

Legion of Tech Volunteers Lead a Charge for Bernie Sanders - bootload
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/04/us/politics/bernie-sanders-presidential-campaign-tech-supporters.html?ref=technology

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schneidmaster
(Reposting this comment from when I posted this article earlier today.)

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.

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jamra
Can you list a couple interesting apps or services that are being worked on at
the moment?

~~~
schneidmaster
In addition to the stuff Kyle mentioned, you can see some of the projects
we've shipped at
[https://coders.forsanders.com/projects/](https://coders.forsanders.com/projects/)

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daniper
(reposting my comment as well)

Best thing I've ever put my tech startup skillz to use for! If you haven't
already checked out [http://feelthebern.org](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. :-)

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sandaru1
During the Presidential Election of Sri Lanka (2015, January), there was a
huge Volunteer supporter base on social media for Maithreepala Sirisena (The
candidate who won the election defeating the previous president). This was
mainly due to the fact there was no media freedom and the traditional media
was hugely biased towards one side.

It was quite interesting since the official tech teams of the candidates are
there as nominal roles. They were just using online advertising and
maintaining FB pages, etc - nothing more.

This blog explains in more detail : [http://groundviews.org/2015/01/13/was-
prespollsl-2015-sri-la...](http://groundviews.org/2015/01/13/was-
prespollsl-2015-sri-lankas-first-cyber-election/)

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jmnicolas
OK, full disclosure : I'm not American, I don't know Sanders much, and I
didn't read the article.

But seriously, how many times can people be deceived by a promising politician
that builds hope and then continue the same politic than his predecessors ?

Even if this one is sincere, do you really think one man is going to resist
the combined pressures of all the interest groups that are in place ?

~~~
digitalzombie
> Even if this one is sincere, do you really think one man is going to resist
> the combined pressures of all the interest groups that are in place ?

In the real world you have to compromise, while he may perhaps resist interest
groups his constituents may not and he will have to compromise with them and
by proxy may be influenced.

But I believe he's the best so far, out of all of them, in term of his views
and mines.

I don't expect any president to be perfect they're only human. And I don't
expect his views to be exactly like mine, if I wanted that then I would be
running really.

But I believe he's an honest man like Jimmy Carter.

I hope he win but if not at least he's pushing Democrats toward the left more
so and stopping the march toward center.

~~~
fhadley
I'd much rather Slick Willy's mid 90s economy and his less than consistent
commitment to the truth than Carter's honesty & stagflation.

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rusbus
It will be interesting to see how this largely volunteer organization will
fare compared to the highly organized tech teams that Obama had and Clinton
has as well.

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trothamel
Arguably, Clinton's tech team is what has left her so vulnerable in the first
place.

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zeeshanm
Would like to know how so? There seem to be pretty good people on the team.

~~~
saryant
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controve...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controversy)

