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Ask HN: Who wrote Orca?

16 points by VonGuard ↗ HN
So, Romney's Orca campaigning application was supposedly written with Microsoft and a third party contract firm. Who was this firm? Anyone know? I'm more interested in figuring out whether they outright sabotaged the thing, or if it was just mismanaged and rushed. It's the first I've heard of software failures being involved in election coordination failures, and I find it interesting from a forensic stand point.

16 comments

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gruseom
Most enterprise software projects sabotage themselves.
damian2000
From my reading of it they didn't do enough user testing or training. But this may have been outside the scope of the contracted firm; they probably delivered exactly what has asked for, and no more.
VonGuard
My reading seemed to indicate complete architectural failure. 11 database servers for the desktop app, but only 1 app/DB server for the mobile app, which most people were using. Also, Comcast shut them down over DDoS concerns somewhere, meaning they were going through a home or office account as a choke point?!
rhizome
I'm sure there were enough failures in planning and execution for it not to be attributable to any one person, perhaps by design.
rbanffy
In any case, someone signed the check and approved the overall design. This someone is ultimately responsible for the failure.
brudgers
Just because this is a search for a scapegoat doesn't mean that there is one. This project was the brainchild of at least two large dumb organizations, a political party and a campaign.
rbanffy
I wonder if we'll ever see a decent post-mortem of this, with detailed information about the proposed architecture, hardware and software, where the servers were hosted etc.
_delirium
> first I've heard of software failures being involved in election coordination failures

There are a bunch of vague reports that Obama's team had a similar failure of a big new computerized voter-tracking system on Election Day 2008, but they had also distributed the traditional paper "strike lists" to volunteers, so those were used as a fallback.

VonGuard
That's funny. Kinda like NASA and the Soviet space program. NASA spent 5 years and 100 million $ to develop a pen that writes in space. The Russians used pencils.
squidsoup
Whilst a funny anecdote, there's only a hint of truth to that story. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen

The Fisher 'space-pen' was developed independently without government funding and was actually later adopted by Russian cosmonauts as well.

001sky
Simple ingenuity aside, I can see why. Lead dust in zero gravity (and/or pencil shavings) not ideal for a mission-vehicle. They are normally assembled in a clean-room, no?