April 16, 2012

Obama Campaign Puts Focus on Arizona
President Obama's re-election campaign "is dispatching workers across Arizona's college campuses and Latino neighborhoods this spring, registering as many new voters as they can in an organized, three-month effort to determine whether they can put this unlikely state into play for Democrats this November," the New York Times reports.

A gentleman predicted Arizona would be in play on RC Radio.

Agreed. Not "panic" afraid but knowledgeable that a complaisant Democratic Party could lose if voters assume that Romney cannot be elected.

Agreed, as well. But I can't imagine there are many voters who assume Romney can't be elected, since it's been conventional wisdom since the kickoff of the GOP Sideshow Primary that they "had to" nominate Romney as the only electable candidate.

But I guess overconfidence and wishful thinking (combined with Romney's own utterly lackluster, tonedeaf, and directionless persona) could lead some people to think the only electable candidate isn't electable.

“Now, though, the general election season is on, and The Times needs to offer an aggressive look at the president’s record, policy promises and campaign operation to answer the question: Who is the real Barack Obama?” Brisbane wrote. “Many critics view The Times as constitutionally unable to address the election in an unbiased fashion. Like a lot of America, it basked a bit in the warm glow of Mr. Obama’s election in 2008.”

Brisbane lamented that “a strong current of skepticism holds that the paper skews left,” one that’s “exacerbated by collateral factors — for example, political views that creep into nonpolitical coverage.” His column expressed considerable sympathy along with some skepticism toward longstanding conservative criticisms of the Times, although he argued that that perception can be overcome.

“The warm afterglow of Mr. Obama’s election,” he wrote, “the collateral effects of liberal-minded feature writers — these can be overcome by hard-nosed, unbiased political reporting now.”

'I'll treasure this, except when the Army or Navy come by...'

We Interview Daniel Ryan, Director of Front-End Development for ‘Obama for America’

With the Election in the rear-view mirror for Americans we are starting to learn about the tools, assets and people that helped President Barack Obama win re-election.

One of tools that helped give Obama for America an edge was “Ubuntu” due to its cost-savings and the familiarity that members of the team had with it and how well it was supported in the cloud.

Harper Reed, CTO for the Obama For America presidential campaign talks to Canonical

US presidential elections grab the attention of people the world over. Media advertising, on-location campaigning, debates, TV appearances and voter engagement through social media, web sites, data polling are absolutely essential to a successful campaign. All those initiatives require a robust, agile IT infrastructure. In the most recent US election, the Obama team came up trumps not only in terms of a winning campaign but also with the much heralded IT infrastructure that powered that campaign. The heart of that infrastructure? Ubuntu, of course.

The Obama for America campaign’s relatively small IT team relied heavily on data analytics and digital media. This enabled them to combine real-time information from the census, Facebook, research, marketing, internet profiles and social media patterns to create the most accurate profile of a voting population in history. To be able to achieve this level of engagement and data analysis all day every day, the campaign needed to rely on robust IT infrastructure, that would not fail or fall over, even at the busiest times throughout the campaign.

The Obama for America team chose an open, cloud-based IT model. This kept costs down and consistent, even at the most demanding times. The team chose Ubuntu as the operating system, generally running instances on Amazon Web Services. Ubuntu provided a cost effective OS, that is stable and reliable and that scales easily as required. The technology behind the Obama for America campaign will likely change the face of government elections of the future, as well as how enterprises will run their infrastructures. We expect Ubuntu to continue to be at the heart of those initiatives.

Harper Reed, the CTO behind the Obama for America spoke with Canonical about project Narwhal, the cloud, Ubuntu, open source and the use of disruptive technologies that supported President Obama’s successful campaign for a second term.

As Obama heads back to office, a battle rages over the tech that got him reelected

The tech team behind the 2012 Obama campaign has probably received more attention than any political programmers in history. A so-called "dream team of engineers from Facebook, Google and Twitter [who] built the software that drove Barack Obama’s reelection" were extolled in the press for bringing Silicon Valley strategies like Agile development to the normally hidebound process of a political campaign. In the post mortems that followed Obama’s victory, many credited the superiority of the Democrats’ tech team and its famous Narwhal platform, in contrast to the failure of Mitt Romney’s digital efforts, with mobilizing the vote and winning crucial swing states.

But in the aftermath of the election, a stark divide has emerged between political operatives and the techies who worked side-by-side. At issue is the code created during the Obama for America (OFA) 2012 campaign: the digital architecture behind the campaign’s website, its system for collecting donations, its email operation, and its mobile app. When the campaign ended, these programmers wanted to put their work back into the coding community for other developers to study and improve upon. Politicians in the Democratic party felt otherwise, arguing that sharing the tech would give away a key advantage to the Republicans. Three months after the election, the data and software is still tightly controlled by the president and his campaign staff, with the fate of the code still largely undecided. It’s a choice the OFA developers warn could not only squander the digital advantage the Democrats now hold, but also severely impact their ability to recruit top tech talent in the future.

"The software itself, much of it will be mothballed," believes Daniel Ryan, who worked as a director of front-end engineering at OFA. To the techies who supported the campaign, this would be a travesty. The historic work the campaign was able to achieve in such a short time was made possible, Ryan and others argue, because the Obama tech team built on top of open source code — code that has been shared publicly and can be "forked," essentially edited, by anyone. "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. "We wouldn’t have been able to accomplish what we did in one year if we hadn’t been working off open source projects," says Rathee. ...

A DNC official responded to The Verge with the following comment. "OFA is still working out the future of their tech and data infrastructure so any speculation at this time is premature and uninformed."

Woodhull and Pugh agree nothing is set in stone, but they are not encouraged. "I haven't heard definitively that the DNC is going to mothball the technology, just that they haven't yet moved forward with maintaining it," said Pugh. "I think that's a major missed opportunity, since there's so much that could be done with it in the next few years. It also means that we're giving Republicans a big chance to catch up with us, in an area that we've had a sizable advantage in since 2008."

Me to You: August 16, 2012: The 'Pretty One' will know more about Ubuntu than I would, though I do use a couple of systems based on Xubuntu and Kubuntu, so I'd be able to answer at least some basic questions that may come up for you, Fogs.