more to design, develop, and produce sweet things for your Internets. I also take a lot of photos.
Generation Dean
I first started melding politics with the Internet when I created Students for Dean, a national organization of students supporting Howard Dean for President. I bought studentsfordean.org, built a website in Geocities, copied the code over, set up an email address, and within 4 weeks had connected 50 campus groups to collectively organize for Dean.
With the combined efforts of Yoni Cohen and Ryan Beam, we built an even bigger network of 150 groups in 2 months, attracting the attention of Dean's campaign and an invitation to make Students for Dean the official youth organizing effort. We accepted the invitation to Vermont, but on the condition that we retain creative control and day-to-day management of operations.
Generation Dean was born in the summer of 2003 under the excellent leadership of Amanda Michel; I worked full time from my dorm room in between classes, organizing our online and offline communications. Though college campuses were our bread & butter, accounting for more than half of our groups, we also had high school students, punx, snowboarders, young professionals, and even Disney employees create groups on our website. In the end, we had more than 23,000 members and 1,200 groups organizing on their own to support Dean.
Full feed: blog updates, sweet links, and photos.
