A business is about sustainability. You are creating things that you will be maintaining and using for (hopefully) years to come. You get to be picky about who you are hiring. In that given, its not unusual that you want all of your employees to be able to work on various parts of the stack as focus changes or what not.
This isn't to discount the value in polyglot groups. Its almost an inevitability at this point. While totally possible that you could have entirely js stack in node, more likely you'll have ruby (or something) and javascript and maybe objc for iphone and java for android and maybe .Net for windows or more objc on osx or whatever.
Isn't it? I'm a frontend dev. While I'm capable of digging into the backend and mucking around, it's not a typical part of my job. There are backend devs who I can talk to, who are writing Scala or Java rather than Javascript or Ruby, who can deal with problems faster and better than I could.
Changes of focus like what you describe seem to be typical of far more nascent companies. In that sense, Reed's team was like a startup: everyone had to be ultra-capable because they had to pick up anyone's slack at any time, just like a CEO of a ten-man group sometimes has to clean the kitchen or code a component that no one else has time to.
It's important to note that in this sense, "polyglot" refers to the collective group -- ie, the Obama campaign had numerous talented people with a huge variety of skills in-house -- vs the individual sense of the word.
Not to say that there weren't incredibly talented generalists, but when you have a team of this size (dozens of designers and front-end developers, engineers focused on the back-end APIs, a team dedicated to data integration, a handful of dedicated ops and DBAs) the ability of individuals to specialize in an area could be a strength.
The translation over isn't obvious. From what I've heard their internal organization was pretty fluid. That kind of thing depends on the quality of people involved, their commonality of purpose, and the organizational culture. You can't box that and roll it over to party HQ.
That said, Democrats do seem more likely to attract and motivate the kind of people you'd need for this. That's a pretty important head start.
Judging from the emails I'm getting, Obama would like to turn it from a campaign advantage to a governing advantage (here are all of my current policy issues, please put pressure on Congress to do X, Y and Z), and if he succeeds in that he will undoubtably try to turn it into a party advantage in the future.
So yes, the organization is fluid and can evaporate. The database of possibly politically active people is much less fluid, and may prove to be a more durable advantage.
One system was diverse and cooperative; the other isolated, secretive, and ultimately a failure.
I'll agree that a GOTV tool is only one part of campaign IT, but I think there's a lesson waiting here.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORCA_%28computer_system%29
That's impressive. Glad that tech is on the Democratic side.
But then again change, liberalism, progress, technology and innovation are all leftist tenets - so it isn't so surprising.
Here's hoping to another tech assisted Republican defeat in 2016. May the morons stay out of power - least they screw us all once again.
