MorningSession

From CallsForChange

[edit] FreeTel Calls For Change Morning Notes

First we did an open round of introductions.

• Steve Cisler - use of sms
• Dan Droller - mobile activism sms for working assets
• Ben - mobile voter (registration and outreach) interested in open sourcing app
• Benay Dara-Abrams - DALaboratories - System to support seniors (wants to add sms / phone support to apps)
• David Troy - popvox voip gotv and political apps.
• Becky Faith - tactical technology collective - building toolbox of open source tools for telephony communication.
• Simon Ditner - Super technical voice broadcasting tools (interactive and voice mail drops)
• Ed Prentence - Televoce - merging pc and phone, does skype development projects

[edit] Intro by David Troy

David. Talked about how he got in to doing popvox. Interested in voip, and got locally in politics, didn't like the campaign to put slot machines in maryland. Applied some technology to the volunteer campaign he was working on, started with email, then moved to calling. Built tool where he put in an address and number. Setup caller id tricks so it looks like the calls are coming originally from the volunteer. It was super effective, and david thought about applying these ideas for more campaigns.

Built a new tool for the maryland governors race. Volunteers could make calls from their home to help phone bank. The candidate dropped out of the race, but the tool lived on. It's a web based predictive dialer. Used the system for the Ned Lamont campaign. Did a million phone calls in the 06 election. Lots of grassroots adoption. Now after the election it's being used for some advocacy applications to politicians.

Technically, it was built with perl first. It was fast and easy. It's very hard to keep track of all the systems. It was very brittle. If the spec and use never changes, it works. But the minute it changes, things break. It melts down quickly. David didn't want to write that kind of app, because he would have to be fire fighting.

Came across ruby on rails, made it easy to write pretty compact reusable. Put together an asterisk library in ruby, so you could access the entire asterisk api via ruby. It was very compact, easy, readable. The ability to make nice libraries within the rails community made it possible to build new apps on top of the framework.

Once he got rails and asterisk working together with more than one back end asterisk server, it made it very easy to scale. Predictive dialers and other tools were easy to build. It was very easy to scale, simply adding more asterisk servers.

There's a great library from Jay Philips - Adhearsion - A dsl for telephony in ruby!!!!