
Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture - PStamatiou
http://paulstamatiou.com/inside-votizen
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PStamatiou
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/>), but in my own
style -- focused on the startup and in my natural super-long-form.

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zvrba
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.

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PStamatiou
Željko, I think you could have worded that a bit more politely. Try
readability, RSS or perhaps increasing the size of your browser window.

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kogir
Remove "position: fixed;" from "div.left-col" in responsive-stammy.css

Unless there was a reason to break the (horizontal) scrolling.

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PStamatiou
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

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famousactress
_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)

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jdunck
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
More conjecture. I feel like the honest answer to this question would be
closer to:

 _"We've been lucky enough to find smart people who are happy to come into the
office so this isn't a bridge we've needed to cross, which we're happy about
because we don't really have much idea how it would impact our company or what
challenges it might introduce"_

It's unfortunate that the idea of remote employees is perpetrated as a
compromise (we couldn't find anyone better, closer). So many of us literally
make tools that throw rocks at the problem of erasing physical space
(including you). I find constant inspiration in remote working that gets fed
into the tools I build, and that's far from the only benefit. I'm not arguing
that it's better, I'm arguing that it's not worse.. and if anything, is likely
a rounding error in the equation of who the best person for your company is.

Also, all other things are never equal.

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jdunck
Honestly, we've been close to hiring 2 remote people in our short time. Both
were because we knew how good the people were. Hiring with confidence is
difficult, and canning a person shortly after you realize you made a hiring
mistake is a bad outcome for both parties.

Hiring remotely makes this harder.

(Personal opinion, not my employer, yadayada but:

I've long thought that the best way to hire eng would be to have a pool of
contractors, all "maybe interested in FT" in both directions of the
transaction. Hire the best of the pool who are willing once you have
confidence gained. Remote would be one factor to overcome in gaining
confidence.

Even so, there are structural problems with this; it's hard to take that
course in hiring as the first-mover. People don't like to quit jobs - even in
this awesome job market for devs - without a bird in the hand.)

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pavel_lishin
> _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.

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5vforest
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-
an...](http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Social-networking-and-
politics.aspx)

~~~
jdunck
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> and
[http://www.amazon.com/Connected-Surprising-Networks-
Friends-...](http://www.amazon.com/Connected-Surprising-Networks-Friends-
Everything/dp/0316036137/)

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.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Don't you think your efforts will just be co-opted though?

I've got a number of friends on social networks who don't hesitate to share
their political views now. The problem is that they're doing so by whatever
divide-and-conquer meme the political masters are spinning this week. It's the
same as it ever was, only faster and 10x as annoying. I've actually hidden a
couple of people on my FB timeline because of it.

What do you think will make it possible for your efforts to avoid being co-
opted into more of the same old trap?

~~~
jdunck
It's a risk, but it's one we recognize. We're in this to disrupt hierarchy and
broadcast-as-politics. I think that peer re-broadcasting is basically
incompatible with the spirit of the interaction. The medium is the message,
and the message is formed by the medium.

I don't think you can successfully run a broadcast system on top of the peer-
based medium. The transition may be slow[1] and painful[2], but the change is
economic (in terms of transactional overhead and diminishing returns); it's
hard to see how it could be avoided short of censorship and regime[3].

If these peers are just spouting the message (the easiest thing for them to do
- RT "yeah!") that will not be persuasive. The angels don't need to be saved.

What's new here is that collaborating on issues can span time and space;
group-forming doesn't need a reason before it can happen. The reason can be
discovered.

[1] <http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=100284>

[2] <http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=4517>

[3] [http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/01/newspapers-paywalls-
and...](http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/01/newspapers-paywalls-and-core-
users/)

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saraid216
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.

~~~
dgouldin
I'm a developer at Votizen.

Just our voter history (whether a voter actually voted in a particular
election) is, on average, 10 rows per voter record. 200 million voter records
* 10 history records per voter = ~2 billion rows.

~~~
saraid216
Ah, okay. That makes more sense. Thanks.

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hkarthik
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
Thanks! We are hiring! <https://github.com/votizen/careers>

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tocomment
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
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.

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

~~~
scarmig
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.

