IT Responsibilities and Priorities
IT's core responsibilities lie in the areas of Operations, Data Acquisition and Information Delivery. An overview of operations may be found here. The following guidelines are provided by Management and are not intended to be comprehensive. The National Director will typically communicate the organization's priorities to the IT Department, but occasionally some will come from Richard as a representative of our Board.
Table of Contents
IT Management Responsibilities
Assignments and Reporting
Mostly, issues and feature requests are communicated to the IT department via email and Mantis. Individual assignments and day-to-day work are typically at the discretion of the IT Director. The current division of duties is listed here.Written weekly reports are due each Monday, and must include the following information:
- Key tasks completed in the previous week.
- Status report on projects in progress and projected time until completion.
- Objectives for new week.
- Problems/Concerns.
Seasonal Needs
Summer- VoteEasy imports and other PCT needs, remote intern tech support, limited project time.
Fall- Servers around election time, prep for election, no project time in Congressional election years.
Mid-November-April- Project time
Projects
Current Scheduled Projects
- JustFacts Website update.
- VoteEasy maintain and update.
- Research Tools update and maintain.
- Automation- Further Research and Exploration.
- Postgres Database updates, possible transport to RDS on AWS.
- Update and maintain API.
- Improve Organizational technical knowledge and skills and hiring as needed.
See IT Timeline 2021-2022 for more info.
Standard Priorities
Highest Priority: Critical Operations and Reputation Management
1. Ensure that our external services are at least functional and accessible to the public and not misrepresenting data or Vote Smart. This includes, but is not limited to:- Maintaining our current website, apps, and API.
- Monitoring and tracking usage.
- Setting up and maintaining our servers.
- Providing prompt, courteous responses to users with feedback and questions, with particular attention to external partners, API users, and Vote Smart Board Members.
- Maintaining internal applications, including Admin, Django Admin, PVSWiki, and Pyqual.
- Database administration.
- Systems and network administration: providing domain/file sharing/print/mail/backup services in both Windows and Linux. Configuring and maintaining hardware and software. User account administration.
- Providing tech support.
- Making recommendations for hiring IT staff as needed.
- Making recommendations for contracting with IT vendors for IT services as needed.
- Incorporating data from external data sources: Location-to-district mapping from Aristotle DMDS and USPS census data; Factchecking data from Politifact and FactCheck.org; Campaign Finance data from the Center for Responsive Politics and National Institute for Money in State Politics; Votes data from senate.gov and thomas.gov.
- Importing VoteEasy research and citations.
- Exporting data for use in the VSDM, if needed.
See also: InfrastructurePriorities
CategoryITInfo
