Tech volunteers for candidates isn't very new. I remember reading about "Tech for Obama" a while ago. What's different is the scale and professionalism of how this is all going about -- and the distributed nature of it all.
Fascinating to see it firsthand.
The reason I read this article; to find out how this kind of bottom-up organisation works.
"features like the donation app, which incorporates the Square credit card processing software,"
You mention the front-end applications, how about the back-end?
"one built an Internet “bot” to help match newcomers to tasks appropriate to their skills."
Any more details on this? Sounds like an interesting idea for a spin-off.
ps: sorry for crashing the thread with a re-submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10168708) . For all the time I've used HN, there has never an attempt to avoid re-submission of a url multiple times.
We are full stack and flexible to campaign needs. For example, the donate app (native iPad front-end) is backed by a Rails API running on Heroku to aggregate donation data (particularly important since the FEC requires donation logs). Also, another group member built an Angular front-end dashboard for the campaign to authenticate with Google Apps and view/export donation data. We have generally found small, loosely coupled services to be a good model for allowing people to work in their areas of expertise and avoid blocking each other.
> Any more details on this? Sounds like an interesting idea for a spin-off.
The NYT article wasn't super clear but it's a Slack bot. It is open source at https://github.com/SandersForPresident/Butler. We have tried to open source as much as possible as we develop things. However it is not my project so I'm not the most qualified to talk about it.
No worries about the duplicate post! Glad it is getting attention.
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.