The key thing that I don't think enough people understand is that this campaign finance reform that Lessig is working on is an issue for anyone who has ANY cause. Whether your cause is is climate change, net neutrality, or anything else, meaningful change with that issue is largely blocked by THIS issue (money in politics).
Lessig's personal path of giving up his work copyright reform as his "issue" to focus on corruption is exactly this understanding - that this needs to be treated as the core problem before any progress can be made with net neutrality, immigration or other issues.
For this reason I'm very surprised that the tech community, who is so loud about net neutrality, isn't speaking up more about this corruption. Sure, there are different approaches to fighting against it, but I think Lessig's experiment is a great one and definitely worth our money.
Yes, I just looked at the form again (the link still works) and it asks:
University, Major, GPA, strongest programming language, second programming language, and preferences for location, and then a five-option part where you rate yourself out of:
Not my thing (none)
Can make do (fair)
Comfortable (good)
Comes easily (better)
World Class (best)
On the following:
1) Applications and Services: this is Google's term for the software that is directly visible to end users. People who focus on applications and services typically work on improving our capabilities in a variety of areas that span the range from new features to increasing performance and efficiency at Google scale. They will be tasked with devising and building new approaches to Google's problems, and exploring their effectiveness.
2) Systems: People who have a systems focus are oriented towards behind-the-scenes software and systems, often building them from underlying components and services. Systems work spans from platforms (hardware, OS, networking) to infrastructure (shared services such as storage, cluster management) and everything in between.
3) Sys-admin: Our system administrators keep all of Google's systems running, and help deploy new ones. They deal with issues involving single machines to those involving huge numbers. They work with native Linux environments, and Google extensions and services.
4) Verification and Test: Our test teams helps make our systems resilient and reliable - we put a lot of effort into this. Building world class applications at world class scales doesn’t happen by accident. It takes insight, innovation, and precision to verify our systems perform as expected.