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One of President Obama’s advantages in the 2012 presidential race – besides running against a horrible candidate – was his campaign’s technology. While the Romney campaign had epic technology failures the President sailed to re-election with a fully functioning and innovative data management system.
The problem? The Obama tech team built its system using open source software.
While the Obama campaign developers want to, in keeping with the open source ethos, release the code their DNC and Obama For America (OFA) counterparts are wary. The DNC is particularly concerned with the Republicans gaining from the use of the software and OFA is considering licensing opportunities.
From The Verge:
At issue is the code created during the Obama for America (OFA) 2012 campaign: the digital architecture behind the campaign’s website, its system for collecting donations, its email operation, and its mobile app.
When the campaign ended, these programmers wanted to put their work back into the coding community for other developers to study and improve upon. Politicians in the Democratic party felt otherwise, arguing that sharing the tech would give away a key advantage to the Republicans. Three months after the election, the data and software is still tightly controlled by the president and his campaign staff, with the fate of the code still largely undecided. It’s a choice the OFA developers warn could not only squander the digital advantage the Democrats now hold, but also severely impact their ability to recruit top tech talent in the future.
Beyond demoralizing activists and operatives who believe in the open source movement, there are also practical concerns associated with not releasing the code.
In this sense, the decision to mothball the tech would be a violation of the developers’ ethical principles. But the argument is about more than whether putting the tech back in the hands of the public is the right thing to do.
“The biggest issue we saw with all of the commercial election software we used was that it’s only updated every four years,” says [OFA Front-End Software Engineer] Ryan. It was these outdated options that convinced team Obama to build all the campaign tech in-house. If the code OFA built was put on ice at the DNC until 2016, it would become effectively worthless. “None of that will be useful in four years, technology moves too fast,” said Ryan. “But if our work was open and people were forking it and improving it all the time, then it keeps up with changes as we go.”
By all accounts this is not a done deal. There are even discussions of just releasing parts of the code. But what remains is a larger fault line among the factions within the Democratic Party. The open source movement’s ethics are not necessarily compatible with the values (or lack thereof) of the corporate wing of the party now firmly in control.
That being said, the pragmatic argument made by the Obama tech team may prove persuasive given the competitive nature of partisan politics. What is the point of having an advantage that will be worthless in four years?
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“Corporate wing”…. So, you mean the entire Democratic party then?
The Repubs will never use software that “phones home” to Democrats.
Besides, technology without people is useless.
unka @ #1: you may not be too far off as the “ofa software” is really the hijacked 50-state strategy DNC open-source software developed by Howard Dean’s crew for the DNC.
also, too, note that WH website requires registration to comment or sign petitions — wouldn’t be surprised to learn that ofa and WH have same database and software…
p.s. anybody know who is called/named/figurehead “Chair of the DNC” these days?
So essentially the argument is over data mining and voter tracking software, essentially a subset of customer relationship management software.
I don’t see the advantage for anyone except the programmers having a sandbox to play in and improve the software for four years. And maybe some marketing folks who want to do data mining and customer tracking.
The key elements of the OFA software is the database of voters compiled over the years and the data from a variety of sources that they mined in order to profile voters.
I would say that NSA might be interested, but it would likely threaten on of the multi-billion-dollar sweetheart development contract they have with a defense vendor.
I don’t see any big risk for the DNC or big value for anyone else. Unless they hard-coded a lot of the data mining queries in a way that would expose the sources and weighting of the data attributes.
It is simply incorrect that anybody using open source code must make their own use of it open. It is only if used for commercial purposes or released for public use. That is, if OFA allowed the GOP to use their programming, they would have to make the underlying code public, but if OFA simply uses it for their own purposes, they do not.
The issue isn’t whether they “must” make it open. As said in the post, “the Obama campaign developers want to, in keeping with the open source ethos, release the code … back into the coding community for other developers to study and improve upon.”
The argument that “If the code OFA built was put on ice at the DNC until 2016, it would become effectively worthless” begs the question: Given there are state and local elections before 2016, and the claim that the software is an important part of getting out the vote and so forth, why aren’t there efforts to use, and update, the software between now and 2016 to elect state and local Dems.