Best thing I've ever put my tech startup skillz to use for!
If you haven't already checked out http://feelthebern.org, please do so and share widely. We built it to make clear where Bernie Sanders stands on every issue... TL;DR for 50+ years he's been consistent and on the right side of history no matter the political cost.
Before this I'd never found (or even tried to find) common ground with, say, Republicans, libertarians or even mainline Democrats. I'd also never really known people in active military service, or who were formerly homeless — but these are some of the amazing humans who I've been working with for 7 weeks now.
Most Americans care about the same things, and if we can move past the broken two-party system and the theatrics that play out in the media, we can actually start solving problems together. Feel grateful that thanks to this candidate and his issues-based campaign, my world's a little bigger.
Join us, we have mobile apps and social apps and so much more coming out. We need great devs, designers, writers & more. :-)
- Privacy & Digital Rights should be near the top of the homepage
- Every page hits me with a wall of text, and sometimes I have to scroll further down to actually get to the part about his views. It is fine to have that info, but would be great to have a giant bold one sentence summary of his stance on things at the very top. People don't like to read ;)
This article is primarily about the CodersForSanders organization (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.
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.
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!
"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) . For all the time I've used HN, there has never an attempt to avoid re-submission of a url multiple times.
> 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. 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.
If you haven't already checked out http://feelthebern.org, please do so and share widely. We built it to make clear where Bernie Sanders stands on every issue... TL;DR for 50+ years he's been consistent and on the right side of history no matter the political cost.
Before this I'd never found (or even tried to find) common ground with, say, Republicans, libertarians or even mainline Democrats. I'd also never really known people in active military service, or who were formerly homeless — but these are some of the amazing humans who I've been working with for 7 weeks now.
Most Americans care about the same things, and if we can move past the broken two-party system and the theatrics that play out in the media, we can actually start solving problems together. Feel grateful that thanks to this candidate and his issues-based campaign, my world's a little bigger.
Join us, we have mobile apps and social apps and so much more coming out. We need great devs, designers, writers & more. :-)