The Open Source Force Behind the Obama Campaign | Linux Journal - The Diigo Meta page

• 26 Jan 09
  

  tom .

  technology tech4democracy reading delicious

• 20 Jan 09
  

  Cory Salveson
  • The substance of democracy is what hackers have known for the duration: freedom, liberty, openness, generosity, and constructive responsibility. The best code doesn't just win. It just works.
• 28 Dec 08
  

  Michel Bauwens

  I'm here to claim Linux-based geek paternity for the successful presidential campaign of Barack Obama. The geeks didn't do it alone, of course. But their role was huge.

  P2P-Elections P2P

• 28 Nov 08
  

  Democracy shouldn't be about candidates and campaigns as products or brands. Image matters, but it's still just superficial. The substance of democracy is what hackers have known for the duration: freedom, liberty, openness, generosity, and constructive r

  politics open_source linux technology howard_dean obama

  • "I always wondered how could you take that same collaboration that occurs in Linux and open source and apply it here," Joe told Larry Lessig in a 2003 interview. "What would happen if there were a way to do that and engage everybody in a presidential campaign?" When Larry asked Joe if that made Dean's an open-source campaign, Joe said, "Yes... I guess it’s about as open as you can do it in modern-day politics".
  • Dean dropped out of the race after losing in Iowa, but neither the techies nor their code were running for office. Instead the "Dean Diaspora" began the work of improving democracy with free and open technology.
  • 6 more annotations...

  • • Dean tech veterans -- Clay A. Johnson, Joe Rospars, and Ben Self -- and started Blue State Digital. In a June 2008 story, Business Week called Blue State Digital "Obama's secret political weapon". By the end of July Blue State's work was behind more than $200 million raised online, 1,000,000 users and 75,000 campaign events. By the time you read this, those numbers will be way low.

      
      

      I became acquainted with Blue State Digital's work for the Obama campaign on June 3 of this year, when I got an email pointing me to a MyBO ad with the filename "techinterest?foo". The ad recruited "exceptionally talented web developers" with "A deep understanding of LAMP development processes and best practices", "Experience scaling (a) large LAMP application", "Experience building complex applications using PHP and MySQL" with "deep knowledge of MySQL performance and query optimization" and "Advanced or expert CSS, Javascript, and AJAX skills". The email also noted that McCain's campaign site runs on Windows.

    • Almost all of our tools put user interaction and user creation first. Take events management systems. In the past they were made so an organization could post its official calendar online. We said that's great but not nearly as interesting as letting your supporters create their own calendars.

    • We don't like to re-invent wheels. So, for example, we don't write our own database connection library. We're using ADOdb, which is one of the more popular ones for PHP, and python as well. We use PEAR, which is PHP's library of tools and utilities. We use PEAR modules for everything from sending email to doing caching... We use things like memcached. We use open source monitoring tools.

      
      

      We use RSS all over the place

    • The work I'm most interested in these days is dynamic-scripting -- what I think about as "flow-and-go" data sets instead of what Jeff Jonas coined as "rack-and-stack" data sets. Dynamic scripting is Unix pipes! That is, every application does input and output. We leave the world of databases-make-reports and enter the world of RSS-flows-in and RSS-flows-out.
    • For all the talk about Obama's campaign being netcentric and groundbreaking, the code to their site is still proprietary. I don't foresee the Obama campaign releasing that code to make it easier for any and all people to replicate what they have created. Same thing, by the way, with MoveOn.org, Democracy For America and even the organizing tools created by the DNCC."
    • we are seeing a geek-i-fication of everything from campaigns to good government groups to government itself. More open source. More frameworks. More collaborative communication among individual developers. It's uneven, it's bumpy, but it is definitely happening. The tipping point has occurred now in politics and government -- the question remains only where the tree is going to land.
• 26 Nov 08
  

  Jeff Johnson

  obama politics FOSS open_source opensource

• 25 Nov 08
  

  Sean Hackbarth
• 

  Robert Sutor

  "JFK said "Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan." So I'm here to claim Linux-based geek paternity for the successful presidential campaign of Barack Obama. The geeks didn't do it alone, of course. But their role was huge."

  OB Obama politics Linux open source

• 24 Nov 08
  

  Torben Kristensen

  opensource politics

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