7 ms·

Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture

101 points by PStamatiou 15y ago

PStamatiou 15y ago
Author here -- Please let me know what you think of this format. If it works, I'd love to do more of these immersive-get-to-know-a-startup articles with other startups. Is it too long? Does the Q&A structure work here? My inspiration for this was The Setup (http://usesthis.com/ http://usesthis.com/), but in my own style -- focused on the startup and in my natural super-long-form.
- jbredeche 15y ago
  Love these posts, please keep them coming!
- njs12345 15y ago
  Definitely, this is excellent. Like the way it's got a bit of tech stuff and also business as well.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- zvrba 15y ago
  Your webpage layout sucks: in a Browser half a window wide (Opera 11.61, 64-bit Win7, 1680x1050 resolution), the text overflows past the right margin. When I scroll it horizontally, the blue block of text ("Paul Stamatiou") and the purple ad overlap the text. This (1st line of text) is where I stopped reading.
  - PStamatiou 15y ago
    Željko, I think you could have worded that a bit more politely. Try readability, RSS or perhaps increasing the size of your browser window.
    - kogir 15y ago
      Remove "position: fixed;" from "div.left-col" in responsive-stammy.css Unless there was a reason to break the (horizontal) scrolling.
      - PStamatiou 15y ago
        I think he meant horizontal scrolling (which is because his browser window is only 800px wide). position fixed on the left sidebar was actually requested by many folks so they dont have to scroll all the way back up after reading a long article of mind to get to the nav
    - zvrba 15y ago
      I'm impolite because I'm annoyed and I'm annoyed because browsers by default automatically adapt text layout to the window size, and you have somehow purposefully broken this mechanism. Victory of design over functionality. What's more, YOU are now asking ME to inconvenience myself in order to fix YOUR bug. Sorry, no-go. [Your page is not the only one offender, but you're the first author I have the opportunity to tell this to directly.]
      - PStamatiou 15y ago
        "browsers by default automatically adapt text layout to the window size" That is not a browser default. That is fluid vs fixed. Check out smashing magazine for some articles on how that works in HTML/CSS if you're curious. "fix YOUR bug" Me not wanting to support people with 800px wide browsers is not a bug. It's a decision. Much like major companies no longer want to support IE users.
        zvrba 15y ago
        > That is not a browser default. That is fluid vs fixed. Nitpicking. Fluid is default unless you change it. Fixed layouts belong to fixed media, such as PDFs formatted for a particular paper size. [with them I have no problem, and, incidentally. I have yet to run into a PDF that is not viewable in a window 800 pixels wide.] > Me not wanting to support people with 800px wide browsers is not a bug. In the same way that Excel 2003 having 64k row limit is not a "bug", but it's still unusable if you have a larger dataset. (From what I've seen on the net, newer versions support up to 1M rows; but the fundamental problem - arbitrary limitation - is still there.) I really wonder how you would have replied had I written that I tried to read it on my phone or a tablet.
- alabut 15y ago
  Well done Stammy, this was excellent. It's like the way I wanted Founders At Work to never end and keep reading more about company's from the inside, rather than the "success theater" at presentations and talks. It's so good I might just steal the format :)
- avadhanula 15y ago
  Very interesting post. One thing that would be interesting to know about startups which gets talked about very little is the mundane things about running such a shop. - None of the startups have HR. How do they deal with Health and other benefits? - Legal etc. Love the sawhorse desks.
pavel_lishin 15y ago
> David: One state had its voter file arrive on a magnetic tape format called 128 CPI — characters per inch of magnetic tape (same format that was used by UNIVAC in 1951) — which is probably how Auric Goldfinger stored his data. Converting it to something useable was more expensive than acquiring the tape itself. That's amazing. I wonder which state it was.
saraid216 15y ago
They claimed 2B rows for their voter database. If I understood that correctly, that means they know about 2 billion people. Do they cover countries other than America? Because the population of America is only 300 million or so; even accounting for false positives (failing to sync two accounts as one person) or fake identities (pet dog has an account), I don't really see how you can get from 300m to 2b.
- PStamatiou 15y ago
  It's about ~200M voters (United States only)
  - scarmig 15y ago
    I'm guessing that their database isn't voter registrations but individual votes--one person can have multiple votes and registrations recorded over the years. I still don't see how that could add up to a factor of 10, though. I'm in a similar space and typically people will have fewer than that, although the voter records we have don't go back more than a decade or so.
    - aamar 15y ago
      A ~10 year record could mean ~30 chances to vote, but hardly anyone votes in a majority of those elections. I, too, am curious how they have an average of 10 votes per voter.
      - msrpotus 15y ago
        I haven't used Votizen but in other voting records databases, they record "Yes" or "No" as to whether they voted (and sometimes other information depending on the state).
      - jdunck 15y ago
        I just looked at a rough count - it's 1.1B voter history records. I don't have an offline copy to do heavier analytics on it - just from analyze stats on indexes for now. Also, after signing up, people can correct/revise their voting records: http://imgur.com/a/NOj4I http://imgur.com/a/NOj4I This is because 1) the states themselves don't keep complete records and 2) we don't have all voting history forever, as scarmig pointed out. scarmig, you're "in the space" I googled and this was 1st: http://www.strike-the-root.com/3/scarmig/scarmig1.html http://www.strike-the-root.com/3/scarmig/scarmig1.html What do you work on? Sideline, is that related to Lessig's Root Strikers? Seems to be a different Libertarian site w/ unfortunate brand collision. :-/
