Navalny Headquarters IT infrastructure and signature collection: project management

Series of publications about collecting signatures

1. Introduction, the site "Bulk 20! 8", preparation for the collection
2. Iron and networks, video surveillance
3. Reaper 2018: a system for collecting signatures
4. Project Management

This is the final chapter of the material about the IT infrastructure of Navalny headquarters. It tells about project management and project participants from the IT department.

Project work

Preparation for the collection of signatures is a long, complicated, resource-intensive and completely imperceptible project, which does not bring any “political points” to the headquarters and the candidate, and in case of refusal of registration it turns out to be completely unnecessary. Why did we decide to invest so much money, time and effort into it?
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From the very beginning we did a real election campaign. This meant that it was necessary to overcome the barrier in the form of collecting 300 thousand signatures. All our processes were rebuilt from this - from the choice of cities, where the headquarters were opened, and ending with video production. The collection of signatures is a kind of final product, on which we worked for almost a year.

One of the main difficulties of this project was related to the decomposition of the convoluted process of collecting and subsequent verification of signatures into a series of small sequential actions. It sounds scary, and life is still worse. We spent a lot of time to paint, clarify and optimize the original collection scheme proposed by lawyers. Only a good understanding of the physics of the process allowed us to formulate tasks for the IT system.



The work was carried out almost autonomously and in a very multi-tasking mode, with the chronic absence of the candidate and the chief of staff, who were arrested several times during the campaign. Almost all project participants combined the workload associated with the daily work of the campaign and work on a system for collecting signatures. Our previous experience and long-term planning helped us to manage everything on time.

We immediately knew what was waiting for us, so the largest parts of the project were planned in advance. The first stage of preparation for collecting signatures began in the fall of 2016 from the site "Bulk 20! 8". A key element on it was the pre-registration form for those who want to sign a nomination for Navalny. So at the time of launch (December 13, 2016) we immediately began to collect the base and contacts of supporters.

“For registration, I will need 300 thousand signatures, and today we begin to collect a super system in which these 300 thousand people register, so that at hour X we have it legally and collected signatures very quickly, if not immediately,” Alexey Navalny .

The second important step was the verification of supporters in the campaign headquarters. We tried to make the entire verification project as close as possible to the combat collection of signatures, but without their physical carrier. Software for verification - Sych is a beta version of software for collecting signatures. Work on it began in the spring of 2017, and in early July we launched verification in three test headquarters. After making corrections following the results of testing, verification passed to the stage of active implementation and support and continued until the CEC refused to register the candidate.



The final stage - the development of a system for collecting signatures and the Reaper - began on October 27, the first meeting on the project was held that day. The first commit was made on November 16, the last - on December 25. For two months of work in the nightmare mode, we have assembled a working system for collecting, storing and working with subscription lists. Do not try this at home.

At this point, we counted and painted all the square meters of the tables in all the headquarters, removed several new premises specifically for the collection, studied the models of all the head-mounted printers and their print fields, tested several industrial paper cutters, made up the staff list taking into account the work of the headquarters in two shifts. , the points were written down and agreed on a 42-page legal instruction on collecting signatures, concluded 1817 contracts with collectors. Lawyers, managers, design and IT have never worked so closely together in a single project.

Line-up

Roman Rubanov - deputy chief of staff, head of IT-direction.
Anton Rubtsov - devops, creating a support department.
Maxim Klyuev - development of a config of microtics.
Vladislav Romantsov - user support at headquarters.
Dmitry Doroshev - web application for verification.
Dmitry Larionov - a web application for verification.
Igor Petrov - development and support of the site "20! 8".
Grigory Zhizhilkin - cto.
Alexander Alekseev - the backend of the site 20! 8 and the Reaper.
Oleg Petrov - layout, frontend.
Mikhail Makeev - the backend of the first version “20! 8”, various common tools.
Ilya Biryukov - layout and script maps.
Yuri Fedak - testing.
Elena Marus - art director, product.
Anastasia Zinovyeva - designer.
Lyubov Gorbokonenko - signature collection manager.
Anna Dodonova - Site Manager "20! 8".
Ruslan Kavetsky - an application for iOS.
Dmitry Bochkov is an Android application.

And the special services behind us.

As with other campaign projects, the signature collection project team is distributed across many cities. In the Moscow office of the headquarters, there are large campaign campaigns and meetings of the IT department at which discussion and planning of tasks takes place. At least once a week, a general meeting of the project was convened with the participation of IT, designers, managers and lawyers. Someone participated in meetings remotely.


_{Total campaign bit}

Throughout the campaign and in the collection of signatures involved a lot of people and departments. At different times, the number of project participants only from the IT department varied from 5 to 15 people. In order for everyone to understand the big picture at any moment, we led an analog board with cards of key tasks. Cards are grouped by type and linked. It was in this form that we discussed and updated the tasks during regular status meetings. This board also had a counterpart in Trello.


_{A keen eye can see a table with a dozen Gantt charts on this photo, but due to the overall entanglement of the project, it was easier for everyone to focus on the red stickers, not the Gant ones.}

Current project questions between all team members are discussed in Telegram, IT tasks and technical things in Slack, documentation and layouts are stored in Google Docs. Task list is fixed in Trello. At the first stages JIRA was with us, but within the framework of this project we refused it.

Conclusion

This is not a complete description of what was done in a year and a half to prepare for the collection of signatures for the nomination of Navalny as a presidential candidate. The whole telephony, server administration, building office networks, combating DDoS attacks, employee information security and personal data protection issues, the campaign’s online store and much more remained beyond the scope of the story.

Unfortunately, the CEC did not register the nomination, the collection of signatures did not begin. Now begins a new stage in the life of the headquarters. A significant part of the infrastructure will continue to work, but with new tasks.

March 18, 2018 Russia will host an event, to participate in which we accepted everything possible. About him it is important to understand this: anyone who will be registered by signatures, without having an infrastructure of such a scale, is only an imitation of the candidate and passed everything to the electoral commission, but not legal signatures.

Thank you all for your attention!