6 ms·

So am I the only person seeing a Democrats (Big Goverment services) way of doing things vs a Republicans (multiple layers of crony capitalists contractors) in t

So am I the only person seeing a Democrats (Big Goverment services) way of doing things vs a Republicans (multiple layers of crony capitalists contractors) in the comparison of the efficacy of Narwhal Vs Orca? I can't be the only one?

mikebike 14y ago
Orca wasn't built by contractors, it was written in-house by Romney staffers and volunteers. See: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/which-consultants-built-romneys-project-orca-none-of-them/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/which-...
- woodhull 14y ago
  Orca and systems like it are also not particularly relevant to electoral outcomes, compared to all of the other things that campaigns use/build.
  - gyardley 14y ago
    No kidding - ORCA should've been miles down the priority queue. That tens of thousands of election-day volunteers were wasted on it when they could've been doing more essential things is infuriating. The Romney campaign didn't build the right thing wrong - instead, they built the completely wrong thing, which is doubly damning.
roc 14y ago
Didn't the latest Ars article suggest Orca wasn't a contractor concoction after all? [1] I think all we really see, is that the Obama campaign had experience and no primary campaign distractions. The Obama campaign had a v1 in 2008 and were merely updating it for 2012. Yes, they had to figure in mobile and the enhanced scale of the problem, but they were starting from a significantly better place than the GOP, who were caught completely flat-footed on technology in 2008. The Obama campaign also had a (comparatively) leisurely opportunity to implement and refine their system while the Republican primary battles raged on and any one potential GOP candidate was denied the money/focus to start the development of a national campaign tool. [1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/which-consultants-built-romneys-project-orca-none-of-them/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/which-...
- MichaelSalib 14y ago
  they were starting from a significantly better place than the GOP, who were caught completely flat-footed on technology in 2008 Shouldn't the GOP have been funding an Orca-like system starting in 2008? I mean, how many elections does the other guy have to deploy superior technology to great effect before you start making your own better tech? The Obama campaign also had a (comparatively) leisurely opportunity to implement and refine their system while the Republican primary battles raged on and any one potential GOP candidate was denied the money/focus to start the development of a national campaign tool. But the national party could have started working on this 08 and just sold/licensed the tech to the campaign after the nominee was selected....
  - roc 14y ago
    I think that just hits on a larger organizational problem that seems to be common to both national parties: A staggering amount of the services and resources that I would think the state/national party would build up and have on-hand, they simply don't appear to have. (To say nothing of the coordination they don't seem to have) e.g. Obama wasn't building/running a DNC-wide system and sharing it with all the candidates. His campaign built it on their own, for their one race and now-built, all indications are that it's going to be wound-down or morphed into a citizen mobilization sort of effort to drive "call your congressman"-type efforts. Maybe political campaigning laws prohibit massive transfers of 'property' like that. I don't know. But it doesn't even sound like the DNC is looking to build their own system to share with future candidates. And perhaps political campaign laws prohibit the national party from transferring down that much assistance to local races. That, I also don't know. I don't even know if, say, the GOP could legally lock up a sweet bulk price for buying signage/buttons/tshirts/etc and act as cheaper-middleman for their candidates. There seems to be a hard line between each campaign and the rest of the organization and that leaves each campaign is largely 'on their own' for anything other than maybe lining up endorsements or speaking dates to get friendly faces to show up for local campaign events.
    - gyardley 14y ago
      As I understand it, a lot of the infrastructure is contained in private companies (some non-profit, some not) closely associated with one of the two parties and available to all the campaigns associated with that party. For instance, the Democratic Party's contact databases are in NGP VAN's VoteBuilder or in Catalist, and campaigns in 2014 will both be using the information entered there in 2012 and updating the contact information for the next race. Much of the Democratic Party's institutional knowledge about voter contact and outreach lives at the non-profit Analyst Institute. The insights gained in the 2012 campaign will stay there instead of evaporating. The Republican Party has a little of this - there's the GOP Data Center, formerly Voter Vault - but they haven't been building infrastructure as aggressively as the Democratic Party, and it's costing them. In 2004 the GOP had a superior technical organization, but they seemed to rest on their laurels, and in 2008 they were slightly weaker. In 2012 they were totally lapped. They will do better by 2016 - thanks in part to the utter failure of ORCA - but the Democrats have built up a pretty healthy infrastructure lead that'll be hard to top.
josephmosby 14y ago
You could twist that the other way, though. The Democratic organization was highly decentralized, leaner and more effective than the Romney campaign bloc, centralized and huge in Boston HQ.
- scarmig 14y ago
  It was also fault tolerant. In 2008, at least, Democrats had paper backup for things that went wrong with the tech, and did end up using it at times. In 2012, Republicans hadn't done any due diligence and assumed their tech would work. So sure they were that their tech would work is that they only released it to users on Election Day itself...
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    Indeed, and frankly I think the US dodged a bullet in that respect. I've always been interested in politics and have a belief that there's a strong correlation between the way the campaign goes and the way governance would go if the candidate is elected.
- rayiner 14y ago
  Decentralization is really the key thing, not whether the work is done by the government versus contractors. The government can be very efficient doing things in-house as long as the efforts are decentralized. The US Attorneys Offices handle tremendous caseloads for their staffing levels relative to private law firms. The Army Corps of Engineers is also quite effective because it's decentralized. Things that are a mess are often centralized and involve too many contractors. Defense, the VA, etc.
lifeguard 14y ago
I lol'd that Romney got his Orca app from Best Buy.
- lifeguard 14y ago
  "Most of the Romney organization's core IT operations, such as desktop support and back-office systems, were outsourced to Best Buy subsidiary MindShift Technologies" http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/which-consultants-built-romneys-project-orca-none-of-them/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/which-...
  - tomjen3 14y ago
    That is not necessarily bad though, MindShift properly has a lot more experience in that area and the tech support is likely the same as what they normally sell. Orca (and Narwhale) on the other hand -- they are more of a once in a lifetime app.
KaoruAoiShiho 14y ago
This makes a case for a small government. A small team, in house, tightly managed worked very well. Real big government is the multiple layers of crony contractors you're talking about.
- rayiner 14y ago
  You're conflating multiple different things. You can have big government without multiple layers of contractors. E.g. the federal court/prosecutors offices are a pretty huge operation in the aggregate, but it's all distributed so each office or court individually is small and lean. At the same time, one of the ways to get "small government" has historically been to outsource as much as possible to contractors. That's why the military industrial complex looks the way it does.
- johnrgrace 14y ago
  Or it makes the case that the goverment should do things inhouse instead of outsourcing everything and having hordes of contractors.
- vampirechicken 14y ago
  > Real big government is the multiple layers of crony contractors you're talking about. That's entirely the opposite of that the GOP means when they say Big Government. They mean large offices of government employees. They demonstrate a love of having a few contract managers and a slew of corny contractors.
brown9-2 14y ago
I think that this is a stretch since 2012 was the first time they brought the technologists in-house.
vampirechicken 14y ago
Nice discussion. Thanks folks.

