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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 It was these outdated options that convinced team Obama to build all the campaign tech in-house.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...
... 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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not a rumor. He did, in fact, withhold his birth certificate. He knew all along that to quell rumors he should release the long form. He chose not to for several years. He's special.
Well no, he tried to *not* be special by not circumventing Hawaiian law to obtain a record that a normal citizen would not have access to. He released the only document that Hawaii would provide to him as proof of birth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_conspiracy_theories
every judicial forum that has addressed the matter, and Hawaiian government officials—among whom a consensus has been reached that the document released by the Obama campaign is indeed his official birth certificate.
Obama was not entitled to receive a copy of the "long form":
oshua Wisch, a spokesman for the Hawaii Attorney General's office, stated in 2011 that the original "long form" birth certificate — described by Hawaiian officials as a "record of live birth" kept in the archives of the Hawaii Department of Health is "... a Department of Health record and it can't be released to anybody", including President Obama. Wisch added that state law does not authorize photocopying such records
Legally, there was no way to obtain his long form.
Finally, in 2011, realizing that he *was* special, and that the long form might save everyone a lot of hassle, Obama requested a waiver from normal records release policy:
On April 22, 2011, Obama asked Loretta Fuddy, director of the Hawaii Department of Health, for certified copies of his original Certificate of Live Birth ("long-form birth certificate").[46] Accompanying the letter was a written request from Judith Corley, Obama's personal counsel, requesting a waiver of the department's policy on computer-generated certificates. Corley stated that granting the waiver would relieve the department of the burden of repeated inquiries into the President's birth records.[47]
On April 25, 2011, Fuddy approved the request and witnessed the copying process as the health department's registrar issued the certified copies. The same day, Corley personally visited the department headquarters in Honolulu to pay the required fee on Obama's behalf, and received the two requested certified copies of the original birth certificate, an accompanying letter from Fuddy attesting to the authenticity of same, and a receipt for the processing fee. Fuddy said that she had granted the exception to its normal policy of issuing only computer-generated copies by virtue of Obama's status, in an effort to avoid ongoing requests for the birth certificate.[48][49]
Enough with the fake outrage.
What else could he release? How about some school transcripts? Bush had his stolen & released. Why wouldn't someone do the same with Obama's? Oh, right. He's special.
Well I can't answer why there is no one willing to risk criminal prosecution by stealing and releasing his school transcripts - why don't you do it? I'm not sure what it would prove if official state birth records and even birth announcements in 2 different Hawaiian newspaper are not enough to satisfy birthers. School records just prove attendance, I've never seen any agency accept a school transcript as proof of citizenship
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/obamabirth.php
Well no, he tried to *not* be special by not circumventing Hawaiian law to obtain a record that a normal citizen would not have access to.
You are rewriting history. I hear there are job openings in part 2 of the Obama administration for people like you.
From your source, Hawaii does not give it out to "persons who do not have a tangible interest in the vital record." He has interests. He could have made the call.
Your reading comprehension is a little lax.
Read what I quoted again:
oshua Wisch, a spokesman for the Hawaii Attorney General's office, stated in 2011 that the original "long form" birth certificate — described by Hawaiian officials as a "record of live birth" kept in the archives of the Hawaii Department of Health is "... a Department of Health record and it can't be released to anybody", including President Obama. Wisch added that state law does not authorize photocopying such records
The short-form was already released by Obama in 2008 and was rejected by the birthers, despite it being the only valid birth record that normal Hawaiians are allowed to receive..
Here's a longer quote from the Hawaiia Attorney General's office (with highlighting added to help your comprehension)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42519951/ns/politics-more_politics/#.UP9yiGJQAUQ
But Wisch, the spokesman for the attorney general's office, said state law does not in fact permit the release of "vital records," including an original "record of live birth" — even to the individual whose birth it records.
"It's a Department of Health record and it can't be released to anybody," he said. Nor do state laws have any provision that authorizes such records to be photocopied, Wisch said. If Obama wanted to personally visit the state health department, he would be permitted to inspect his birth record, Wisch said.
But if he or anybody else wanted a copy of their birth records, they would be told to fill out the appropriate state form and receive back the same computer generated "certification of live birth" form that everybody else gets — which is exactly what Obama did four years ago.
He was born in Hawaii. I get it and always have. The issue is dicking around with not releasing the birth certificate. I don't hold on to Hillary Clinton conspiracy theories.
But he *did* release the only birth certificate that Hawaii was willing to provide to him (until the public records office was harassed so much that they waived their normal policy to release a copy of the original birth record).
On your original offer of "what else could he do" he could release some school records. The original point about the Obama election group not releasing source code would fall in line with the lack of transparency in this administration. It's not surprising.
But you haven't said what releasing school records would do -- if an official state record of birth is rejected as adequate proof, what good is is releasing school records?