Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/15/building-a-movement-nationbui.html
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Friendly reminder that doing real organizing online is a terrible idea 
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Whether you’re managing a political campaign or building a client base, there comes a time when you stop seeing people and start seeing numbers…
[NationBuilder’s tools] allow you to manage your contacts in integrated databases that… allow for on the-fly-customization based … on prior interactions.
So it definitely is or is not treating people like numbers… one of those two…
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All the popular right wing groups use it!
(Left wing groups also use it, but it became kind of a thing on the right.)
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Sounds like a great idea, doesn’t it: put all your donors and supporters in a database somebody else has control over and access to.
What could go wrong?
The Nationbuilder website says “Some 3dna employees have access to account holders’ databases and supporter data for means of providing customer support and to resolve any technical issues in conjunction with the Service.”
Nationbuilder is not Open Source*, so it’s hard to tell how secure those databases are agains attempts of third parties to break into them, and it’s impossible to run your own instance so that you can keep the government out.
*they got stuff on Github, but only Clients and API specs, not the interesting stuff.
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Now I remember where I had heard the name NationBuilder before.
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This is some dystopian shit.
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