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To Open Source Obama's Get-Out-the-Vote Code Or Not?
An anonymous reader writes "There's a battle brewing amongst Obama's election team. The political folks want to keep the get out the vote code closed source so republicans never get access to it, but the programmers want it open sourced so it can be improved upon. 'In this sense, the decision to mothball the tech would be a violation of the developers’ ethical principles. But the argument is about more than whether putting the tech back in the hands of the public is the right thing to do. "The biggest issue we saw with all of the commercial election software we used was that it’s only updated every four years," says Ryan. It was these outdated options that convinced team Obama to build all the campaign tech in-house. If the code OFA built was put on ice at the DNC until 2016, it would become effectively worthless. "None of that will be useful in four years, technology moves too fast," said Ryan. "But if our work was open and people were forking it and improving it all the time, then it keeps up with changes as we go."'"
Ok folks put up or shut up time
Open source and 'bad people' can use your code. Or keep it closed...
Personally I wouldn't want my code maintained to levels I've come to expect from open source "standards".
... open sourcing the software may be critical; not only does it expose to anyone who needs to know that its done well and ethically, but it can also serve as a platform (at all levels) for the majority of voters to fight back against the exponentiation of aforementioned gerrymandering.
Have the DNC set aside $400k or so to keep a 3 member team of coders updating it for the next 4 years. Don't forget, there are midterms in 2 years.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
I noticed that as well. I looked repeatedly for a mention of who Ryan was. Without further development, the context could lead you to believe it's Paul Ryan...
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
A bit like a Linux distribution, they used existing components and avoided as much work from scratch as possible due to the time constraints and need for as reliability and flexibility as is possible. Some of the AWS wizardry and front-end stuff may be what's really missing from the picture.
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
Why would they put it on ice for four years? There are plenty of state elections, local elections, and Congressional elections between now and the next presidential election, and I find it hard to believe that the software is so specialized that it's only good for presidential elections - for one thing, if it were that specialized, open sourcing it likely wouldn't help, since no one's going to bother working on code that's of no use for anything else.
And also, "none of that will be useful in four years" sounds like BS to me. The hyped usage was in targeting who to have workers phone or visit. Polls, addresses, phones, etc. aren't going to change significantly in four years, and unless they did some seriously messed-up stuff, their code should still compile and run with only minor tweaks at worst four years from now.
Because they don't care about good policy, they care about their team winning.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
This raises the interesting question of who owns the software and who's decision it is to open source it or not. The LA time link claims that specifically Obama and his campaign team is retaining the software, not the DNC.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
It gets as simply as this:
The developers who created the baby want it grow to be a nice piece of useful code that can benefit everybody.
Politicians want to have an edge on their rivals.
Let the DNC hire the programmers and keep them on staff. Keep the code closed-source (so the Rs don't get it) and also expand it to work with local races in the House and Senate.
Yup... it still a hard choice, though. Means to an end? It's OK if your candidate wins because of advertising, money spent, catch phrases and slogans, or computer software instead of winning because they had the best ideas and most tenable solutions to problems? I'm not starting an argument about whether or not Obama won that way - we're talking about the future. If the people involved actually wanted the best candidate to win, then they wouldn't try to advantage one over the other. Obviously, people want their side to "win," whether or not their candidate was better. Who are we to tell them what to do with their software?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
If the code is open, we might then have a notion of the scope, depth, and detail with which all of us are being tracked by the party. And that would probably be shocking to all of us who thought we had some level of privacy left. So I don't expect it to be open for just that reason.
The alternative to limited government is unlimited government.
In this sense, the decision to mothball the tech would be a violation of the developers’ ethical principles.
Unless the developers were tricked into thinking they were developing an open source software platform, I don't see where ethics come in. Why would a business release the software that is widely believed to have given it a competitive advantage?
. "It’s going to send a very bad signal to engineers who might consider working on the next election cycle in 2016," says Rathee. "It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how we work."
There are lots of programmers that understand confidentiality and realize that their code is never going to be open sourced. Is there a growing body of developers that want everything to be open sourced and free to the world?
The things we built off of open source should go back to the public," says Manik Rathee, who worked as a user experience engineer with OFA. The team relied on open source frameworks like Rails, Flask, Jekyll and Django.
Isn't this exactly the type of thing Rails, Flask, Jekyll and Django were built for? To allow developers to quickly develop and deploy applications? This is the kind of FUD that makes corporations afraid to use open source - they think that if they take advantage of an Open Source framework then they are obligated to open source their code even if it's used only for an in-house application.
I don't see the source code for Google's search engine or Facebook's core code available for download even though both companies take advantage of FOSS software in their infrastructure -- that's not to say that they haven't released some of their support code, but the "secret sauce" that runs the business is still private.
Third paragraph, first sentence.
