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The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

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Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#71

Post by pessimizer »

war1025 wrote: post #59
nooron wrote: post #44

I started a company that was asked to write a proposal to make what became the app that failed last night. I declined because it was outside of our core skillset. You can read my prior comments or look at my profile to validate this. If you want my perspective as someone who started a Democratic software company, you should keep reading. This app emerged from a mandate to make the caucus more accessible and transpare…

I don't know whether I heard correctly or if the number was accurate, but I heard someone throw out $60k as the amount paid for the app development this morning on the radio. That sounds like a lot of money to a lay-person, but assuming $100/hr, which seems like at least a reasonable ballpark rate, that breaks down to 600 man-hours, or 15 man-weeks. That is a very tight deadline to turn out a critical app like this.…

I think the plan was clearly that they would reuse the software for every caucus during this primary, so the $60K was one of a series of payments for the same product.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#72

Post by RealisticImpact »

faizshah wrote: post #28
tmpz22 wrote: post #14

This should really be getting more attention, here is an alternative breakdown: https://imgur.com/gallery/ycOC0HX . The jest of it is one of the most important institutions in the United States (the Democratic National Committee) uses a highly nepotistic and incompetent system for managing IT which leads to colossal failures in marketing, canvassing, and security. Not to mention massive PII violations as millions of…

So if we are interested in helping the DNC improve their software what do you think we should do? Is there a route for something like 18F for the DNC?

The Democratic Party must be destroyed to save it. This is a material manifestation of underlying shit, just a symptom at several degrees of remove from any more-than-superficial cause.

The only thing that could conceivably provide a systematic opening to fix things (ie, not just fixing specific things, after they've become apparent, because they've already catastrophically failed), in the realm of badly-written science fiction and fantasy, would be:

Bernie Sanders (or another equally popular candidate, in the near-future) is ratfucked so badly and obviously (which this could be the start of the perception of, even if it is just sufficiently advanced incompetence to be indistiguishable from malice), then the nominee loses to Trump so convincingly, that it completely shatters the party -- like it is no longer able to function at a basic level, and will clearly, even to the most delusional, never be able to win another election again -- and then... something, I don't even know how this would work. I am not creative enough to write this laughable science fiction any further.

There might also be a route involving Bernie Sanders winning both the primary and the general by a landslide, but that comes with its own and different set of systematic problems that I don't think would make the party's competence at dealing with technical problems, at least, any better.

But in either case, the deepest underlying rot is still the toxic interests of its financial backers, which are reproduced in the very bones of the party, and occasionally pop up in especially ridiculous and very indirect ways like this (and many more that don't get frontpaged as a problem on HN, or the New York Times for that matter). There's no fixing anything without somehow getting rid of them. And there is no realistically traversable path to that.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#73

Post by charred_toast »

nooron wrote: post #44

I started a company that was asked to write a proposal to make what became the app that failed last night. I declined because it was outside of our core skillset. You can read my prior comments or look at my profile to validate this. If you want my perspective as someone who started a Democratic software company, you should keep reading. This app emerged from a mandate to make the caucus more accessible and transpare…

If it means anything to anyone, my sister is naming her design company after her beloved dog, Shadow.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#74

Post by coredog64 »

LargeWu wrote: post #5

If there's any good that comes out of this, it's that people will hopefully see the value of physical paper ballots or records.

There always was a paper trail. The purpose of the app is/was to send a set of numbers from the precinct to central.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#75

Post by godelski »

war1025 wrote: post #59
nooron wrote: post #44

I started a company that was asked to write a proposal to make what became the app that failed last night. I declined because it was outside of our core skillset. You can read my prior comments or look at my profile to validate this. If you want my perspective as someone who started a Democratic software company, you should keep reading. This app emerged from a mandate to make the caucus more accessible and transpare…

I don't know whether I heard correctly or if the number was accurate, but I heard someone throw out $60k as the amount paid for the app development this morning on the radio. That sounds like a lot of money to a lay-person, but assuming $100/hr, which seems like at least a reasonable ballpark rate, that breaks down to 600 man-hours, or 15 man-weeks. That is a very tight deadline to turn out a critical app like this.…

I mean that's the kind of money you spend funding two interns for a few months. Is it a surprise that this app looks like it was designed by a few interns on a tight schedule?

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#76

Post by nooron »

charred_toast wrote: post #73
nooron wrote: post #44

I started a company that was asked to write a proposal to make what became the app that failed last night. I declined because it was outside of our core skillset. You can read my prior comments or look at my profile to validate this. If you want my perspective as someone who started a Democratic software company, you should keep reading. This app emerged from a mandate to make the caucus more accessible and transpare…

If it means anything to anyone, my sister is naming her design company after her beloved dog, Shadow.

That's very sweet, my cousin's dog was named Shadow. I hope it goes well for her.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#77

Post by bluehat »

charred_toast wrote: post #73
nooron wrote: post #44

I started a company that was asked to write a proposal to make what became the app that failed last night. I declined because it was outside of our core skillset. You can read my prior comments or look at my profile to validate this. If you want my perspective as someone who started a Democratic software company, you should keep reading. This app emerged from a mandate to make the caucus more accessible and transpare…

If it means anything to anyone, my sister is naming her design company after her beloved dog, Shadow.

That remains terrible branding. Branding is part of marketing. Her dog is not part of that.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#78

Post by yazboo »

nooron wrote: post #44

I started a company that was asked to write a proposal to make what became the app that failed last night. I declined because it was outside of our core skillset. You can read my prior comments or look at my profile to validate this. If you want my perspective as someone who started a Democratic software company, you should keep reading. This app emerged from a mandate to make the caucus more accessible and transpare…

Can you share any more about the proposal process? Where was the RFP posted? What were the evaluation criteria? I was kind of assuming that this was more of a handshake deal or a cold sell or something, surprised to hear it went through a structured bid of some kind.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#79

Post by coredog64 »

bluGill wrote: post #55
jariel wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paper ballots with scanned results in the booth. No scan means redo your vote. That way you have a track record + instant results. Folks can take home the stub to ensure non-repudiation etc.. They can look up the serial number on the stub they take home to see for sure it was recorded. FYI we should also have basic ID requirements for voting. The arguments against it are kind of ridiculous, and federal or state ID sh…

This is a caucus not a primary. From what I understand there are no ballots at all - you physically walk around the room until you find the group you want to support, if your group is large enough to choose delegates (generally there are more slots than people to fill them) to the next convention. The delegates are in theory (in practice it is different) not required to vote for you, so when your group chooses people…

Once everything has been decided, an iron clad paper trail IS produced. There’s nothing anonymous about the results document and it is signed in front of witnesses. AIUI, the paper doc isn’t discarded until after the party convention.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#80

Post by coredog64 »

jandrese wrote: post #61
neonate wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's a better theory. The process may be 'bad' but it has been that way, and worked, for a long time. As far as we know, the new ingredient was the app.

There were some confounding factors, like an apparent day-of decision to require the caucuses to report the results of every vote cast, not just the last one. This led to considerably higher data requirements in precincts where multiple votes were necessary to reach consensus. The new requirements were apparently not reported to the staff until around noon on the day of the election. As anybody can tell you, nothing…

The extra information has been known since 2016. Bernie (or his campaign) asked for it as a means of providing additional transparency into the process.
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