Everything You Want to Know About the Tech Nerds Who Won for Obama Has Been Written

Proud that people "like us" had a hand in winning President Obama's reelection, the tech blogger world is celebrating the coders and data crunchers of the campaign the only way it knows how:  With words. Many, many, many words. Following the Democratic win last week, we have seen many "deep dives" and long features about the nerds who helped get out the right kind of vote to swing the election in Obama's favor. We understand the enthusiasm, tech nerds, but it's a lot. For those who don't have time to sit down and read the many thousands of words dedicated to these good-with-computers guys, we've put together a little reading guide for you. You're welcome.

If You're Into How Things Work ...

Read: Ars Technica's "Built to Win: Deep Inside Obama's Campaign Tech"
Sean Gallagher goes into the technology behind Narwhal, the set of services the tech team built where it could store and develop all the different applications the Obama campaign used to get the right people to vote on election day. This is for the more tech obsessed reader, who wants to know about the computing language, cloud services, and self-made API these geeks used and created.
Or, Shorter: 

To pull it off, the Obama team relied almost exclusively on Amazon's cloud computing services for computing and storage power. At its peak, the IT infrastructure for the Obama campaign took up "a significant amount of resources in AWS's Northern Virginia data center," said Ecker. "We actually had to start using beefier servers, because for a period of time we were buying up most of the available smaller Elastic Compute Cloud instance types in the East data center."
Atop Amazon's services, the Obama team built Narwhal—a set of services that acted as an interface to a single shared data store for all of the campaign's applications, making it possible to quickly develop new applications and to integrate existing ones into the campaign's system. Those apps include sophisticated analytics programs like Dreamcatcher, a tool developed to "microtarget" voters based on sentiments within text. And there's Dashboard, the "virtual field office" application that helped volunteers communicate and collaborate.

Read more: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/11/everything-you-want-know-about-tech-nerds-who-won-obama-has-been-written/59082/#