Technologies that serve politics traditionally have lagged behind more advanced systems developed for major commercial enterprises. In recent years the gap has closed as firms like Aristotle have introduced new methods and tools to the business of campaign management and the processes of democracy. Changes in efficiency and ease of use for campaigns are aspects of technological progress where this has been apparent.

In an insightful article on Personal Democracy Forum, Ben Schaffer zeroed in on a key issue of the political software market that illustrates this point: offering campaign software that is interoperable with other vendors’ systems and applications. For Aristotle the need to provide its many clients with the best technological tools has meant that we listen closely to the preferences of campaign professionals. This is why three years ago we decided to make interoperability a key feature of a completely new suite of software products such that ours would be able to work well with other vendors in the market, especially with those who provide value added services.

We began to rebuild all of our products from the ground up in a way that would allow them to “work and play well with others.” Some in the industry advocate the use of open standards software/tools, an approach that in theory would ease integration between the disparate offerings in the market place. In practice, however, we found that this approach excludes any vendors not using open standard tools to construct their application, in effect shutting out valuable systems and making the goal of interoperability unattainable in those instances.

Schaffer noted that a core issue is data exchange – and that is our belief as well. It’s the rationale for our focus on facilitating other vendors’ ability to easily exchange data with our applications and to accessibly store the data generated by others.

To accomplish this we designed and built two complimentary systems that are key features of Aristotle 360, the completely new product now being introduced across the country. First, our applications utilize a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The beauty of the SOA is that it is no longer necessary that other vendors use any specific technology but rather that they just use XML, the web standard for exchanging data. A robust web service layer was created to mediate all access to the underlying data layer and is readily accessible to any authenticated application.

As part of that effort, we created a data type definition (DTD) for Aristotle’s web services that we believe comprehensively addresses the needs of the industry. Of course that is necessarily a work in progress and we continue to refine it in tandem with our partners to make it convenient for all vendors seeking to seamlessly exchange data. Not only have we created web services to support our applications, we have designed them to access our expansive data products, including our database of 172 Million registered voters.

The web services layer for Aristotle’s 360, while critically important to our strategy, is only half the story. The underlying 360 Database was designed to accommodate data from an enormous variety of sources. Most importantly, it was designed drawing on the considerable empirical knowledge at Aristotle derived from thousands of campaigns, PACs and grassroots organizations at every level to capture the myriad data points utilized in the industry today as well as those anticipated in the future. Knowing that we could not foresee every possible requirement, it was also designed to be largely data-driven so that the applications that interact with it can determine a great many of the operational attributes and metadata as they evolve. Also, it was designed to be extensible: that is, the ability to add user and application defined fields is built into the core of the database.

In addition, protecting the relational integrity of the 360 database is a priority of the highest order. For this reason it is highly “normalized”, meaning that it is designed to interact with a very broad diversity of applications in such a way as to minimize the risk to relational integrity. As a simple example; constraints on the database would not allow an individual contribution or any other action to be associated with an event that the individual did not attend.

Aristotle has already benefited greatly from this approach in integrating all of our own application offerings while affording access to other vendors employed by our clients. As Schaffer notes, vendors in the industry can see the exchange of data with potential competitors as either a threat or an opportunity. Properly done, it is assuredly the latter. In fact, data is now flowing seamlessly in real time between the Aristotle 360 System and other vendors’ systems. At Aristotle we clearly see this valuable new approach as an opportunity to provide better, more flexible, solutions to our clients. And, along with other vendors who share this vision, we are helping to advance the benefits that democracy gains from state-of-the-art technology.