mikebike 14y ago

Orca wasn't built by contractors, it was written in-house by Romney staffers and volunteers. See: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/which-consultants-built-romneys-project-orca-none-of-them/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/which-...

woodhull 14y ago
Orca and systems like it are also not particularly relevant to electoral outcomes, compared to all of the other things that campaigns use/build.
- gyardley 14y ago
  No kidding - ORCA should've been miles down the priority queue. That tens of thousands of election-day volunteers were wasted on it when they could've been doing more essential things is infuriating. The Romney campaign didn't build the right thing wrong - instead, they built the completely wrong thing, which is doubly damning.

roc 14y ago

Didn't the latest Ars article suggest Orca wasn't a contractor concoction after all? [1] I think all we really see, is that the Obama campaign had experience and no primary campaign distractions. The Obama campaign had a v1 in 2008 and were merely updating it for 2012. Yes, they had to figure in mobile and the enhanced scale of the problem, but they were starting from a significantly better place than the GOP, who were caught completely flat-footed on technology in 2008. The Obama campaign also had a (comparatively) leisurely opportunity to implement and refine their system while the Republican primary battles raged on and any one potential GOP candidate was denied the money/focus to start the development of a national campaign tool. [1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/which-consultants-built-romneys-project-orca-none-of-them/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/which-...

