(TL;DR)
Siege Analytics is a boutique strategic consulting firm with expertise in geography. We are what you can call a where-first firm – we understand that people who are otherwise similar but live in different places have very different lives, and take that into account in everything we do. Our job is to help you reach people, make sense of what they tell you and act on it in every part of your work.
In this work, you can’t easily separate analysis, technology, strategy or staff. Personnel is not just policy, it’s also perspective and capability. We pride ourselves on being multi-modal. There’s nobody here who can’t explain a decision made about a survey, design an experimental framework for a voter analysis, manage a project, architect software and execute it. We do it all. We excel in :
- visual storytelling – showing how the whereness of a problem determine it’s solution
- polling – helping you understand the people you need to persuade and helping you do it
- spatial engineering – building software that helps you do amazing geographical work
- boundary estimation – understand where people live and how by reverse engineering boundaries
Everyone on our team can and will do everything. Nobody is above pulling a sample, making a map for publication, cleaning data or even writing JavaScript.
Principal
Dheeraj Chand
Dheeraj was born in Queens, New York, and grew up traveling all over Asia. Traveling made him question the relationships between boundaries, physical geography, culture, and ethnic identity, all relevant to his work in political analytics and spatial analysis. Prior to Siege, he worked for polling firms, labor unions, and CRM software manufacturers, and also spent two years working in humanitarian technology to help crisis zones recover.
He has worked as a pollster for The Feldman Group, Lake Research Partners, Myers Research and The AFL-CIO, where he introduced use of geographical methods to the analytical toolkit. Dheeraj also originated the in-house polling program for The Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC).
He has also been involved in every redistricting process since the early 2000’s, becoming engaged in the process during the mid-decade Texas redistricting, and is currently advising several partners on and making tools for community groups.
In his spare time, Dheeraj avidly studies Ving Tsun Kung Fu, plays his guitar and spends time with his family.
@dheerajchand /dheeraj.chand
Frequent Collaborators
Steve Leopoldo
Steve is a professional campaign consultant with over fifteen years experience. His earliest political memories were listening to NPR in his father’s car on the way to elementary school. Steve went on to study Political Science and started working campaigns throughout his time in college.
Starting in “the field,” knocking doors and cutting turf, Steve has since supported nearly every facet of campaigns from fundraising, social, direct mail and media. He has an appreciation for how all the pieces have to come together to execute a winning strategy.
A true Quant, Steve even quantifies and tracks his hobbies, from solar production to the tomato yield in the backyard garden.
She is always looking to learn new technologies and hopes the products she builds can help others.
Research!
Erik Swedberg
Erik has been building web applications since the mid 90s when he put a SONAR lab’s electronics parts database online. He cares deeply about web standards and the open web; advocates that putting things on the web right pays dividends; and strives to constantly push the limits of what’s possible in a web browser.
Informed by his years at the strategic design consultancy frog design, and later at Apple in Cupertino, Erik’s approach to building web-based software is user-oriented and design-centric, always aiming for intuitive, elegant, responsive, and performant experiences solving real-world problems.
A full stack developer, Erik is as comfortable with PostgreSQL, Python, and Node, as he is with modern HTML/CSS/JavaScript and associated frameworks, in addition to architecture and design.
Erik has a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and has worked at NASA in Mission Control for the Space Shuttle. After over a decade in the SF Bay Area, he is currently back in his native Houston, TX with his family and 3 dogs, dreaming of the Colorado and New Mexico mountains they frequently adventure in.
/erikswedberg
Angela Gloyna
Angela was born and raised in Houston, Texas but has spent the last six years in Austin developing educational software. She received a degree in Chemistry with a minor in Computer Science from Hendrix College in 2014 and has been working in the tech industry ever since. Although her background was originally in the natural sciences and data analytics, she has since turned her focus to web application development as a full stack engineer, primarily in Node.js and React.
She is always looking to learn new technologies and hopes the products she builds can help others.
/angela-gloyna
Partnerships
Political Data, Inc.
Left Hook Strategy
New Virginia Majority
OpenField
data.world
Competitive Advantage Research
The Progressive Turnout Project
Testimonials
AFSCME
“Dheeraj is great to work with; he hears what I’m saying, answers the question I’m asking and makes me feel empowered to continue working on solving my problems. I wouldn’t feel like GIS and Python were accessible options for me were it not for Dheeraj explaining the concepts and helping me solve problems using these tools.”
— Jenn Cervella, AFSCME
New Virginia Majority
“Dheeraj has never failed to surprise me. I come to them with what I think are impossible problems, and not only do they find a solution, but they do so quickly and always under budget. The only surprise you’ll get with working with Siege is that they’re smarter and faster than you think.”
— Jamaa Bickley-King
Action Network
“Dheeraj is always professional, dependable, and knowledgeable in his field. We’ve happily turned to him for advice, consulting, and development, programming, and systems administration work. Projects we have worked on together have been well-planned, efficiently executed, and successful. We look forward to working with Siege in the future!”
— Jason Rosenbaum, Director of Technology, Action Network
Strong.AI
“At some point, I’m going to stop being surprised by what John and Dheeraj are capable of. Their knowledge is surpassed only by their diligence. There are only two people I would trust to advise us [Strong AI] on how to integrate spatial data into the database system we have been developing for six years: John and Dheeraj. If it were not for them, we would have no idea how to think about geography or geographical data problems.”
— Asher Haig, CEO, Strong AI
Competitive Advantage Research
“At Competitive Advantage Research we tend to stick to published geography and our techniques are relatively out of box. On the other hand, when it comes to speculative geography and boundary creation–such as in legislative redistricting–Dheeraj and Siege Analytics are in a league of their own. As practitioners ourselves, we are in awe of Dheeraj’s specialty in this area, but we also uphold his commitment to ideas. What matters to us about collaborating with Siege Analytics is Dheeraj’s facilitation of a rigorous and open-minded process, as well as the metric precision of his results.” – Jon Reznick, Managing Partner, Competitive Advantage Research
Progressive Turnout Project
“I’m a newcomer to the field of political data, and I’ve always dreamed of incorporating more mapping into my work to help drive strategic decisions and build a narrative of the work I do. As a newcomer to these skills, I thought I was limited by the shapefiles I could scrounge up by searching online or calling a county. In my goal to collect accurate precinct shapefiles in multiple congressional districts in multiple states, getting connected to Siege Analytics was a dream come true. It was incredible how they could turn a simple export of geographic voter file data into accurate, easy-to-use shapefiles. The entire process was fast, affordable, and accommodating to my needs. It’s exciting to now know how accessible and transformative mapping can be.” – Connie Gao, Progressive Turnout Project
Emeritus
John Holden
John has worked on both Obama presidential campaigns and on multiple campaigns in Australia. He created walkability models to increase organizer efficiency, wrote code to optimize early voting by drive time to polls, and wrote an entire volunteer management database from scratch. He has also worked as a contractor for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) working to restore forests in Viet Nam, and for the College of William & Mary in Uganda, where he trained fishery scientists. John was also a member of the winning team in the Virginia Citizen Redistricting competition.
As an avid open source software advocate, John specializes in training others on open source GIS software, especially where use of open source software will allow cost savings to occur. He has created high quality print maps for several private clients.
John has a geography degree from the University of Arizona and received a J.D. from the College of William and Mary. He is a member of the Oregon State Bar.