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The Billion Dollar Startup: Inside Obama's Campaign Tech
Nerval's Lobster writes "A presidential campaign is many things to many people: a reason to hope in the future, a wellspring of jokes and debate fodder, an annoyance to tune out, a chance to participate in the civic process. But for a couple dozen software engineers and developers involved over the past two years in President Obama's re-election effort, a campaign was something entirely different: a billion-dollar tech startup with an eighteen-month lifespan and a mandate to ship code under extreme pressure. Speaking to a New York City audience, some of Obama for America's leading tech people—those involved in the all-important Dashboard and Narwhal projects, as well as fundraising and DevOps—characterized the experience as 'insane,' filled with unending problems and the knowledge that, at the end of the whole process, nearly everything they worked on would likely end up tossed away. This is the story of what happened, and how technologies on a massive scale can make or break campaigns."
British parties are looking at Obama's operation very closely to see if they can improve their own using similar techniques. But they don't have nearly the same budgets for this kind of bespoke IT work and corporation-sized infrastructure, so are having trouble figuring out how to adapt any lessons from it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If only someone could have hit their system with some kind of stuxnet type virus/trojan, we might have a brighter future to look forward to.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
What bothered me the most about the 2012 campaign was the lack of almost any discussion of actual issues. There was almost no discussion about the fiscal cliff, entitlement reform, gun control, or any other issues that the country is now dealing with. Unfortunately, the lesson seems to be that keeping campaigns content free, and instead focusing on social media, turnout, and the "ground game", is the way to get elected, even if it isn't good for the country.
Of course...it is the 'dream'.
Get in early on ground floor...build it up, bail for a shitload of money, then blissful happiness in early retirement with hookers and blow.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
"and the knowledge that, at the end of the whole process, nearly everything they worked on would likely end up tossed away."
Do they think that's the last election that will ever be held? Or are they just all pretending that all code and documentation was thrown away, so that each of them can sell their "secret backups" at the next gig?
Yes, but they don't have to deal with 50 individual, winner-take-all races over several hundred markets with three hundred million voters.
And, to be fair, most of the 1.1 Billion spent by the Obama campaign was spent on advertising slots and ground game (rental, printing). This wasn't really a $1 Billion startup, but rather a conduit for $1B in spending. It's like saying your stock broker is a billion dollar operation because he directs clients 401k money for a 10,000 person corporation.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Obama turned to his team and said..."you didn't build that!" :)
I keed, I keed....
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
You're just now getting this? Every election is about the little shit that doesn't really matter much. It's about emotion and flash. It always has been. Look back 100 years and it will be the same thing. Look back 200. Mudslinging, character assassination, out-of-context quotes, outright lies have always been part and parcel of the political election process. Sure, we can do more and make more convincing fakes with technology (autotune the news, anyone?), but it's also easier to fact check.
Contentless politician banter is anything but a recent phenomenon.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"Specification change you can believe in!"
Table-ized A.I.
God undocks, -A- does not!
Interestingly, it was partially true. Both the Romney and the Obama campaign heavily leveraged Salesforce, for the precise reason they didn't have to build out everything themselves. A good chunk of the infrastructure and the business logic was already built out and ready to go once they signed on the dotted line.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The election politicians themselves were boring and predictable. (Well, once the primaries were over. I'm still convinced Herman Cain is actually a comedian who's work rivals that of Andy Kaufmen)
The stories about the IT side of their campaigns was pretty interesting. Obama's crew put together a really interesting and very modern piece of software that scaled up and scaled down in a way pretty much unique to it's purpose. Think about it. You need a piece of software that goes from zero users, to literally nation wide in every corner of every part of the country in a span of a few months.. And then it all ends in one day. How do you do that? How do you pay for that? Well, I remember at one point someone mentioned that it took a significant chunk of the entire EC2 cloud at it's peak usage.
Interviewers with developers made it obvious that these were very competent and enthusiastic engineers. They were involved in campaign ops from day one and the whole op was considered a huge sucess. .. Contrast that from Romney's op. It was clearly a subcontracted piece of software written by an outsourced developer with no little from the campaign. It ran from a single datacenter on a few fixed servers. Very compartmentalized. Very businesslike. And it failed miserably. It was late, crashed under nowhere near it's needed peak load, and left their organizers stranded with no information.
I was at first taken aback when I heard the clip of "You didn't build that". I just had to go youtube the Obama speech that it came from. Wow, he was talking about the infrastructure - roads, post offices, other public services... that all businesses count on to run. His point was that some things are best done by businesses, and other things are best done by Public Sector. For example, what company would take on building and maintaining Interstate highways throughout the US? Funny the statement sounded when taken out of context.
I rather like paying for my games at valve, that is more honest.
Je me souviens.
I moved from MD (blue state) to PA (toss up to somewhat blue state) right before the election. The DNC knew that we are all registered democrats, and that we had just moved. They sent one person to our house to ask if we were registered in our new state and if we needed help getting to the polls. We said that we were registered and everything was fine so they didn't bother us again. They took their money and resources somewhere else.
The RNC didn't bother us at all -- at first. Early polls showed mit that PA would be a lost cause, so both parties took their money to other states. But then later the RNC actually thought they would win Ohio ... because well they can't add and as we all know science and math have a well known liberal bias. So despite the fact that there is no way we would ever even consider voting for romney they sent in robo call after robo call after robo call. We got calls from Mit, Mit's wife, Clint Eastwood, basically every republican they could think of. Later we learned that they were so sure they would win Ohio that they wanted PA too just to make their margin or victory that much bigger.
Of course on election night we learned that not only were the RNC going to lose Ohio and PA but that Obama had such an electoral college landslide that even those two states didn't matter. The DNC kept the senate and the only reason the RNC kept the house was because republican goveners had screwed up the districts so much that 1 million more votes for democrats still wasn't enough to win the house. The best part was watching Karl Rove argue with the math department at Faux News over their projected results for Ohio. No Karl, they were using real math not republican math.
True story, Obama had planned to run a hard campaign on the issues, but they did focus groups and found the no one believed Romney would go through with the deep cuts to medicare, social security, welfare, etc along with the huge tax cuts. So Obama abandoned an issues based campaign and focused instead on the Romney's character and 'me-too' politics (like me, only louder).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
They should open source the whole thing. Let others fork this massive R&D project in new ways.
I can't really speak to the Romney campaign's use of salesforce, but I never had to deal with it as I believe that our use was limited to handling inbound contacts from public channels.
The Obama campaign had the distinct advantage of having 18 months to build our technology from the ground up, and that's precisely what we did! Of course, there were still external vendors that handled some functionality and we built systems so that everything was integrated and worked together.
Typically, a Presidential campaign only has 3-4 months between when they secure the nomination and the election to build their campaigns, which is why there are many niche vendors. Romney undoubtedly got an influx of support from the RNC once he had the nomination, but they could have easily have continued building since he never collapsed his organization from his 2008 campaign.
The big difference in my opinion was the choice to bring a dedicated internal term in as opposed to outsourcing to consultants.