hkarthik 15y ago
I really dig posts like this. As an engineer, this is the kind of stuff that makes a startup a really attractive place to work.
- novaurora 15y ago
  Thanks! We are hiring! https://github.com/votizen/careers https://github.com/votizen/careers
tocomment 15y ago
So question 1, what do they do exactly? I can't quite parse it out from the article. Can someone who doesn't use facebook frequently still use this?
- novaurora 15y ago
  We can scan your social networks for registered voters you know. Once you know who they are, you can affect their vote by asking them to turn out for who you want. I think the discovery piece is very interesting, even if you're not ready to ask anyone to help you elect a candidate yet. We'll be building more uses in the future.
tocomment 15y ago
Also how are they allowed to get voter registration data? Is that public information?
- scarmig 15y ago
  Sort of. You have to pay a nominal fee for it and sign some documents indicating that you have a legitimate (political) use for them and won't use them for commercial marketing, etc.
- jdunck 15y ago
  The repercussions for misusing this data are pretty severe. This isn't a slap on the wrist, and we take securing that data seriously.
5vforest 15y ago
Anyone else find it odd that Votizen wants you to share your political views with your social network friends? Political views, for me at least, have always been an inherently private subject matter. Sure, I have my friends who I'll talk politics with, but I don't espouse candidates on my Facebook profile. I have a feeling that other people might feel the same way: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Social-networking-and-politics.aspx http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Social-networking-an...
- novaurora 15y ago
  We don't need you to, but ultimately if we want to change this political system, meaning replace the fundraise from large donors > buy television / direct mail > blast you with TV/robocall with something more democratic, you're going to need to be a bit more vocal about what you want from your elected officials, and prove somewhere that you're a voter and you matter. Our long term vision is to build online electorates, where you come together with people that share your values, and attract candidates to a large voting pool. In a system like that, candidates even with little to no money, can win based on how well they can convince you / match with your values. Happy to go into further detail!
- jdunck 15y ago
  Hi, I'm a dev at Votizen. I haven't read that study yet - it's on my list - but I tend to agree that existing social ties are somewhat orthogonal to political views. We are surprised by our friends' views precisely because we don't feel comfortable discussing things. This limits communication and understanding. The two-party winner-take-all system, combined with slow feedback loops (I won't vote for Pelosi because she supported warrantless wiretaps, but she doesn't know that and therefore doesn't care about it) mean that the messaging for campaigns to succeed depends on wedge issues and vilification. At the same time, our social connections (be they online or off) do inform our positions and views on ranges of acceptable behavior. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window and http://www.amazon.com/Connected-Surprising-Networks-Friends-Everything/dp/0316036137/ http://www.amazon.com/Connected-Surprising-Networks-Friends-... Connectedness in a network increases the transitivity of ideas. Now what we need is a forum/channel/model for expressing our political positions/desires/demands and we should see the political process get less hierarchical, more responsive, and more accountable. So yes, "please vote for my candidate" via online channels is v0 of the overall goal. We want to flip it, "take my position if you want my vote", but to get there, we need campaigns to recognize the influence of their electorate that social networks (again, online or offline) provide.
famousactress 15y ago
What are typical working hours? Can engineers work from home? Jason: 8-10 hours in office, more from home / weekends. Yes if needed but we prefer to collaborate in the office. Since we run continuous deployment speed matters, and that means you need high intra-office bandwidth. If the bit about intra office bandwidth isn't ridiculous misdirection, then apologies... But it sure sounds like it. I think it's interesting, in an age where shops are bending over backward to rethink what makes people productive, and go above and beyond when it comes to equipment (or tequila), that telecommuting still seems to have an unfounded shroud of taboo hanging over it. What am I missing? Please feel free to tell me why intra-office bandwidth is a really important attribute that deserves a place in the answer to this question. (For the record Votizen seems rad, and the article is awesome. Sorry for coming off negative)
- pnathan 15y ago
  Basically, it's nice to walk over to someone's desk and chat.
- jdunck 15y ago
  Devs use IRC, even in the office. And we do standups with some members on Skype. But meatspace still matters. We generally prefer people in the office, all other things being equal. All other things are generally not equal, but it's a complex set of factors. I worked as a contractor with several clients for about a year, almost all remotely from my home office. It works, but it is definitely still good to be in person. I was able to do that because of market imbalances - I was, for some value of "better", the best available option, despite being remote. And that is certainly still true for some future employees. There's also the difficulty, when you're mostly central, that the off-site people are somehow less real or feel less ownership. I wanted to relocate before I knew I'd be joining Votizen. It was a happy accident. I do think, at some point, if the startup funding ramp continues, that it will just become absurd to try to pack in all the people moving here. And, of course, the world is a big place and there are more smart people living elsewhere than living here. But the density of skills and funding does matter, too.
  - famousactress 15y ago

