Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture

by PStamatiou • 14 years ago

101 45 14 years ago

PStamatiou6• 14 years ago

Author here -- Please let me know what you think of this format. If it works, I'd love to do more of these immersive-get-to-know-a-startup articles with other startups. Is it too long? Does the Q&A structure work here?

My inspiration for this was The Setup (http://usesthis.com/), but in my own style -- focused on the startup and in my natural super-long-form.

jbredeche• 14 years ago

Love these posts, please keep them coming!

njs12345• 14 years ago

Definitely, this is excellent. Like the way it's got a bit of tech stuff and also business as well.

zvrba3• 14 years ago

Your webpage layout sucks: in a Browser half a window wide (Opera 11.61, 64-bit Win7, 1680x1050 resolution), the text overflows past the right margin. When I scroll it horizontally, the blue block of text ("Paul Stamatiou") and the purple ad overlap the text. This (1st line of text) is where I stopped reading.

PStamatiou6• 14 years ago

Željko, I think you could have worded that a bit more politely. Try readability, RSS or perhaps increasing the size of your browser window.

alabut• 14 years ago

Well done Stammy, this was excellent. It's like the way I wanted Founders At Work to never end and keep reading more about company's from the inside, rather than the "success theater" at presentations and talks.

It's so good I might just steal the format :)

avadhanula• 14 years ago

Very interesting post. One thing that would be interesting to know about startups which gets talked about very little is the mundane things about running such a shop.

- None of the startups have HR. How do they deal with Health and other benefits? - Legal etc.

Love the sawhorse desks.

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

> David: One state had its voter file arrive on a magnetic tape format called 128 CPI — characters per inch of magnetic tape (same format that was used by UNIVAC in 1951) — which is probably how Auric Goldfinger stored his data. Converting it to something useable was more expensive than acquiring the tape itself.

That's amazing. I wonder which state it was.

saraid2162• 14 years ago

They claimed 2B rows for their voter database. If I understood that correctly, that means they know about 2 billion people.

Do they cover countries other than America? Because the population of America is only 300 million or so; even accounting for false positives (failing to sync two accounts as one person) or fake identities (pet dog has an account), I don't really see how you can get from 300m to 2b.

PStamatiou6• 14 years ago

It's about ~200M voters (United States only)

scarmig3• 14 years ago

I'm guessing that their database isn't voter registrations but individual votes--one person can have multiple votes and registrations recorded over the years.

I still don't see how that could add up to a factor of 10, though. I'm in a similar space and typically people will have fewer than that, although the voter records we have don't go back more than a decade or so.

dgouldin• 14 years ago

I'm a developer at Votizen.

Just our voter history (whether a voter actually voted in a particular election) is, on average, 10 rows per voter record. 200 million voter records * 10 history records per voter = ~2 billion rows.

saraid2162• 14 years ago

Ah, okay. That makes more sense. Thanks.

hkarthik• 14 years ago

I really dig posts like this. As an engineer, this is the kind of stuff that makes a startup a really attractive place to work.

novaurora3• 14 years ago

Thanks! We are hiring! https://github.com/votizen/careers

tocomment2• 14 years ago

So question 1, what do they do exactly? I can't quite parse it out from the article. Can someone who doesn't use facebook frequently still use this?

novaurora3• 14 years ago

We can scan your social networks for registered voters you know. Once you know who they are, you can affect their vote by asking them to turn out for who you want. I think the discovery piece is very interesting, even if you're not ready to ask anyone to help you elect a candidate yet. We'll be building more uses in the future.

tocomment2• 14 years ago

Also how are they allowed to get voter registration data? Is that public information?

scarmig3• 14 years ago

Sort of. You have to pay a nominal fee for it and sign some documents indicating that you have a legitimate (political) use for them and won't use them for commercial marketing, etc.

jdunck7• 14 years ago

The repercussions for misusing this data are pretty severe. This isn't a slap on the wrist, and we take securing that data seriously.

5vforest• 14 years ago

Anyone else find it odd that Votizen wants you to share your political views with your social network friends? Political views, for me at least, have always been an inherently private subject matter. Sure, I have my friends who I'll talk politics with, but I don't espouse candidates on my Facebook profile.

I have a feeling that other people might feel the same way: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Social-networking-an...

novaurora3• 14 years ago

We don't need you to, but ultimately if we want to change this political system, meaning replace the fundraise from large donors > buy television / direct mail > blast you with TV/robocall with something more democratic, you're going to need to be a bit more vocal about what you want from your elected officials, and prove somewhere that you're a voter and you matter.

