Lessons from Burlington
I'll be making a presentation at Harvard's Berkman Center for
Internet and Society next Tuesday, February 7. The Berkman
Fellows' Luncheon (a series)
will be webcast
and on IRC
at 12:30 Tuesday. The description:
Dean Done Right
For two years, Britt
Blaser has sought a way to duplicate what Zephyr
Teachout and Jim
Moore and David
Weinberger
and so many friends of Berkman demonstrated was possible at the Dean
Campaign. The Open Resource Group is releasing ORGware, but informally
it's called "Dean Done Right." Britt will preview what the Dean
campaign would have used if it had started three years later, in the
age of Web 2.0. Background material here.
Some of the last few posts have been intended as background
material for the presentation. They were:
In addition to the lofty goals and tech talk, I appreciate the
archaeological aspects, remembering what it was like to be on
the third floor of
60 Farrell Street, South Burlington, VT in late 2003. They were heady
times and I
felt privileged just to carry a few bags for those magnificent people.
The Dean Campaign was the latest in a series of unsuccessful attempts
to forge
grassroots activism into a tsunami deep and strong enough to
overwhelm the cynicism of politics-as-usual.
One lesson is that those 3-4 dozen tech-savvy people were the Dean web
service, in ways that no other enterprise would or could have
attempted. Understanding that is key to understanding why Dean Done Right has
not been built before.
Self-Indentured Servants
Dean's almost-unpaid net slaves were able to maintain the
illusion
of an automated web service at deanforamerica.com and
blogforamerica.com with a lot
of hands-on tech kludges, customized TCP/duct tape and IP/baling wire.
Fortunately for
the campaign, we net slaves rowed our own boats to Burlington and
chained ourselves to the desks for the duration(many of us were even
cheaper than slaves,
feeding and housing ourselves). None of us was paid anything like what
we'd earn in private enterprise.
Dean's suite of impressive and smooth-running web services
were so dependent on
this human network's packets of inspiration that few other
organizations
could have pulled it off. The Dean campaign spent almost nothing on the
Internet, yet it employed resources that would have cost about $280,000
per month in Burlington alone (c. 40 people x $7,000 incl. benefits).
It would have been worth it, but they never would have made that
investment.
And the tech? Fuhgeddaboutit! A hodge-podge of Movable Type, Meetup,
Convio, many
disparate databases, etc., etc. Those amazing people made
it all look to the world the way a web service should, but the rules
were that there had to be at least 2 people on site at all times, and a
SWAT team on call. One Saturday evening in December 2003, Halley Suitt
and I had dinner in Burlington and discussed this (among many other
things, as you can well imagine). We decided to return to the office
at 11pm – on a Saturday – to do a head count, which
I
guessed would be at least 45. The actual was 67!
When we see a successful web platform, we assume there will be
a
couple of even-better copycats on line within a month. Maybe that's why
Dean's people-power web illusion set up the dismay that so many
organizers
feel when they reach for a tool like Dean had and they discover that
there simply aren't any available. Here's Susan Crawford's
recent
amazement,
and Harish Rao's
revelation
from a year ago, and even Nicco's
not sure where
this is going.
Andrew
Rasiej's
campaign
also foundered on the shoals of promoting a social network for New York
City that couldn't be found on the campaign's web site, and which never
formed around his candidacy. You may recall that I promised Andrew and
Micah Sifry
that Open Resource Group would produce a web platform to support
his political platform, but we screwed up and couldn't deliver. We were
all amazed that there is no campaign-in-a-box.
That is the problem that ORGware aims to fix.
Back to the Syllabus
What are the lessons for Tuesday's Case Study of
Burlington? I had not studied this
problem space before 2003, so I took the thrilling possibilities at face
value.
I'm glad I did, or otherwise my midsummer enthusiasms might have been
prematurely chilled by Micah Sifry's harsh mid-winter explanation:
these enthusiastic efforts crop
up
periodically and have always failed. Micah shared this insight with Doc and me over
coffee a couple of days after Dean's New Hampshire defeat, citing the
Goldwater, McCarthy and Perot campaigns.
I've been working on the mechanics of the solution since then.
Without something no worse than ORGware, we'll never send Mr.
Smith back to Washington.
