Bernie’s Army of Coders
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The site is just one of the dozens of websites, tools and apps built by coders lining up behind Bernie Sanders, often people—like Hughes— with no affiliation to the campaign at all. Behind Sanders’ astonishing success in the primaries so far stands a coterie of more than 1,000 volunteer techies pumping out innovations like this at a rate of about one new app a week.
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“It’s been a great resource for us,” said Kenneth Pennington, the Sanders campaign’s digital director and one of several officials who regularly keep in touch with the tech volunteers. “It speaks to the ethos of the entire campaign. The volunteers are running the ship here.”
The online landscape of Bernie apps is so broad it can be hard to get a handle on. Some can be downloaded for free from the Apple and Google Play app stores; others are internal tools for Sanders’ volunteers to use. There’s an app dubbed “Ground Control” that organizes volunteer phone-bank hosts and helps campaign staffers approve grass-roots events. Another app, Bernie BNB, has about 1,000 Sanders-minded volunteers searching either for a place to spend the night or offering a free spare bed in their homes. Two million visitors have clicked on feelthebern.org, a heavily footnoted site that compiles the Vermont senator’s stances on a range of policy positions from climate change to immigration. Volunteers can turn each page into a downloadable flier that can be used for canvassing.
“I’ve heard of superPACs building crappier websites with full-time staff for $1 [million] to $2 million,” said Daniela Perdomo, the 30-year old tech volunteer who spearheaded the building of feelthebern.org during more than five weeks of all-night shifts from her Brooklyn home not far from Hillary Clinton’s campaign headquarters.
The contrast with Sanders’ Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton, couldn’t be more stark. Her operation is led in part by former Google executive Stephanie Hannon and an army of digital hands who honed their online skills on Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns or elsewhere in the Democratic advocacy power structure. But Clinton’s tech innovators are hobbled, several Democratic and GOP tech experts said in interviews, by a hierarchical management structure that is seen as stifling new projects, or at least requiring them to win multiple layers of sign-offs before they go live.
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Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/bernie-sanders-army-of-coders-2016-213647#ixzz40WCRn6eH
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