Project Narwhal: Obama's IT Infrastructure that won him the ground game.

[Phokus]

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-the-nerds-go-marching-in/265325/

Fascinating read, it really contrasts the Democrats and Republicans well. Conservatives are a bunch of old fogies who don't understand technology. Also goes in depth on how the various teams butted heads but eventually came together and succeeded. I've seen lots of these types of projects fail in the corporate world, many much simpler than what these guys were trying to create.

The billing the Republicans gave the tool confused almost everyone inside the Obama campaign. Narwhal wasn't an app for a smartphone. It was the architecture of the company's sophisticated data operation. Narwhal unified what Obama for America knew about voters, canvassers, event-goers, and phone-bankers, and it did it in real time. From the descriptions of the Romney camp's software that were available then and now, Orca was not even in the same category as Narwhal. It was like touting the iPad as a Facebook killer, or comparing a GPS device to an engine. And besides, in the scheme of a campaign, a digitized strike list is cool, but it's not, like, a gamechanger. It's just a nice thing to have.

It's like they are 10 years behind the Democrats.

And as i posted in another thread, the elite of the elite software engineers are overwhelmingly liberal, so they get the best engineers from Google, twitter, facebook, etc. to work for their campaigns. I don't see the GOP attracting that kind of talent anytime soon.