Using the Cloud to help progressive Congressional Candidates and fight for Net Neutrality

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The past years, we’ve witnessed the rise of micro donation platforms and services powering everything from crowd funded games to social justice causes. But with the recent US Congressional elections said to be the most expensive elections on record, it has become more critical than ever to leverage and coordinate small-dollar donations, geographically dispersed activism, and grassroots-supported candidates to counteract the lobbying mega-donors in a scale that actually makes a difference.

Grassroot campaigns rely in the power of numbers to counter the lack of mega-donors. But big numbers mean bigger infrastructure and an increasing need for scalability. Managing thousands or millions of people is a task in itself. Upscaling during election time is part of the equation. Being able to downscale after a campaign ends can be equally important in terms of cost-effectiveness. And when it comes to upscaling and downscaling quickly, the Cloud is the obvious way to go.

That is what the people at Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) have been working on. PCCC was founded in 2009 by former MoveOn organizer Adam Green and Stephanie Taylor, a labor union organizer named one of the top 50 campaign influencers by Campaigns & Elections, with the late hacktivist Aaron Swartz as an early key member of the team who helped to launch its technology division. An NGO that’s been called “the top progressive group in the country,” PCCC endorses, advises, and supports bold, progressive U.S. federal and state-level candidates. This year they’ve also partnered with Lawrence Lessig’s Mayday.US to reform the way elections are financed and reduce the influence that big donors have on government policy.

PCCC and its nearly one million members are also long time supporters of an open Internet, pressuring big corporations and the U.S. government to support Net Neutrality, and protesting against the Stop Online Piracy Act. They were early and long term supporters of Net Neutrality champions Zephyr Teachout and Tim Wu in the New York Governor’s race this year. And during the recent midterm elections, their members made over 435,000 phone calls and raised over $80,000 for Minnesota Senator Al Franken, the Senate’s leading defender of Net Neutrality and a strong opponent of corporate media consolidation. On Monday, President Obama came out in favor of Net Neutrality on a video announcement, wherein he lays out his plan for protecting the freedom and openness of the Internet.

This past year, PCCC has built a software tool called PIES to help candidates run their campaigns according to best practices and without wasting time or money. Candidates can track their fundraising efforts, campaign events and get-out-the-vote progress, launch a campaign website in minutes, collect signatures and endorsements, and engage their supporters with an easy-to-use email blaster. This cycle, 150 candidates used the beta version of PIES to manage their campaigns at the federal, state, and local level.

PCCC uses Mist.io’s API to orchestrate the deployment of Linode, DigitalOcean, Rackspace, and Amazon VMs for their own organizing efforts and for on-demand PIES services they offer to campaigns, to upscale quickly during critical times like Election Day, and to automate the cleanup process and downscaling when extra resources are no longer needed. Using Mist.io’s standard server dashboard plus custom application-specific metrics, PCCC monitors its systems, keeps track of traffic and user activity, and makes sure its own tools and those of its users stay up and running smoothly through the election season.

By managing server configurations and capacity through Mist.io while leveraging a wide variety of specialized services across the Cloud including ActionKit, BitBalloon, HubDialer, Robodial, and Twilio, PCCC has managed to increase its campaigns’ effectiveness and make over four million phone calls to reach out and inform voters on what candidates stand for and what’s at stake in the elections, while offering scalable software services and hard-won knowledge to progressive candidates around the country.

We are proud of the work being done by PCCC and are very happy to be working with them. Not only do we support many of their causes like Net Neutrality; we also admire their fight for freedom and grassroots power over big corporate influence. After all, one of the reasons we started Mist.io was to help users avoid vendor lock-in and democratize cloud computing.

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