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Coyotl

(15,262 posts)
Sat Nov 10, 2012, 10:11 AM Nov 2012

Inside Team Romney's whale of an IT meltdown = Orca, the Romney campaign's "killer" app [View all]

Inside Team Romney's whale of an IT meltdown
Orca, the Romney campaign's "killer" app, skips beta and pays the price.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/inside-team-romneys-whale-of-an-it-meltdown/

It was supposed to be a "killer app," but a system deployed to volunteers by Mitt Romney's presidential campaign may have done more harm to Romney's chances on Election Day—largely because of a failure to follow basic best practices for IT projects.

Called "Orca," the effort was supposed to give the Romney campaign its own analytics on what was happening at polling places and to help the campaign direct get-out-the-vote efforts in the key battleground states of Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Colorado.

Instead, volunteers couldn't get the system to work from the field in many states—in some cases because they had been given the wrong login information. The system crashed repeatedly. At one point, the network connection to the Romney campaign's headquarters went down because Internet provider Comcast reportedly thought the traffic was caused by a denial of service attack.

As one Orca user described it to Ars, the entire episode was a "huge clusterfuck." Here's how it happened.

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