101 points by PStamatiou 15y ago

Author here -- Please let me know what you think of this format. If it works, I'd love to do more of these immersive-get-to-know-a-startup articles with other startups. Is it too long? Does the Q&A structure work here? My inspiration for this was The Setup (http://usesthis.com/ http://usesthis.com/), but in my own style -- focused on the startup and in my natural super-long-form.

jbredeche 15y ago
Love these posts, please keep them coming!
njs12345 15y ago
Definitely, this is excellent. Like the way it's got a bit of tech stuff and also business as well.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
zvrba 15y ago
Your webpage layout sucks: in a Browser half a window wide (Opera 11.61, 64-bit Win7, 1680x1050 resolution), the text overflows past the right margin. When I scroll it horizontally, the blue block of text ("Paul Stamatiou") and the purple ad overlap the text. This (1st line of text) is where I stopped reading.
- PStamatiou 15y ago
  Željko, I think you could have worded that a bit more politely. Try readability, RSS or perhaps increasing the size of your browser window.
  - kogir 15y ago
    Remove "position: fixed;" from "div.left-col" in responsive-stammy.css Unless there was a reason to break the (horizontal) scrolling.
    - PStamatiou 15y ago
      I think he meant horizontal scrolling (which is because his browser window is only 800px wide). position fixed on the left sidebar was actually requested by many folks so they dont have to scroll all the way back up after reading a long article of mind to get to the nav
  - zvrba 15y ago
    I'm impolite because I'm annoyed and I'm annoyed because browsers by default automatically adapt text layout to the window size, and you have somehow purposefully broken this mechanism. Victory of design over functionality. What's more, YOU are now asking ME to inconvenience myself in order to fix YOUR bug. Sorry, no-go. [Your page is not the only one offender, but you're the first author I have the opportunity to tell this to directly.]
    - PStamatiou 15y ago
      "browsers by default automatically adapt text layout to the window size" That is not a browser default. That is fluid vs fixed. Check out smashing magazine for some articles on how that works in HTML/CSS if you're curious. "fix YOUR bug" Me not wanting to support people with 800px wide browsers is not a bug. It's a decision. Much like major companies no longer want to support IE users.
      - zvrba 15y ago
        > That is not a browser default. That is fluid vs fixed. Nitpicking. Fluid is default unless you change it. Fixed layouts belong to fixed media, such as PDFs formatted for a particular paper size. [with them I have no problem, and, incidentally. I have yet to run into a PDF that is not viewable in a window 800 pixels wide.] > Me not wanting to support people with 800px wide browsers is not a bug. In the same way that Excel 2003 having 64k row limit is not a "bug", but it's still unusable if you have a larger dataset. (From what I've seen on the net, newer versions support up to 1M rows; but the fundamental problem - arbitrary limitation - is still there.) I really wonder how you would have replied had I written that I tried to read it on my phone or a tablet.
alabut 15y ago
Well done Stammy, this was excellent. It's like the way I wanted Founders At Work to never end and keep reading more about company's from the inside, rather than the "success theater" at presentations and talks. It's so good I might just steal the format :)
avadhanula 15y ago
Very interesting post. One thing that would be interesting to know about startups which gets talked about very little is the mundane things about running such a shop. - None of the startups have HR. How do they deal with Health and other benefits? - Legal etc. Love the sawhorse desks.

