DevOps In Politics
summary
Working campaigns run like fast, high-stakes software projects: volunteers use Drive the Vote and Hillary B&B, contributors spin up identical dev boxes with vagrant, CI runs on CircleCI, and automatic dialers connect humans instead of robocalls. The claim is concrete: automation speeds and verifies work but must free human capital for empathy‑driven voter conversations. Example: referendum 74’s person‑to‑person calls flipped votes in 2012; code later forks into the Women’s March site, proving reusable lessons even after loss.
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chapters (21)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:23What does politics have to do with devops?
- 0:57Every political campaign is a software company
- 1:34Technology moves on in between elections...
- 2:08but principles applied to the technology remain the same
- 2:35What makes tools "devops" is the manner of their use, not fundamental characteristics of the tools themselves.
- 5:14Technical implementations are useless if they solve the wrong problem
- 8:35Speed is critical
- 8:57Accuracy is critical
- 9:40The right automation enables speed and accuracy
- 10:01Automation is very helpful with large volunteer forces
- 14:00The right automation enables human connection rather than replacing it
- 14:39Robocalls do not make personal connections
- 14:55Personal connections are what capture hearts, minds, and motivate voters
- 15:10Referendum 74
- 16:51Let go of being right and meet people where they are
- 17:26Hearts and minds change through personal connections
- 19:08The purpose of automation is to free up human capital to do what it does best
- 20:59Losing an election is devastating
- 22:15Cynicism is the easy path
- 24:13What does devops have to do with politics?
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