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Comment by ROFISH | Hacker News Reader

Kinda odd saying that it has an expiration date. Aren't the same systems required for the next election?

I was at a talk by Rayid Ghani, the chief scientist for the Obama campaign. He said that they shut down everything after the campaign simply because they can't afford to keep on all the staff full-time for the 4 years, but they don't throw away the code.

With the billions of dollars pumped into election campaigns, it's odd that a political party wouldn't keep at least a small team on the code to continually test, update, refactor, and generally improve the quality.

Fred Brooks, nine women / one month, etc.

They keep a small team, just not the full battalion.

Source: visit to OFA offices in 2010. May have changed by now because there is no third term, but I doubt it.

The problem is that political parties are fueled by donations, and it's hard to get people to donate for something like that. Not to mention you'd be competing with local/state/House/Senate elections with actual candidates for that fundraising money. I've donated politically in the past and even having only given small amounts, I still get emails daily and calls monthly asking me to donate to about half a dozen groups (many of which I've never donated to). Heck, wounded firefighters and cancer-striken kids have a low conversion rate for their fundraising - "money for technical systems to help a candidate to be named later" is even worse.

The DNC does the job of folding any successful and reusable parts from the campaign into a continuing technology stack.

This will seem a bit OT, but it is relevant: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about...

I'm bothered that we as a society have trouble recognizing the point and purpose of overhead.

Obama For America, Inc. is an actual not for profit corporation[1], and will likely be wound down before the next election. The long term election-to-election databases and such are all ran by the DNC Services Corporation.

1. http://www.corporationwiki.com/Illinois/Chicago/obama-for-am...

The same systems are not used for the next election. Bitrot, differing requirements and a general distrust of technology all account for the political machine to rebuild each cycle.

This is obviously not ideal. I hope that OFA 4.0 will release a bunch of it as open source and it will help make the next cycle easier.

With 3 and a bit years of downtime to sort out the crud and weirdness between uses.

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