I'm Neal Rauhauser, @StrandedWind. Iowa State software engineering back
when - dodged a punchcard programming class by one semester. Cisco Certified
Network & Design Professional for a decade, recently lapsed as the cert is
devalued at both resellers and in general due to their failure to protect
the brand. I pay the bills operating a rural triple play carrier.

   I'm a founding member of the Blog Workers Industrial Union, which came
together at the end of Netroots Nation 2009. We've spawned Progressive PST,
a social media consulting operation for Progressive Democratic candidates &
causes. PeanutButterPAC is another offshoot that I'm only tangentially
involved with, and we're chipping away at a workflow management system that
is Twitter enabled.

  We very purposefully don't have a web site for the tools we build. Some of
the BWIU are quite activist and they draw attention to themselves - we don't
want to bring that kind of heat down on our hosting. Any complex data is
prepared for the back end in Google Docs and access is triggered by commands
in direct messages to controlled Twitter accounts. The security model is
implemented using private lists. Results and logs return from the gmail
accounts associated with a particular set of Twitter IDs. Those operating
the systems have no idea where the backend servers are physically located.
Twitter tolerates us having two whitelisted IPs, only one of which is active
at any given moment. The systems are quite geographically diverse and we've
been doing a good bit of cross training.

  We've got low frequency, high value automated message placement - think
public service announcements for political campaigns and such. There's a one
to many direct message utility that permits the receivers to go
onduty/offduty with a single message, no matter how many tasks groups
they've joined. Applications accessible by API can be triggered remotely by
non-technical users and they receive reports via email. None of this stuff
is particularly complex - any elegant looking code we might have is due to
Net:Twitter and the help Marc Mims has provided.


  I am the resident programmer but you wouldn't have to follow me very long
to learn that I'm wrestling with #Lyme. I'd really like to find some more
stuff like Marc's Net:Twtter module - things that are simple to use, things
based on perl, thing that behave if I want to put them in a chain of unix
tools running in the background.

  Oh, and we've got a couple of million plus users organizations that would
like us to do certain things, and I could really use an Oauth app but
nothing off the shelf is going to fit my needs ...