MichaelSalib 14y ago
they were starting from a significantly better place than the GOP, who were caught completely flat-footed on technology in 2008 Shouldn't the GOP have been funding an Orca-like system starting in 2008? I mean, how many elections does the other guy have to deploy superior technology to great effect before you start making your own better tech? The Obama campaign also had a (comparatively) leisurely opportunity to implement and refine their system while the Republican primary battles raged on and any one potential GOP candidate was denied the money/focus to start the development of a national campaign tool. But the national party could have started working on this 08 and just sold/licensed the tech to the campaign after the nominee was selected....
- roc 14y ago
  I think that just hits on a larger organizational problem that seems to be common to both national parties: A staggering amount of the services and resources that I would think the state/national party would build up and have on-hand, they simply don't appear to have. (To say nothing of the coordination they don't seem to have) e.g. Obama wasn't building/running a DNC-wide system and sharing it with all the candidates. His campaign built it on their own, for their one race and now-built, all indications are that it's going to be wound-down or morphed into a citizen mobilization sort of effort to drive "call your congressman"-type efforts. Maybe political campaigning laws prohibit massive transfers of 'property' like that. I don't know. But it doesn't even sound like the DNC is looking to build their own system to share with future candidates. And perhaps political campaign laws prohibit the national party from transferring down that much assistance to local races. That, I also don't know. I don't even know if, say, the GOP could legally lock up a sweet bulk price for buying signage/buttons/tshirts/etc and act as cheaper-middleman for their candidates. There seems to be a hard line between each campaign and the rest of the organization and that leaves each campaign is largely 'on their own' for anything other than maybe lining up endorsements or speaking dates to get friendly faces to show up for local campaign events.
  - gyardley 14y ago
    As I understand it, a lot of the infrastructure is contained in private companies (some non-profit, some not) closely associated with one of the two parties and available to all the campaigns associated with that party. For instance, the Democratic Party's contact databases are in NGP VAN's VoteBuilder or in Catalist, and campaigns in 2014 will both be using the information entered there in 2012 and updating the contact information for the next race. Much of the Democratic Party's institutional knowledge about voter contact and outreach lives at the non-profit Analyst Institute. The insights gained in the 2012 campaign will stay there instead of evaporating. The Republican Party has a little of this - there's the GOP Data Center, formerly Voter Vault - but they haven't been building infrastructure as aggressively as the Democratic Party, and it's costing them. In 2004 the GOP had a superior technical organization, but they seemed to rest on their laurels, and in 2008 they were slightly weaker. In 2012 they were totally lapped. They will do better by 2016 - thanks in part to the utter failure of ORCA - but the Democrats have built up a pretty healthy infrastructure lead that'll be hard to top.

josephmosby 14y ago

You could twist that the other way, though. The Democratic organization was highly decentralized, leaner and more effective than the Romney campaign bloc, centralized and huge in Boston HQ.

scarmig 14y ago
It was also fault tolerant. In 2008, at least, Democrats had paper backup for things that went wrong with the tech, and did end up using it at times. In 2012, Republicans hadn't done any due diligence and assumed their tech would work. So sure they were that their tech would work is that they only released it to users on Election Day itself...
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  Indeed, and frankly I think the US dodged a bullet in that respect. I've always been interested in politics and have a belief that there's a strong correlation between the way the campaign goes and the way governance would go if the candidate is elected.
rayiner 14y ago
Decentralization is really the key thing, not whether the work is done by the government versus contractors. The government can be very efficient doing things in-house as long as the efforts are decentralized. The US Attorneys Offices handle tremendous caseloads for their staffing levels relative to private law firms. The Army Corps of Engineers is also quite effective because it's decentralized. Things that are a mess are often centralized and involve too many contractors. Defense, the VA, etc.

lifeguard 14y ago

I lol'd that Romney got his Orca app from Best Buy.

lifeguard 14y ago
"Most of the Romney organization's core IT operations, such as desktop support and back-office systems, were outsourced to Best Buy subsidiary MindShift Technologies" http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/which-consultants-built-romneys-project-orca-none-of-them/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/which-...
- tomjen3 14y ago
  That is not necessarily bad though, MindShift properly has a lot more experience in that area and the tech support is likely the same as what they normally sell. Orca (and Narwhale) on the other hand -- they are more of a once in a lifetime app.

KaoruAoiShiho 14y ago

This makes a case for a small government. A small team, in house, tightly managed worked very well. Real big government is the multiple layers of crony contractors you're talking about.

rayiner 14y ago
You're conflating multiple different things. You can have big government without multiple layers of contractors. E.g. the federal court/prosecutors offices are a pretty huge operation in the aggregate, but it's all distributed so each office or court individually is small and lean. At the same time, one of the ways to get "small government" has historically been to outsource as much as possible to contractors. That's why the military industrial complex looks the way it does.
johnrgrace 14y ago
Or it makes the case that the goverment should do things inhouse instead of outsourcing everything and having hordes of contractors.
vampirechicken 14y ago
> Real big government is the multiple layers of crony contractors you're talking about. That's entirely the opposite of that the GOP means when they say Big Government. They mean large offices of government employees. They demonstrate a love of having a few contract managers and a slew of corny contractors.

brown9-2 14y ago

I think that this is a stretch since 2012 was the first time they brought the technologists in-house.

vampirechicken 14y ago

Nice discussion. Thanks folks.