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This article is primarily about the CodersForSanders organization (https://coders.forsanders.com/ https://coders.forsanders.com/), which started on reddit at /r

This article is primarily about the CodersForSanders organization (https://coders.forsanders.com/ https://coders.forsanders.com/), which started on reddit at /r/CodersForSanders and uses Slack to coordinate efforts among over 150 developers, designers, and digital/content folks. I am a member; I built the donation app mentioned in the article (an iPad app for volunteers to collect donations at campaign events using Square readers) and a few other projects. 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.

sayhar 11y ago
I have to agree. 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.
- hjt 11y ago
  Getting a bunch of people (150+) from the internet, especially reddit to go from an idea thread to a full website with over 1mil page views is nuts. Congrats!
bootload 11y ago
"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." 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 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.
- schneidmaster 11y ago
  > You mention the front-end applications, how about the back-end? 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 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.
  - bootload 11y ago
    > https://github.com/SandersForPresident/Butler https://github.com/SandersForPresident/Butler beaut.

sayhar 11y ago

I have to agree. 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.

hjt 11y ago
Getting a bunch of people (150+) from the internet, especially reddit to go from an idea thread to a full website with over 1mil page views is nuts. Congrats!

bootload 11y ago

"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." 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 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.

schneidmaster 11y ago
> You mention the front-end applications, how about the back-end? 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 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.
- bootload 11y ago
  > https://github.com/SandersForPresident/Butler https://github.com/SandersForPresident/Butler beaut.