Case Study: Ruwart ‘08 — Fedora 7 VDS, Drupal 6.1 and Google Apps
While I oppose electoral politics as, in my own opinion, a wrong-headed strategy for the libertarian movement to follow (preferring an alternative approach as ultimately more realistic in the long run), I don’t see that as a reason to leave money on the table — any more than you would expect an agorist hot dog vendor to not sell a hot dog to a cop (the ones that actually pay, that is). Thus, while I don’t even volunteer (let alone sell) campaign advocacy, almost any organization can purchase technical services from me — even political campaigns, if they can stomach having an anti-political anarchist technical consultant show up on their government-mandated campaign expenditure reports.
Thus, while Mr. Knapp, Prof. Long and others have already mentioned the Ruwart for President campaign, I thought I’d talk about what I’ve done so far to actually get them set up.
While I sell decent personal and small business web hosting accounts, early concerns in discussions with the Ruwart campaign involved having a large enough amount of bandwidth on tap, availability of sufficient system resources to enable a snappy response time even under a respectable traffic load and the desire for flexibility in software options that comes with having full administrative control over your own *nix host.
A true dedicated server — literally, your own box given “room and board” at some data center for a monthly fee — can potentially set you back a respectable amount of money. In the case of the Ruwart campaign, though, I recommended (and acted as purchasing agent for) a virtual dedicated server w/ 500GB monthly bandwidth in the paltry $29.99 a month range from GoDaddy.
For those not clear on the distinction between a dedicated server and a virtual dedicated server, a virtual dedicated server isn’t a physical server but an “imaginary” server, one of perhaps several created and run on a physical server at a data center somewhere. The VDS runs as a software simulation of a real server. The many imaginary servers a physical machine may be running each have their own dedicated slice of that machine’s resources, but otherwise act as independent machines. Think of it as the difference between an apartment building and a mansion. The many virtual servers being run on the physical machine each act as a sub-divisions of the larger machines capacity. What all of that boils down to is that the Ruwart campaign is only paying for approximately as much server capacity as they actually need — and that capacity is readily expandable on short notice.
Open source software and the virtualization technologies described above lead to a very cost effective approach.
- Fedora 7 Linux OS
- Apache web server
- MySQL database server
- PHP
- Drupal 6.1 content management system
The Barlow theme for Drupal was pretty much ready to go and gave the site a somewhat “Ron Paulian” look. As a result, no true design work was necessary — only setup, configuration and some minor customizations. The train image in the page header comes from the Marinelli theme, which was another one of the stock themes I showed the campaign. The train image wasn’t to my taste, actually. I was showing them the Marinelli theme just for layout purposes and talking about putting together a photo image for the header based on a well-cropped but high-res close-up of the eyes and crown of the Statue of Liberty. They saw the train, though, and specifically asked for it. The customer wants the train, they get the train. [shrug]
The real bulk of the work in setting up this site has been laising with content developers and providing initial user support.
Setting up campaign email was an easy choice. I wanted rock solid reliability and knew that I (or whoever) would be better off “out-sourcing” it and just not having to deal with it beyond stuff like user account setup. We went with Google Apps, of course. Along with all of the other advantages, the free suite of apps gives me a chance to evangelize on behalf of using online collaboration tools to move beyond email. Talking about stuff like file sharing in Google Docs and calendar sharing in Google Calendar makes for a great segue into talking about powerful project management tools — either open source ones that I can set up and manage for the campaign or great commercial tools like Basecamp from 37signals. Ultimately, this is a chance for me to help teach key libertarian activists a better, more effective way to work. I told Ruwart’s campaign manager that the following is required reading, and I meant it:
How the Barack Obama Campaign Uses Wikis to Organize Volunteers
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