One of my big projects was to help address the thousands of emails coming into the campaign every day. Volunteers were trying to sort through them all and barely keeping up. I was able to eliminate a large percentage of emails by removing spam and bounces. We set up better processes for managing the workflow of the volunteers and gave them some new tools and filters. Ironically I was introduced to the project because of my experience with help desk ticket software but the first thing I realised was that the amount of email they were receiving was larger than any FOSS (free and open source software) ticket system could handle. Therefore, I had to be creative.

Did you work on the campaign for Barack Obama as well?

Just the last three days of the campaign. I went to Pennsylvania where by day I walked door-to-door as part of the get out the vote effort, and at night I volunteered at the local Obama office. When I arrived the office manager was so overloaded she didn't have time to give me something to do. She was flooded with phone calls and people coming to her with questions. After listening to her answer questions for about 15 minutes I learned enough to answer about 50 percent of the questions that were coming in. The rest I tried to answer by doing Web searches from my laptop. I was deflecting enough people from interrupting her that she had enough spare cycles to give me something to do. Finally she asked me, 'Who are you and where did you come from?'

You are a self-proclaimed internet activist. Are you a fan or a critic of hacktivism, and have you used such strategies?

I don't support hacktivism that includes illegal activity. What I do support is geeks getting involved in social justice so as to make the world a better place. There are charities and service organisations everywhere that would benefit greatly from a weekly visit by a geek to do basic PC maintenance like making sure all Windows systems have working anti-virus software, backing up critical data, or helping replace an insanely manual process with a simple MS-Excel macro. These things seem minor to the average geek, but are incredibly valuable to such organisations. Helping set up Drupal or another content management system (CMS) can help such an organisation go from having a boring Web site with nearly no updates to an exciting Web site that can make them self-sufficient for routine updates.