Legion of Tech Volunteers Lead a Charge for Bernie Sanders | Hacker News Reader

Legion of Tech Volunteers Lead a Charge for Bernie Sanders

nytimes.com

70 pointsbootload20 comments

(Reposting this comment from when I posted this article earlier today.)

This article is primarily about the CodersForSanders organization (https://coders.forsanders.com/), which started on reddit at /r/CodersForSanders and uses Slack to coordinate efforts among over 150 developers, designers, and digital/content folks. I am a member; I built the donation app mentioned in the article (an iPad app for volunteers to collect donations at campaign events using Square readers) and a few other projects.

Regardless of your political leanings, I've found CodersForSanders to be a fascinating experiment at the intersection of grassroots political organization and remote development/tech work. We have worked on projects that campaigns would normally only entrust to expensive consulting firms, but both out of financial necessity and a commitment to grassroots support we have taken on a lot of that work. I wonder if this can be a new model for political organizing in the 21st century.

Can you list a couple interesting apps or services that are being worked on at the moment?

Android app just got released but will be continuously updated.

iOS is in process and needs some help.

Building a carpool website to help schedule rides.

Also building a bus reservation system that simplifies the charter bus payment process.

A phone call system that lets volunteers get a list of numbers to call with a script.

Anddd couple others and we love hearing new ideas!

In addition to the stuff Kyle mentioned, you can see some of the projects we've shipped at https://coders.forsanders.com/projects/

And while feelthebern.org collabs w/ the Coders for Sanders Slack, we actually have our own Slack with even more volunteers. At our end, we're working on a iOS and Android apps (not just ability to access all the content, but also a gamifying canvassing/GOTV functionality; and also some Thunderclap-like native features). We're also preparing 3 more sites that will be tied into our site but be for more TL;DR consumption. Finally, we're developing flyer versions of our content for offline GOTV'ing.

CodeForSanders is great and all, but what I really hope comes from it is not just a big death march push toward the mirage of a Sanders nomination (face it: his chances, while not exactly zero, are pretty close to a rounding error), but the establishment of a permanent organization and a framework for working to change the political landscape. This was the big tragedy of Obama's first campaign: they built a great, energized, and well-organized volunteer organization, and after the win, shut it down.

Rounding error? I thought he was already polling within a single digit of Clinton, and his rallies draw the biggest crowds of any candidate. I think his chances are better than those of the vast majority of Republican candidates.

(reposting my comment as well)

Best thing I've ever put my tech startup skillz to use for! If you haven't already checked out http://feelthebern.org, please do so and share widely. We built it to make clear where Bernie Sanders stands on every issue... TL;DR for 50+ years he's been consistent and on the right side of history no matter the political cost.

Before this I'd never found (or even tried to find) common ground with, say, Republicans, libertarians or even mainline Democrats. I'd also never really known people in active military service, or who were formerly homeless — but these are some of the amazing humans who I've been working with for 7 weeks now.

Most Americans care about the same things, and if we can move past the broken two-party system and the theatrics that play out in the media, we can actually start solving problems together. Feel grateful that thanks to this candidate and his issues-based campaign, my world's a little bigger.

Join us, we have mobile apps and social apps and so much more coming out. We need great devs, designers, writers & more. :-)

During the Presidential Election of Sri Lanka (2015, January), there was a huge Volunteer supporter base on social media for Maithreepala Sirisena (The candidate who won the election defeating the previous president). This was mainly due to the fact there was no media freedom and the traditional media was hugely biased towards one side.

It was quite interesting since the official tech teams of the candidates are there as nominal roles. They were just using online advertising and maintaining FB pages, etc - nothing more.

This blog explains in more detail : http://groundviews.org/2015/01/13/was-prespollsl-2015-sri-la...

OK, full disclosure : I'm not American, I don't know Sanders much, and I didn't read the article.

But seriously, how many times can people be deceived by a promising politician that builds hope and then continue the same politic than his predecessors ?

Even if this one is sincere, do you really think one man is going to resist the combined pressures of all the interest groups that are in place ?

Sander's sincerity does not matter much, nor does his ability to resist pressure matter in the slightest. He has no chance of being elected so support for him is the white liberal version of supporting Rand Paul (or his father in previous cycles.) [Let's get real here, to win the Democratic nomination the man would have to actually, you know, declare himself to be a Democrat...] That he has support in the tech community is not surprising, I see a lot of #feelthebern support in my Facebook feed from white liberal techies in my circle of friends and I will chuckle with amusement and move on to things that actually matter. If I did not know any better I would have guessed that Bernie and the Trump were plants from the Clinton campaign to frame the extremes of the debate.

As to the whole "build hope and then continue the same" bullshit line you are trying to slide in there, if you think that our presidents have been the same or even vaguely similar then you have obviously not been paying attention and you probably have that child-like imagined view of what a US president does and what they can actually accomplish that we seem to propagate in our media narratives. Don't worry, lots of Americans fall for the story as well. They end up with similar levels of vague disappointment because reality never quite lines up with the stories they have been told.

Sanders is not going to be president, that is not what this is about. Sanders' goal is to keep the debate focused on issues he and his followers cares about and forcing candidates to take stands on issues they would rather ignore, all in the hope of making small incremental changes.

Look at the Tea Party on the right. By loudly forcing the debate to focus on their issues they managed to wield influence far beyond the size of their initial voting base, making more moderate candidates take stands on these issues and move the whole party towards the tea party line.

"I'm not American, I don't know Sanders much, and I didn't read the article."

yet you have an opinion. read the article to be taken seriously.

> Even if this one is sincere, do you really think one man is going to resist the combined pressures of all the interest groups that are in place ?

In the real world you have to compromise, while he may perhaps resist interest groups his constituents may not and he will have to compromise with them and by proxy may be influenced.

But I believe he's the best so far, out of all of them, in term of his views and mines.

I don't expect any president to be perfect they're only human. And I don't expect his views to be exactly like mine, if I wanted that then I would be running really.

But I believe he's an honest man like Jimmy Carter.

I hope he win but if not at least he's pushing Democrats toward the left more so and stopping the march toward center.

I'd much rather Slick Willy's mid 90s economy and his less than consistent commitment to the truth than Carter's honesty & stagflation.

It will be interesting to see how this largely volunteer organization will fare compared to the highly organized tech teams that Obama had and Clinton has as well.

Arguably, Clinton's tech team is what has left her so vulnerable in the first place.

I see what you did there

Would like to know how so? There seem to be pretty good people on the team.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controve...

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