Our long term vision is to build online electorates, where you come together with people that share your values, and attract candidates to a large voting pool. In a system like that, candidates even with little to no money, can win based on how well they can convince you / match with your values.

Happy to go into further detail!

jdunck7• 14 years ago

Hi, I'm a dev at Votizen.

I haven't read that study yet - it's on my list - but I tend to agree that existing social ties are somewhat orthogonal to political views. We are surprised by our friends' views precisely because we don't feel comfortable discussing things. This limits communication and understanding. The two-party winner-take-all system, combined with slow feedback loops (I won't vote for Pelosi because she supported warrantless wiretaps, but she doesn't know that and therefore doesn't care about it) mean that the messaging for campaigns to succeed depends on wedge issues and vilification.

At the same time, our social connections (be they online or off) do inform our positions and views on ranges of acceptable behavior. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window and http://www.amazon.com/Connected-Surprising-Networks-Friends-...

Connectedness in a network increases the transitivity of ideas. Now what we need is a forum/channel/model for expressing our political positions/desires/demands and we should see the political process get less hierarchical, more responsive, and more accountable.

So yes, "please vote for my candidate" via online channels is v0 of the overall goal. We want to flip it, "take my position if you want my vote", but to get there, we need campaigns to recognize the influence of their electorate that social networks (again, online or offline) provide.

waterlesscloud• 14 years ago

Don't you think your efforts will just be co-opted though?

I've got a number of friends on social networks who don't hesitate to share their political views now. The problem is that they're doing so by whatever divide-and-conquer meme the political masters are spinning this week. It's the same as it ever was, only faster and 10x as annoying. I've actually hidden a couple of people on my FB timeline because of it.

What do you think will make it possible for your efforts to avoid being co-opted into more of the same old trap?

famousactress2• 14 years ago

What are typical working hours? Can engineers work from home?

Jason: 8-10 hours in office, more from home / weekends. Yes if needed but we prefer to collaborate in the office. Since we run continuous deployment speed matters, and that means you need high intra-office bandwidth.

If the bit about intra office bandwidth isn't ridiculous misdirection, then apologies... But it sure sounds like it. I think it's interesting, in an age where shops are bending over backward to rethink what makes people productive, and go above and beyond when it comes to equipment (or tequila), that telecommuting still seems to have an unfounded shroud of taboo hanging over it.

What am I missing? Please feel free to tell me why intra-office bandwidth is a really important attribute that deserves a place in the answer to this question.

(For the record Votizen seems rad, and the article is awesome. Sorry for coming off negative)

pnathan• 14 years ago

Basically, it's nice to walk over to someone's desk and chat.

jdunck7• 14 years ago

Devs use IRC, even in the office. And we do standups with some members on Skype. But meatspace still matters.

We generally prefer people in the office, all other things being equal. All other things are generally not equal, but it's a complex set of factors.

I worked as a contractor with several clients for about a year, almost all remotely from my home office. It works, but it is definitely still good to be in person.

I was able to do that because of market imbalances - I was, for some value of "better", the best available option, despite being remote. And that is certainly still true for some future employees. There's also the difficulty, when you're mostly central, that the off-site people are somehow less real or feel less ownership.

I wanted to relocate before I knew I'd be joining Votizen. It was a happy accident.

I do think, at some point, if the startup funding ramp continues, that it will just become absurd to try to pack in all the people moving here. And, of course, the world is a big place and there are more smart people living elsewhere than living here. But the density of skills and funding does matter, too.

famousactress2• 14 years ago

More conjecture. I feel like the honest answer to this question would be closer to:

"We've been lucky enough to find smart people who are happy to come into the office so this isn't a bridge we've needed to cross, which we're happy about because we don't really have much idea how it would impact our company or what challenges it might introduce"

It's unfortunate that the idea of remote employees is perpetrated as a compromise (we couldn't find anyone better, closer). So many of us literally make tools that throw rocks at the problem of erasing physical space (including you). I find constant inspiration in remote working that gets fed into the tools I build, and that's far from the only benefit. I'm not arguing that it's better, I'm arguing that it's not worse.. and if anything, is likely a rounding error in the equation of who the best person for your company is.

Also, all other things are never equal.

dannyr• 14 years ago

Votizen is an early-stage startup still trying to develop its own company culture.

If you have a bunch of remote employees, it's not going to be easy.

jorgeortiz85• 14 years ago

Collaboration is hard. It's harder when you're not in the same room. You can bend over backwards to try to make remote collaboration productive, but the state-of-the-art is nowhere near as good as being in the same room, at least for some kinds of collaboration.

Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture

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