Obama's Techies Want To Open Source Their Work, But Politicians Want To Keep It Secret

from the techies-vs.-politicians dept

Right after the election, we noted the stories showing how Obama's technology advantage was impressive, while the get-out-the-vote technology that the Romney campaign built up appeared to fail spectacularly. However, there's an interesting post mortem to this, which shows how techies and politicians still usually come from very, very different worlds. The world class team of technologists who helped build up Obama's campaign tech are trying to release their work as open source -- but Democratic Party operatives are trying to keep it secret, believing (almost certainly incorrectly) that this gives them a proprietary advantage:

But in the aftermath of the election, a stark divide has emerged between political operatives and the techies who worked side-by-side. 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.

The politicians who want to keep it locked up are making a huge mistake for a very large number of reasons that people who are steeped in technology understand. Let's list out some of the ways in which it's stupid to keep this secret:

1. It basically makes the technology useless. As one of the techies who worked on the project notes, the software "will be mothballed," meaning that four years from now it'll be useless. What the politicians see as keeping an advantage is really just squandering a useful framework.
2. It completely misunderstands how technology advances and works. No one expects software from today to be the same four years from now. By mothballing the tech, it will mean that the next campaign will effectively be starting from scratch. Open sourcing it would allow additional work to continue on this.
3. You can learn from others as well. The really shortsighted part is this insistence that open sourcing it "helps the other side." Again, what will be used four years (or even two years) from now will be quite different as the technology advances. And having it open sourced means that lots of folks can jump in and build on the tech in the meantime. And, yes, even Republican techies might work on it, and the Dems can learn from them as well.
4. Keeping it closed pisses off the techies, who will be less likely to contribute or join the team next time around.
5. If the Democrats believe they have stronger technologists, then next election they should still be able to make innovations faster than their opponents.
6. It quite possibly violates some open source licenses, since much of the code was built on open source software, some of which requires any additional work to also be open sourced.
7. Keeping the tech secret also means that other campaigns (beyond just elections) can't make use of the technology as well, which could actually hurt causes that the Democrats support.

In many ways this is the same old battle we've seen from legacy companies vs. more open upstarts for years. The legacy players think their advantage is in keeping the code secret. The upstarts know that's wrong: the pace of innovation and the rate of change means that by being open you can better keep up and do more. Keeping it closed guarantees stagnation and falling behind.

Filed Under: democrats, development, obama, open source, politics, techies

Ten Lines Of Code Is Easy; Building Community Is Hard

from the yup dept

Fred Wilson has a good post pointing out how ridiculous it is for various elitists to scoff at a certain internet startup because it could be recreated in "ten lines of code." I certainly know the feeling (and have, at times, felt it myself), but as Fred notes, the comment is really far off the mark, and is a situation where techies tend to be doing the same thing that content owners have been known to do: overvaluing one part of the product over what's likely to be even more important. While content owners overvalue the content itself, techies often overvalue the code. But with certain services, it's the community that's more important than the code. The fact that the code can be (and has been) replicated is meaningless, if you can't also create the same community around it.

This is a point that's also important when it comes to the various discussions we have about patent law around here. Some patent system defenders insist that they need to "protect" their invention. But, again, if that invention isn't bringing users, there's not much worth protecting, at all. You can copy all you want, but if no one's willing to use what you do, you haven't done much valuable. Ten lines of code may be meaningless. But if those ten lines of code bring in millions of users, it's a different story.

Filed Under: code, community, elitism, techies
Companies: bit.ly

Like Clockwork: Question Raised About Techies Unionizing

from the yeah,-it's-not-gonna-happen dept

Pretty much every two years or so, the press suddenly starts asking if techies should unionize. We first saw such articles around 2000, then again in 2002. We must have missed the 2004 one, but there was yet another in 2006. And, now that it's 2008, we've got another one, asking if techies should unionize.

It's all a bit silly. The reason for organizing labor is because the employers have unchecked power to set working conditions and wages -- meaning that there's not enough bargaining power by the employees as individuals. However, that's hardly the case in the tech industry, where there's tons of competition, and good tech employees have many options for where to work and under what conditions. It seems like all of the stories about unionizing seem to be planted by unions themselves looking to boost ranks, but without offering any serious reason why tech workers should even think about organizing.

Filed Under: organized labor, techies, unions

Does The Web 2.0 Crowd Care About Public Policy Issues?

from the perhaps-more-than-you-think dept

Sean Garrett has a thought-provoking post asking why there doesn't seem to be any "leadership 2.0" on policy issues. His complaint is that most of the folks involved in public policy issues that impact the tech industry are the same folks who were doing public policy issues 10 years ago -- and that it's all coming from the big companies, who mostly have set up offices in DC and keep policy questions away from Silicon Valley. It's an interesting question -- and I tend to agree with Garrett on a lot of things, but I don't see this as much of a worry.

First, Silicon Valley companies historically have never been interested in public policy questions until they reach a certain size. That's why you always hear stories about tech companies reacting late to policy issues and then having to ramp up their lobbying efforts. So this doesn't seem any different than it's been in the past. When companies are in high growth mode, there are only so many things they can worry about, and most of them are focused on growth, not government. If anything, while there are downsides to this, I tend to think this is one of the advantages of Silicon Valley. Once you have young companies looking at policy questions, inevitably, they start focusing on how policy can be twisted to their advantage -- and that's not helpful to anyone.

Second, I partially disagree with the premise. While it may be true that among the web 2.0 San Francisco party crowd you don't see much interest in public policy issues, from my standpoint, it seems like technology-interested folks are much more in tune with public policy issues than a decade ago. You hear more people today who understand various public policy issues than in the past, and there's been a rapid growth of policy-focused blogs, often from young technology-focused individuals. So, while it may be true that the latest generation of Y-Combinator founders are more interested in the next party or getting coverage on hot blogs, that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of folks paying attention to what happens in DC -- and when things get troublesome, they have no problem raising the alarm in a way that gets noticed.

Filed Under: politics, public policy, techies, web 2.0