"The software itself, much of it will be mothballed," believes Daniel Ryan, who worked as a director of front-end engineering at OFA.
Ron Paul is a loon. Like a broken clock he's right twice a day, as in Liberty'O'Clock. But other than that, he's quite literally batshit crazy.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
If the code is open, we might then have a notion of the scope, depth, and detail with which all of us are being tracked by the party. And that would probably be shocking to all of us who thought we had some level of privacy left. So I don't expect it to be open for just that reason.
It's not the Democratic Party that is doing the tracking - its the commercial data sources that they buy their data from. And you don't need to look at Obama's source code to see the depth that we are all tracked.
I know for a fact the Republican Party of Florida has similar a software/database setup that is constantly tweaked, maintained and used. There are too many elections between Presidential ones to let it go to waste. The DNC just needs to sell it to the state party offices to keep it useful.
Shawn Moore http://www.teuse.net
Ron Paul is a loon. Like a broken clock he's right twice a day, as in Liberty'O'Clock. But other than that, he's quite literally batshit crazy.
... But the people who keep voting in the same oligarchs, time and time again, expecting said aristocracy to actually do things differently at some point, are not somehow 'batshit crazy?' Or are you silently acknowledging that the D and R voters are just-as-if-not-moreso crazy than those who vote for Paul?
"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results" -- Albert Einstein
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
You talk like the code is all locked away, and that the keepers have the power to keep it that way.
Trying to keep widely spread information away from "bad" people is a fool's quest. How many programmers worked on this project? Dozens? How easy would it be to duplicate the ideas, if not the exact code? Pretty easy. The data may be more difficult, thanks to the sheer quantity, but that's also the most perishable part.
Do you realize how easy it is to design nuclear weapons? I suppose you'd like to think it's a big, carefully guarded secret. It's not. Why else would a backward nation like North Korea be able to build them? The hard thing is obtaining the material. Also, the rocket science required for the preferred delivery method is not exactly easy. But as for the bomb itself, if you have enough material, a very weak explosion, or even just slamming two hunks together with a sledgehammer, is enough to set it off. With high precision, less material is needed.
And this is source code we're talking about here, not munitions, WMDs, or assault rifles. Such being the case, why make a big stink about it? Release it, and save everyone the trouble. Let's head off the possibility of people being dragged into court to defend themselves for leaking.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
if by batshit crazy you mean advocating the withdrawl of U.S. troops overseas and not wanting to start pointless wars, or supporting 1st, 2nd and 4th Amendment rights and opposing the expansion of TSA, Patriot Act, stop the indefinite detention of American citizens, or wanting to reduce federal spending and balance the budget, or legalize marijuana and stop the war on drugs, or support gay marriage and other civil rights for gays, then yeah I guess he's batshit crazy.
I'm not sure why they are worried about that. Obama is the most conservative president the US has had in at least 30 years. If the next democratic nominee runs on the notion of continuing what he has done so far the GOP won't be able to field a candidate who is more conservative.
"Most conservative?"
You have avery limited definition of Conservative. He's the left-most President in history on gay rights. He's left of Bush on health care, taxes, military spending, Immigration Reform (he supports a path-to-citizenship for all illegals, not just DREAMers), and regulating Wall Street. That encompasses pretty much everything in most Americans top 10 issues facing DC. And we still haven't gotten to the #1 Conservative project: re-making the Supreme Court in their image.
Pretty much the only area he could be considered right of Bush is his use of drones, and that's only because Bush didn't have this many drones to play with.
The problem is that any new program will be commissioned by and paid for by Republicans. That means everything that can be outsourced will be, and we all know what the quality control on outsourced code is like.
Even if they did manage to come up with a brilliant GotV system, they are a dying party. Those under 30 went 2/3 for Obama this election. Conservatives have lost the moral war on gay marriage and they're not doing themselves any favor on other subjects, like rape and abortion. As for the economy, they need to stop pandering to their fellow rich white guys and recognize that consumers are the real "job creators" - not the investors who shove all their extra earnings into tax shelters abroad.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Getting more people to vote is good for the democratic process so the DNC should not look at it as a benefit to the Republicans but instead it is a benefit to all Americans. It should be open sourced so America benefits.
You care about your team winning because you think your team has the best policy. Either the tax burden on the wealthy is a drag to economic growth; or it needs to go up so we can pay for the troops who protect the economy that makes those people wealthy. Either the health system is choking economic growth because people pay too much for care (ie: they delay care until it gets really expensive, and then they can't successfully negotiate a good price because they're fucking dying), or it's choking economic growth because people pay too little (ie: they have no reason to negotiate a good price). Either the military is the perfect size, but could probably use some more toys, or it's too big and needs to get smaller. Either deficits are terrible and will destroy America, or they're not a big deal and we should continue them until the economy picks up some more.
There really isn't a lot of middle ground here.
