Before it ended earlier this month, Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign developed a reputation for two things: detailed plans to solve concrete problems and a robust ground game. Those attributes came together on the campaign’s tech team, which built a grassroots organizing machine on the backend. That wasn’t enough to win Warren the nomination, but veterans from the team are trying to make sure their work wasn’t all for naught. They’re making seven in-house software projects available to everyone for free on GitHub, the most popular destination for open-source software on the web, in the hope that other Democratic campaigns can build on what they developed during the campaign.

“We believe we’ll be the biggest open-sourcing of political tech that has happened,” said Mike Conlow, who was the campaign’s chief technology strategist. Few political campaigns are big and well-funded enough to develop their own software. Fewer still make that software open source.

The tools themselves are not exactly revolutionary; they’re more in the vein of filling in gaps in commercially available political tech. In its early days, the campaign relied on off-the-shelf software. But as the tech team grew to nearly 20 people, it was able to take on software projects of its own. “We were focused on choosing projects where we didn’t think there was an adequate vendor tool out there on the market,” Conlow added. Campaign organizers noticed, for example, that the onboarding process for new volunteers could use more of a personal touch than the system they were using provided. When a new volunteer signed up, they would only receive an automated message. So the team built a tool, which they called Switchboard, that made it easy for organizers to personally reach out to volunteers as soon as they signed up.

Other projects, detailed in a Medium post published Friday, include an automated system for sending location-specific event emails to volunteers; a backend tool for synthesizing different streams of voter data; and, to pick a niche infamously ripe for disruption, a caucus app. The team also made its own improvements to Spoke, an existing open-source, peer-to-peer texting app, which could send texts for 1/32nd of what would have cost with a commercial vendor—saving the campaign more than $500,000 over the course of a few weeks.

Screenshots of the Warren campaign's in-house app for caucuses, the code for which will now be available on GitHub. Courtesy of the Warren for President Tech Team

But software, especially in politics, is not like the field of dreams: Just because you build it doesn’t mean they’ll come. To survive, open-source software needs someone to develop and maintain it. The big question for the Warren team’s experiment is whether any other organization will pick up and run with any of the tools they’re putting out.