pavel_lishin 15y ago

> David: One state had its voter file arrive on a magnetic tape format called 128 CPI — characters per inch of magnetic tape (same format that was used by UNIVAC in 1951) — which is probably how Auric Goldfinger stored his data. Converting it to something useable was more expensive than acquiring the tape itself. That's amazing. I wonder which state it was.

saraid216 15y ago

They claimed 2B rows for their voter database. If I understood that correctly, that means they know about 2 billion people. Do they cover countries other than America? Because the population of America is only 300 million or so; even accounting for false positives (failing to sync two accounts as one person) or fake identities (pet dog has an account), I don't really see how you can get from 300m to 2b.

PStamatiou 15y ago
It's about ~200M voters (United States only)
- scarmig 15y ago
  I'm guessing that their database isn't voter registrations but individual votes--one person can have multiple votes and registrations recorded over the years. I still don't see how that could add up to a factor of 10, though. I'm in a similar space and typically people will have fewer than that, although the voter records we have don't go back more than a decade or so.
  - aamar 15y ago
    A ~10 year record could mean ~30 chances to vote, but hardly anyone votes in a majority of those elections. I, too, am curious how they have an average of 10 votes per voter.
    - msrpotus 15y ago
      I haven't used Votizen but in other voting records databases, they record "Yes" or "No" as to whether they voted (and sometimes other information depending on the state).
    - jdunck 15y ago
      I just looked at a rough count - it's 1.1B voter history records. I don't have an offline copy to do heavier analytics on it - just from analyze stats on indexes for now. Also, after signing up, people can correct/revise their voting records: http://imgur.com/a/NOj4I http://imgur.com/a/NOj4I This is because 1) the states themselves don't keep complete records and 2) we don't have all voting history forever, as scarmig pointed out. scarmig, you're "in the space" I googled and this was 1st: http://www.strike-the-root.com/3/scarmig/scarmig1.html http://www.strike-the-root.com/3/scarmig/scarmig1.html What do you work on? Sideline, is that related to Lessig's Root Strikers? Seems to be a different Libertarian site w/ unfortunate brand collision. :-/

hkarthik 15y ago

I really dig posts like this. As an engineer, this is the kind of stuff that makes a startup a really attractive place to work.

novaurora 15y ago
Thanks! We are hiring! https://github.com/votizen/careers https://github.com/votizen/careers

tocomment 15y ago

So question 1, what do they do exactly? I can't quite parse it out from the article. Can someone who doesn't use facebook frequently still use this?

novaurora 15y ago
We can scan your social networks for registered voters you know. Once you know who they are, you can affect their vote by asking them to turn out for who you want. I think the discovery piece is very interesting, even if you're not ready to ask anyone to help you elect a candidate yet. We'll be building more uses in the future.

tocomment 15y ago

Also how are they allowed to get voter registration data? Is that public information?

scarmig 15y ago
Sort of. You have to pay a nominal fee for it and sign some documents indicating that you have a legitimate (political) use for them and won't use them for commercial marketing, etc.
jdunck 15y ago
The repercussions for misusing this data are pretty severe. This isn't a slap on the wrist, and we take securing that data seriously.