It was written by PRIVATE employees, paid for by PRIVATE monies. Obama's campaign did not take PUBLIC money for his re-election.
The code is either owned by the Obama campaign, or the DNC, or perhaps a specific individual. It all depends on who payed and who commissioned the work. Regardless, no government civilian workers had their government paychecks granted to them because they worked on coding the Obama campaign's get out to work widget.
You are making a critical error in your comparisons. You are comparing what Obama has said to what other presidents have done. Obama has been president for a full term now, it is time to look at what he has done.
And if you do that, you will be hard pressed to find a single bill that he has signed that would not have been signed by Reagan. Hell, Obama has even raised taxes fewer times - for a lower total percentage - than Reagan did in his first term.
Every president as a candidate says they will do various things, and each president accomplishes a varied amount of those things (one could argue Obama is distinct in how few of those he has accomplished). However if you are talking about what Reagan, Bush, Clinton, or Bush Jr did, then you need to compare it to what Obama has done. And if you do that, you'll find that he is easily the most conservative of the set. We can even go back further and add Nixon to that set and Obama is arguably more conservative than him as well.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Part of caring about policy is caring about what can get through Congress.
If we were a Westminster-system Democracy I'd have a lot more respect for potential third-party candidates as policy-makers. But we aren't. We've got a bicameral Legislature, and an independent Executive. To actually get your ideas implemented you need a majority of both houses (and probably 60% of the Senate), and no US Third Party has a plan like that. Most don't even have warm bodies in a majority of Congressional districts and Senate seats, and it's very rare for those candidates to be qualified for the job. Note that I'm including Ron Paul in this, because he doesn't seem to understand that being doctrinaire Libertarian dooms you in Congress despite having years of experience getting jack done in Congress due to his excessively doctrinaire Libertarianism. Their plan tends to be:
1) I, Ron Paul/Ralph Nader/etc., will make the speech that energized the neckbeards/hippies/etc. a bunch more times.
2) ???
3) Victory!
They really honestly have no idea how they're gonna win a) Congressional seats where they don't have candidates (aka: most of them), or b) how they'll convince Boehner/Cantor/Pelosi/etc. to support their agenda.
In the UK or Canada this would be fine. By winning the top job, or even getting a significant proportion of the vote, you'd get seats in Parliament and the big parties would have to pay attention to you. At a minimum you'd be able to give the actual Prime Minister the third degree come Question Period. But in America you get a footnote in the history books. Just ask Debs.
Ron Paul is not a candidate for people who care about policy because he will never make policy. He's a candidate for people who care about looking good on Slashdot.
What made OFA better was that people were willing to let Obama For America get access to their friend's list, .mailrc, gmail contact list etc etc. I, for one, would be very terribly upset if OFA shares the contact graph created by me allowing OFA access to my private list of friends shared willy-nilly and every Tom-Dick-or-Harry politician starts calling my contact list pretending to have my approval or endorsement. I gave Obama access to my contact list. I don't want it shared with DNC without my explicit approval.
I trust Congressional democrats less than I trust Obama. In fact I trust Congressional Republicans less only by a slim margin compared to congressional Democrats. Looks like Harry Reid is preparing to cry uncle and surrender everything in the filibuster reform.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This is where I think you are wrong. Campaigns are paid for by donations, not from a government fund. Who does own it? I'm not really sure whether it would be some entity tied to Obama but not to the government or perhaps the DNC. Point being it's nothing like NASA, or any other government funded initiative and whoever does actually own it can do with it as they please.
Post-election it was widely reported that the tech powering the Obama camp was a big factor in its success, whereas the Romney camp was handicapped by poorly tested & implemented systems.
Why would they want to give that away that sort of advantage?
My suggestion would be to make it easy to volunteer on the project, & hack on the code, but not go so far as to open source it. This enables participation from folks who are motivated, but doesn't give the competition a leg up.
One of the Democrat's huge advantages last election was that they apparently could hire competent software development teams.
If you've ever been involved in software development, you know how rare this is.
The Republican software never worked properly. Why would you give away that advantage?
Once they catch up, whatever, but I woudn't do it now.
expandfairuse.org
Which is just a long winded way of saying there are no candidates for people who care about good policy. If you care about good policy, you can't vote for either Democrats or Republicans, because they won't implement good policy. You can't vote third party, because they can't implement good policy.
The only conclusion is that our system is well and truly broken and must be scrapped. If you care about good policy, fixing the electoral system is the only thing that matters. And that won't happen for as long as D & R monopolize politics in this country.
So if you care about good policy, who are you going to vote for? Is voting for a D or R going to bring about electoral reform? You and I both know that it won't. But voting third party might. Therefore voting third party is the only responsible choice for people who care about good policy.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
No from what he's done, he's not a conservative. He's a right-wing authoritarian: http://politicalcompass.org/uselection2012
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse