Cloning Democracy Apps in the Cloud

Several months ago I approached friends at VMware to talk about ways cloud technologies might support our work or democracy programs in general. We came up with a plan to to address an issue that our @NDITech team has been grappling with for several years: that we’re spending scarce tech resources solving the same tech problem over and over in different countries. We find ourselves building very similar custom software applications for parliaments or election monitoring groups or political parties from one country to the next - often at a significant cost in both time and money.

In some cases we’ve even had to to fly engineers around the world to go build and install these applications - spending time and money addressing problems that have already been solved at the expense of working on the next big technology and democracy breakthrough.

It became evident that we needed to build a set of tools that were generalizable enough to be reusable, and also much easier and quicker to deploy. We believe that in many cases a more general version of our application will suffice with a small amount of customization at a much lower cost.

We partnered with VMware and their hosting partner Bluelock to pilot test a process that would allow us to take a general web application, host it in the cloud and allow our partners and staff around the world to use virtualization tools to create their own clone of the application with a few mouse clicks. They quickly set up their own platform and then customize as needed so they can get to work on politics and not a big software project. No software development process, no time delays, no vendors or consultants or contracts.

So what we’ve done in slightly more technical terms is build a few virtual appliances, templates of custom web applications we use frequently for election monitoring and other political purposes, and put them in the cloud so that we can clone them as needed for our partners in the field - essentially allowing our team to provide SaaS applications for our partners.

Being able to quickly clone these apps and deliver them as a service is a win for all involved.

• The groups in the field can deploy them quickly and with non-technical assistance to get the applications up and running, and don’t have to procure local IT talent or put their project in our queue back in DC - so they love it;
• We’re delighted because we can provide solutions without taxing our engineering team, so they can focus on more strategic issues, not keep reinventing the wheel;
• The NDI field teams can spin up as many as needed as quickly as needed with low overhead and at lower levels of buy-in - meaning groups can try the software out without making large investments in time up front and “kick the tires” at very low risk.

There is a second use case that is worth mentioning. We also plan to provide the ability to download the image and run it on a laptop or PC in a LAN environment (on a local virtual machine, or VM). For various reasons including unreliable Internet service as well as others, we sometimes need to run the apps locally, on a laptop or have them hosted on a local network.

Here are a couple scenarios where putting this solution to work makes sense:

In countries making rapid democratic transitions, such as Iraq a few years back, or Egypt and Tunisia today, NDI often provides training to dozens or even hundreds of new political parties - and some of them may request help organizing and contacting their members. One of our clonable apps is a political party member tracking tool, an open source CRM (based on Drupal and CiviCRM), that we could quickly spin up for as many parties as requested it. They could be working on their own party membership tracking tool in less than an hour and at no cost.

Another promising application is our Drupal-based web application that facilitates data collection via SMS or web forms that provides tools to categorize and share information on maps, lists or visualizations. This tool was originally built for the Burma Election Tracker project last year and has since been cloned and deployed for monitoring in the pre-election period for the upcoming Nicragua elections via the Viva El Voto website. Being able to quickly clone, deploy and customize this platform will be very helpful in upcoming programs and can be done with minimal technical assistance.

There is much more to do, but we are delighted to share some our early innovations in the brave new world of cloud technology for democracy.