Here are the overarching ideas that can help the next idealist
overcome this pattern of excitement and rejection:
- Have a Seed Crystal
As with semiconductors, your social algorithm needs a seed to start
crystallizing your social network. Howard Dean was such a seed crystal,
but John Kerry was not. Barry Goldwater was conservatism's seed
crystal, but George H.W. Bush was a damper. Al Gore was nobody's seed
crystal. Bill Clinton is a force of nature, not a seed crystal
– no movement persists. Harley-Davidson is, Buick isn't.
- Smart = Busy
= Distracted = Unfocused = Stupid
Design for the Largest Common Denominator
- Roll the DICE
Most users won't adopt a new application or convene over at Meetup or Base Camp to do
your work if you don't provide all the functionality they'll eventually
need on your web site. Unlike techies and activists, they won't go
build their own blog or organize events at eVite. They need to be
able to do everything
on your site, so you need world-class programming in an interface
that's DICE-compliant:
Deep
Indulgent
Complete
Elegant
- Stepping
Stones
People need to move to be a movement. Online activism is the wild west
for most people, so they need to move in baby steps (from browser
screen to browser screen) by which their slight interest evolves into
an Aha! moment, on to active debate, to recruiting their friends, to
investing money, to voting. Even a city slicker might feel
secure standing on a flat rock in a roaring river. If there's a
similarly hospitable stone a short step away, flat and dry and not too
smooth or mossy, you might just step on it if it's in a direction
you're a little interested in. Pre-build these small safe havens that
are worth visiting for their own sake. Make each one comfortable enough
to hang out for a while. Your future advocates don't know they want to
cross your river.
- Deputize
Celebrities
In the summer of 2003, People at Dean rallies wanted autographs from Zephyr,
Matt
and Nicco.
The more celebrities you create in your movement, the greater its heft.
Every celebrity is a new seed crystal and you need all you can
manufacture.
- Lattice of
Engagement
Locate every member in identifiable relationships. It's a
movement, so everyone wants to know someone who's more of an insider
(mini-celebrity) in this exciting enterprise, and they want to be
important to others who are newer to the movement. The movement wants
constant news about its movement and the members creating
motion.
- Strawberry
Roots Activism
Grass is nice, but your
front lawn is dependent on you for seed, feed, water and weeding, each
seed pushing out just a few blades for us to admire. Rhyzomes, like
strawberries and crabgrass, are more creative. Once started, they shoot
out opportunistic runners which put down roots in hospitable
circumstances. If the new plant prospers, it puts out its own runners,
and so on. Strawberry
roots activism may be the future of politics.
- Federation of
Hierarchies – the basis of strawberry roots
activism
Mass movements have to be egalitarian, which many activists confuse
with hierarchy-free. But your movement needs all the hierarchies you
can spin off, because work-group hierarchies are the only way to get
things done. Let your people form hierarchies on-the-fly, where they
can meet and do the work of politics by collaborating in the three
areas that every movement needs: Discourse,
Growth
and Money.
- No one buys a
Buick because GM needs the money, so . . .
- Govern Early
and Often
Discover each member's values and maintain her personal values profile.
Inspire each member to manage their values profile as assiduously as
they manage their address book. Discuss values constantly and money
peripherally (except when giving it energizes
your members). Tabulate and aggregate the policy preferences of the
members to transform unwelcome email broadcasting into a vibrant
conversation. The Dean campaign's professional policy advisers were
supremely disinterested in polling the campaign's most committed
supporters and tabulating their policy preferences. They refused to
have the candidate "tied to the explicit interests of his base."
Naturally, they got what they wished for.
- iTudes
Movements need iTunes for Attitudes. Before iTunes, no one
imagined that we'd need such a complex environment to buy and listen to
music, but somehow we're there now. It turns out that managing music
was more complicated than we thought. So is democracy. With skill and
luck, your people will spend as much energy expressing their political
preferences as they now spend tweaking their music collection and
publishing their favorites.
These are the background issues open for discussion Tuesday. I hope
you'll tune in to the webcast
at 12:30 Tuesday and check in to Berkman's IRC
channel. We'll save the chat log and will be setting up an ORGware site
for all participants to extend the conversation.
1:47:28 PM 
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