What the Obama IT team teaches us about polyglot programming
blog.appfog.com
blog.appfog.com
A business is about sustainability. You are creating things that you will be maintaining and using for (hopefully) years to come. You get to be picky about who you are hiring. In that given, its not unusual that you want all of your employees to be able to work on various parts of the stack as focus changes or what not.
This isn't to discount the value in polyglot groups. Its almost an inevitability at this point. While totally possible that you could have entirely js stack in node, more likely you'll have ruby (or something) and javascript and maybe objc for iphone and java for android and maybe .Net for windows or more objc on osx or whatever.
Isn't it? I'm a frontend dev. While I'm capable of digging into the backend and mucking around, it's not a typical part of my job. There are backend devs who I can talk to, who are writing Scala or Java rather than Javascript or Ruby, who can deal with problems faster and better than I could.
Changes of focus like what you describe seem to be typical of far more nascent companies. In that sense, Reed's team was like a startup: everyone had to be ultra-capable because they had to pick up anyone's slack at any time, just like a CEO of a ten-man group sometimes has to clean the kitchen or code a component that no one else has time to.
It's important to note that in this sense, "polyglot" refers to the collective group -- ie, the Obama campaign had numerous talented people with a huge variety of skills in-house -- vs the individual sense of the word.
Not to say that there weren't incredibly talented generalists, but when you have a team of this size (dozens of designers and front-end developers, engineers focused on the back-end APIs, a team dedicated to data integration, a handful of dedicated ops and DBAs) the ability of individuals to specialize in an area could be a strength.
The translation over isn't obvious. From what I've heard their internal organization was pretty fluid. That kind of thing depends on the quality of people involved, their commonality of purpose, and the organizational culture. You can't box that and roll it over to party HQ.
That said, Democrats do seem more likely to attract and motivate the kind of people you'd need for this. That's a pretty important head start.
Judging from the emails I'm getting, Obama would like to turn it from a campaign advantage to a governing advantage (here are all of my current policy issues, please put pressure on Congress to do X, Y and Z), and if he succeeds in that he will undoubtably try to turn it into a party advantage in the future.
So yes, the organization is fluid and can evaporate. The database of possibly politically active people is much less fluid, and may prove to be a more durable advantage.
The reality is that if there's a tech advantage held by the Dems, it's the product of much simpler demographics; youth, urban, educated.
For simple demographic reasons the republicans cannot continue to focus on the old white anti homosexual segment of the population, since there aren't enough of them left to form a majority (projections suggest that Texas may turn blue by 2020, perhaps even 2016, if Texas turns blue then the Republicans will never again win the White House) and the other obvious alternative for the republicans is the young, well educated people who want and end to marihuana prohibition and less government interference in the lives in general.
Should the republican pivot to take these voters in, then they may very well attract a much larger share of tech people.
As a party they absolutely need to find new issues, stop alienating Latinos, etc. However the national political lights in the party are mostly in Congress, and the vast majority of them are only going to face political challenges from their own right wing, and so have every reason to double down on current Republican policies even though it is not where the party as a whole needs to go.
I don't expect this dynamic to shift until after the Republican brand has so damaged itself that it stops being nationally viable. This will create soul searching, and cause them to pivot. What happens next will depend on how they pivot.
However I do not expect to see a serious discussion within the Republican party about their dilemma until they have pushed themselves to crisis. Which they have not done yet.
The US Republicans need a Clause IV moment.
Narwhal and other OFA DBs may have supplemental information -- as do the "blue" vendors -- but that's separate from the voterfile, and I'm not sure its life-cycle is certain at this point.
One system was diverse and cooperative; the other isolated, secretive, and ultimately a failure.
I'll agree that a GOTV tool is only one part of campaign IT, but I think there's a lesson waiting here.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORCA_%28computer_system%29
And they needed it--they've been pretty upfront that for an uncomfortably long time it was not clear the decision to centralize the technology was going to work at all. The field and other outreach teams did not like or use the products that the tech built for them for months.
That's impressive. Glad that tech is on the Democratic side.
But then again change, liberalism, progress, technology and innovation are all leftist tenets - so it isn't so surprising.
Here's hoping to another tech assisted Republican defeat in 2016. May the morons stay out of power - least they screw us all once again.