The Nation, America’s oldest weekly magazine and most widely read journal of opinion reported recently on the “new tools and new talent” that is infusing the Democratic Party and buttressing the progressive left.
It is fitting that when the article describes early instances of the online infrastructure progressives built and the flaws of the older generation technology we inherited, the article quotes Adam Mordecai who described Howard Dean’s the innovative websystem the nascent Advomatic built for Iowa.
Adam Mordecai, a Dean staffer who helped run the Perfect Storm, described the problem as follows: “The one major issue that really foiled the perfect storm…was the completely dysfunctional voter-file system. The company we contracted the voter file to was way out of their league. Their system would crash perpetually, field organizers would be lucky if they could ever access the system to download lists and said lists were usually way out-of-date or incorrect because no one could get access to the system to update them. Iowans would get repeated calls from different volunteers within the same hour. It was a disaster. It alienated a lot of Iowans who were simply tired of hearing from Deaniacs over and over again.”
The custom volunteer interface website we built worked great, however the legacy database system which our site needed to synch with was broken.
Such are the flaws of a pre-semantic web universe. Reading about Dean’s online fatal flaw, namely how some of his properties were cutting edge and others so inadequate that they negated our goodness, it makes me proud of our successful database integration sites like TheMiddleClass.org.
Mother Jones Magazine reported on all of the companies that rose from the ashes of Dean’s internet magic including us at Advomatic.
Not to be lost in the conversation about early innovators online is the fact that more innovation is possible. Though not as much innovation has happened this cycle as 2004, more is possible. We at Advomatic will continue to push for broader integration of our creations.