MORE ON DEAN'S SYSTEM CRASH

Here's the highly-specific version, of what Ping told me the other day, from Ping himself. After explaining how negative ads and lack of caucus training were two factors in Dean's Iowa performance, he offers a third:

You're likely to have heard the first two reasons from other pundits, but this part of the story is less often told. The Dean campaign relied on an ASP to develop and host its voter database. The week before the primary, the database became unusably slow and crashed several times, losing data and spreading panic. Thereafter, the data entry process fell apart: some people were entering data using a web form, others were typing their records into Excel spreadsheets, and — unbelievably — others were copying data records out on paper by hand. Stacks of information on hard-earned Dean supporters were never entered, and other Dean supporters were annoyed because we called them twice by mistake. If the story gets out, it may go down in history as another famous case of a software problem with severe repercussions. The software was written by developers at external company who probably had hardly any campaign experience, so it failed to meet the needs of the volunteers and campaign staff. And because it was developed outside, no one within the campaign had the knowledge or access to fix it. I even heard that the stress of dealing with the campaign and the software problems caused several employees at the company to quit. On top of it all, of course, paying this company also cost a lot of money. It comes down to the core problem i've been complaining about over and over: the software development teams are not connected to their users. Campaign software must be written by people with serious campaign experience, or at the very least with their input.

Ping also has a blog, by the way.