I think that what they accomplished is amazing, but remember that their goals were very different than your typical business. Their goals were to create something in a short amount of time with a really random group of people given a fairly short lifetime. The individual projects will live on, but the whole thing was shut down at the end of the campaign.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
I think there is a difference in terms of having fullstack developers versus polyglot developers or a polyglot team. To me, and it seems like in this article, polyglot means using various comparable languages that operate at the same or overlapping parts of the stack - so not Ruby versus Node.js, but Ruby versus PHP.
It seems more likely that this was an Obama campaign advantage, rather than a Democratic party advantage.
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.
It seems more likely that this was an Obama campaign advantage, rather than a Democratic party advantage.
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.
This sounds insightful but really isn't. It's the Republicans who want the most change right now. It's change in a direction most of us disagree with, but it's far more radical than the Democratic agenda.
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.
I do think the democrats have a technological advantage in this case, but it is far less solid than it may appear at first.
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.
The Republicans are caught in their own gerrymander here.
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.
It's funny because the UK Labour party had a similar change/pivot in the early 1990s to become what is nicknamed "New Labour". They got rid of their previous party consitution which was quite socialist and replaced it with a watered down version. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clause_IV
The interesting problem of the republicans is, that they have to focus on the far right. If they focus on anyone else, then they will loose the current core voters and will loose more votes than they actually can get from anywhere else in the short term.
I'm not entirely sure that's the case. The DNC voterfile is compiled primarily from public record requests, and is as complete this cycle as it was in any other.
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.
If, as the theory goes, the product structure mimics the organizational structure of the group that created the product - you could extend to situations like this. In which case, you would argue that until the GOP changes its (hierarchical and paternalistic) structure the tech advantage will continue.
The argument can go the other way as well, if your organization is not so hierarchical that it can't learn anything. Point at this episode as proof that when in direct competition, the organization that's open to multiple approaches and tests to discover what works, has a distinct advantage.
I forget exactly which postmortem article I read it in, but this was actually a problem solved between the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns. The 2008 technology, while still successful, was still too diffuse for top managers at the 2012 campaign and had no overarching hierarchy, so they worked quickly to fix that.
In the sense of "the democratic party is using technology to their advantage" or "the democratic party is moving the tech industry into their political machine"?
Based on this article and those about the failure
the Romney campaign's get-out-the-vote tool, "Orca" [0]
my reaction is that one campaign built usable tech over time,
and the other tried to purchase it on deadline.
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.
The Romney campaign did not really have much choice, because of their need to secure the GOP nomination first. As the incumbent, Obama had a much longer lead time, which allowed his campaign to invest early and bring more of the development process internal.
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.
> 4Gb/s, 10k requests per second, 2,000 nodes, 3 datacenters, 180TB and 8.5 billion requests. Design, deploy, dismantle in 583 days to elect the President. #madops – Scott VanDenPlas, Obama for America IT team
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.
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.