

VOIP + Cloud = Better Political Campaigns - michaelrkn
http://docs.google.com/View?id=ajfpnj43nx69_7d94ddrfb

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oldgregg
I built a service on top of EC2/Asterisk that did political phone polling. Not
really polling though as much as voter ID, we'd push out 100,000 calls into a
congressional district and campaigns would use the resulting data for targeted
mail and GOTV. It was all point and click-- write your poll and record it with
a flash plugin-- stupidly simple. After the 2008 election I shut it down,
largely due to getting to work with so many politicians and realizing how
totally worthless human beings most of them are. Seriously, how the fuck these
people are writing laws is beyond me.

And yeah, the laws are total bullshit. If I revive the project my plan is to
have a massive list of phone numbers as well as a list of congressman's
offices, personal cell phones, children's cell phone numbers, mistresses, etc.
Whenever an important vote comes up you call your people and give them a very
short briefing on the issue and then connect the call through to the
appropriate number. Because you can control the call throttling you can lock
up phone lines and it would be about 100x more effective than traditional
calling campaigns. Ron Paul 2012.

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dangrossman
Political calling is one of few areas you could build something like this and
get away with it.

In any type of business-to-consumer calling you're going to need to hire a
lawyer before you even design the system because of all the telemarketing
regulations (at federal, state and local levels) that have to be followed.
There's lots of documentation to be prepared that you have to make available
to anyone that asks while you call them, there are rules about how predictive
dialers can be used (such as maximum drop call rates and dead air times), etc.

Politicians, when writing these telemarketing regulations, purposely wrote
clauses into them excluding political calls. Ya know, consumers don't want to
be bothered by telemarketing so our politicians actually listen and pass these
laws, but it's OK for _them_ to bother us with telemarketing still.

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michaelrkn
gotta love that, right? i'm figuring that once this is built really well for
political applications that i'll take it to commercial market as well and deal
with all the regulations at that point. commercial clients can provide a nice
stabilizing business stream to balance out the comings and goings of political
campaigns.

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forkqueue
Last time I tried using Asterisk on Amazon EC2 the call quality was pretty bad
- presumably because Asterisk's timing was being messed up by the
virtualisation.

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ichverstehe
I'm using FreeSWITCH on EC2, without any issues. There are kernel images with
1000HZ timing.

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haonanzhang
nice idea. this is a very good vertical application to build on top of
<http://www.twilio.com/>

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michaelrkn
yeah, twilio seems pretty cool, and i'm looking at it for another
voice/political project. but it's basically an api for level 3 with some nifty
features tacked on, so for a project as voice-heavy as a predictive dialer
that doesn't need the extra features, i'm guessing it makes more sense to find
a developer with voice experience and avoid the markup and the added layer of
potential problems. if somebody with twilio or other voice experience is
listening, i'd love to get another opinion.

