The Obama Campaign

A Programmer’s Perspective

Doors closed and the first text message came from a precinct: it looked like a large attendance. Then came the second, the third, the fourth. Each was typed into our model, and a projection was starting to form. The fifth, the sixth, and now the seventh. The projection of attendance seemed solid. The Des Moines Register’s poll had been correct: more than 240,000 people participated in the Iowa caucus. The numbers were astounding, and Barack Obama was going to win it. Simple technologies—text messaging combined with data analysis and PHP—enabled the campaign to create a simple, yet effective, predictive dashboard.

The Obama campaign has been praised—with good reason—for its incredible use of technology. Many organizations would love to replicate its ability to do outreach, its focus on data, and its ability both to coordinate the efforts of hundreds of thousands of volunteers in a single direction and to empower those individuals to take control of their own distinct parts of the campaign.

The use of technology within the Obama campaign creates two seemingly contradictory points: the technology strategy was not a technology strategy—it was an overall strategy—yet it could not have been executed without technology. But this misses what programmers have always understood about software—a truth that has finally blossomed in the age of social networking: software itself is an organizing force that equips organizations to achieve their goals. The Obama campaign used technology as a front-end enabler rather than a back-end support, and this synchronization between mission and tools allowed for the amplification of both.

While the Internet operations of the campaign represented the most visible aspect of its technology efforts, the campaign used technology throughout its operations: for internal processes, for opening offices, for managing GOTV (get-out-the-vote) operations, and for communicating with internal and external stakeholders, including fund raisers, policy advisors, and external consultants. Much of this technology was integrated so that fund raising could be linked across different channels (offline and

online) and GOTV efforts could be executed using both online resources and old-fashioned canvassing. All of this had to be linked to the compliance and operation efforts of the campaign while making sure that the budget was managed and every dollar accounted for. All of these systems had to be created, integrated, and rolled out with training for thousands of staff and volunteers in less than two years.

NO MAGIC FORMULA

How was all this technology designed, developed, and rolled out in such a short time (and at a cost that reflected its short-term nature)? To understand the success of the Obama campaign in using technology, it is important to reflect on how other software architectures have empowered and reflected the organizations they have supported. For example, command-and-control organizations used the structured programming architectures of their time. Object-oriented architectures reflected the move to shared-services organizations in which functions such as HR and finance were moved to more central parts of the organization. Service-oriented architectures seem to support the outsourcing that many organizations have moved toward, where access to the objects is necessary both outside and inside the organizations. Successful organizations have been able to integrate the most current software architecture patterns into their business model quickly and effectively. At this juncture, where technology and people are moving in the same direction, innovation takes place.

The Obama campaign reflects this ability to its extreme. What have been the advances in software architecture that made the Obama campaign successful? Obviously, social networking played a huge part in organizing people, but other models that are important to look at are the open source development and PaaS and SaaS ( Platform and Software as a Service) models. Additionally, the campaign made extensive use of data analysis. Combining these pieces through the use of existing tools allowed the campaign to innovate. Of course, these concepts had constraints, such as a high learning curve, the need for a