Advomatic

It is February 2010, and in an office in Lower Manhattan's Silicon Alley, Aaron Welch is looking for his next big project.

Welch and his partner, Adam Mordecai, were the Iowa online guys for Howard Dean's 2004 Presidential run (Welch was the lead developer; Mordecai was the webmaster). In what is a by-now familiar story for Democratic political technologists, their tour of duty for Dean yielded a steady stream of calls from people offering them work — and thus Advomatic was born, providing technology and web development to progressive campaigns and advocacy organizations.

"We're just guns for hire, and we'll build to spec ... really anything," Welch says, sitting in the small office he sublets from his Web host, Voxel. An unimpressive-looking Windows laptop is in front of him. Behind him is a stack of books that probably should be, if they aren't already, required reading for technologists on the left: "Crashing the Gate," the book Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas wrote in support of a Democratic party driven by the netroots, not the old party machinery they lambast as sluggish and inept; Guy Kawasaki's how-to for entrepreneurs, "Art of the Start;" and "Drupal Multimedia," a book on how to integrate video, audio and Flash into websites built on the powerful open-source content management system, Drupal, written by Aaron Winborn, who authored several pieces of (open-source) software that help you do the job.

Welch's library is an apt summation of the company he co-founded. Advomatic's bread and butter is using Drupal to build custom websites, and developing modules that add functionality to the CMS. Like Armstrong, co-author of "Crashing the Gate," Welch's political technology business started with the end of the Dean campaign. Also like Armstrong, Welch is a technologist for the progressive movement and its organizations.

Since then, Welch said, trends in political tech have come in waves. Advomatic built its single piece of off-the-shelf software, a click-to-call tool, years before the Obama campaign's successful use of similar tools would create demand.

"There was a period when we were rebuilding petition tools all the time," Welch says.

Now, custom house-party tools are all the rage, he says. The workflow specifications for the tool — what a user can do and at what point in his or her use of the software that it gets done — vary slightly from client to client. It's one of the reasons Advomatic largely sticks to working from scratch for each client rather than building a kit of ready-made tools that clients can license.

For the 2010 midterm elections and beyond, Welch figures, the next step in political technology will be finding more ways to "touch people in real life" using digital media — through SMS and call tools, for example. When you're trying to engage people and get them motivated around smaller and smaller campaigns, like a City Council race, it gets harder and harder to do, Welch says — explaining that this will be one of the challenges political tech firms will be trying to solve in the near future.