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Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the sense of "the democratic party is using technology to their advantage" or "the democratic party is moving the tech industry into their political machine"?
I'm not sure what it would mean for them to move the tech industry into their political machine. Could you clarify?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the sense of "the democratic party is using technology to their advantage" or "the democratic party is moving the tech industry into their political machine"?
I'm not sure what it would mean for them to move the tech industry into their political machine. Could you clarify?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems more likely that this was an Obama campaign advantage, rather than a Democratic party advantage. The translation over isn't obvious. From what I've heard their internal organization was pretty fluid. That kind of thing depends on the quality of people involved, their commonality of purpose, and the organizational culture. You can't box that and roll it over to party HQ. That said, Democrats do seem more like…
I agree pretty strongly. I read, for example, that the Obama campaign expanded the Democratic Party's voter database by something like a factor of 10.
Narwhal and other OFA DBs may have supplemental information -- as do the "blue" vendors -- but that's separate from the voterfile, and I'm not sure its life-cycle is certain at this point.
I think that what they accomplished is amazing, but remember that their goals were very different than your typical business. Their goals were to create something in a short amount of time with a really random group of people given a fairly short lifetime. The individual projects will live on, but the whole thing was shut down at the end of the campaign. A business is about sustainability. You are creating things tha…
> In that given, its not unusual that you want all of your employees to be able to work on various parts of the stack as focus changes or what not. Isn't it? I'm a frontend dev. While I'm capable of digging into the backend and mucking around, it's not a typical part of my job. There are backend devs who I can talk to, who are writing Scala or Java rather than Javascript or Ruby, who can deal with problems faster and…
It's important to note that in this sense, "polyglot" refers to the collective group -- ie, the Obama campaign had numerous talented people with a huge variety of skills in-house -- vs the individual sense of the word.
Not to say that there weren't incredibly talented generalists, but when you have a team of this size (dozens of designers and front-end developers, engineers focused on the back-end APIs, a team dedicated to data integration, a handful of dedicated ops and DBAs) the ability of individuals to specialize in an area could be a strength.
Like it or not, the democratic party owns technology compared to republicans today.
In the sense of "the democratic party is using technology to their advantage" or "the democratic party is moving the tech industry into their political machine"?
One system was diverse and cooperative; the other isolated, secretive, and ultimately a failure.
I'll agree that a GOTV tool is only one part of campaign IT, but I think there's a lesson waiting here.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORCA_%28computer_system%29
Like it or not, the democratic party owns technology compared to republicans today.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds insightful but really isn't. It's the Republicans who want the most change right now. It's change in a direction most of us disagree with, but it's far more radical than the Democratic agenda. The reality is that if there's a tech advantage held by the Dems, it's the product of much simpler demographics; youth, urban, educated.
It's not called "change" when it goes backwards in time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds insightful but really isn't. It's the Republicans who want the most change right now. It's change in a direction most of us disagree with, but it's far more radical than the Democratic agenda. The reality is that if there's a tech advantage held by the Dems, it's the product of much simpler demographics; youth, urban, educated.
I do think the democrats have a technological advantage in this case, but it is far less solid than it may appear at first. For simple demographic reasons the republicans cannot continue to focus on the old white anti homosexual segment of the population, since there aren't enough of them left to form a majority (projections suggest that Texas may turn blue by 2020, perhaps even 2016, if Texas turns blue then the Rep…
That's impressive. Glad that tech is on the Democratic side.
But then again change, liberalism, progress, technology and innovation are all leftist tenets - so it isn't so surprising.
Here's hoping to another tech assisted Republican defeat in 2016. May the morons stay out of power - least they screw us all once again.
I think that what they accomplished is amazing, but remember that their goals were very different than your typical business. Their goals were to create something in a short amount of time with a really random group of people given a fairly short lifetime. The individual projects will live on, but the whole thing was shut down at the end of the campaign. A business is about sustainability. You are creating things tha…