

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

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daniper
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. :-)

~~~
shostack
Cool site...a couple points of feedback:

\- 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 ;)

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schneidmaster
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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sayhar
I have to agree.

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.

Fascinating to see it firsthand.

~~~
hjt
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!