5vforest 15y ago

Anyone else find it odd that Votizen wants you to share your political views with your social network friends? Political views, for me at least, have always been an inherently private subject matter. Sure, I have my friends who I'll talk politics with, but I don't espouse candidates on my Facebook profile. I have a feeling that other people might feel the same way: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Social-networking-and-politics.aspx http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Social-networking-an...

novaurora 15y ago
We don't need you to, but ultimately if we want to change this political system, meaning replace the fundraise from large donors > buy television / direct mail > blast you with TV/robocall with something more democratic, you're going to need to be a bit more vocal about what you want from your elected officials, and prove somewhere that you're a voter and you matter. Our long term vision is to build online electorates, where you come together with people that share your values, and attract candidates to a large voting pool. In a system like that, candidates even with little to no money, can win based on how well they can convince you / match with your values. Happy to go into further detail!
jdunck 15y ago
Hi, I'm a dev at Votizen. I haven't read that study yet - it's on my list - but I tend to agree that existing social ties are somewhat orthogonal to political views. We are surprised by our friends' views precisely because we don't feel comfortable discussing things. This limits communication and understanding. The two-party winner-take-all system, combined with slow feedback loops (I won't vote for Pelosi because she supported warrantless wiretaps, but she doesn't know that and therefore doesn't care about it) mean that the messaging for campaigns to succeed depends on wedge issues and vilification. At the same time, our social connections (be they online or off) do inform our positions and views on ranges of acceptable behavior. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window and http://www.amazon.com/Connected-Surprising-Networks-Friends-Everything/dp/0316036137/ http://www.amazon.com/Connected-Surprising-Networks-Friends-... Connectedness in a network increases the transitivity of ideas. Now what we need is a forum/channel/model for expressing our political positions/desires/demands and we should see the political process get less hierarchical, more responsive, and more accountable. So yes, "please vote for my candidate" via online channels is v0 of the overall goal. We want to flip it, "take my position if you want my vote", but to get there, we need campaigns to recognize the influence of their electorate that social networks (again, online or offline) provide.

famousactress 15y ago

What are typical working hours? Can engineers work from home? Jason: 8-10 hours in office, more from home / weekends. Yes if needed but we prefer to collaborate in the office. Since we run continuous deployment speed matters, and that means you need high intra-office bandwidth. If the bit about intra office bandwidth isn't ridiculous misdirection, then apologies... But it sure sounds like it. I think it's interesting, in an age where shops are bending over backward to rethink what makes people productive, and go above and beyond when it comes to equipment (or tequila), that telecommuting still seems to have an unfounded shroud of taboo hanging over it. What am I missing? Please feel free to tell me why intra-office bandwidth is a really important attribute that deserves a place in the answer to this question. (For the record Votizen seems rad, and the article is awesome. Sorry for coming off negative)

pnathan 15y ago
Basically, it's nice to walk over to someone's desk and chat.
jdunck 15y ago
Devs use IRC, even in the office. And we do standups with some members on Skype. But meatspace still matters. We generally prefer people in the office, all other things being equal. All other things are generally not equal, but it's a complex set of factors. I worked as a contractor with several clients for about a year, almost all remotely from my home office. It works, but it is definitely still good to be in person. I was able to do that because of market imbalances - I was, for some value of "better", the best available option, despite being remote. And that is certainly still true for some future employees. There's also the difficulty, when you're mostly central, that the off-site people are somehow less real or feel less ownership. I wanted to relocate before I knew I'd be joining Votizen. It was a happy accident. I do think, at some point, if the startup funding ramp continues, that it will just become absurd to try to pack in all the people moving here. And, of course, the world is a big place and there are more smart people living elsewhere than living here. But the density of skills and funding does matter, too.
- famousactress 15y ago