A Grater for Democracy
Over at Greater
Democracy, they've been having a heated
discussion this week around who did what and why during the
2004 Democratic campaign, Dean and post-Dean. It starts with a post by
Jock Gill regarding the traditional Master/Slave structure to campaigns
and the peer-to-peer model that the Dean campaign embraced pretty well
(Jock introduced me to the Dean campaign). There are comments by, in
order of appearance:
Valdis Krebs
"Democrats don't get "social networks" as well as the Republicans."
Jon Lebkowsky
"The Kerry campaign focused on raising money, not building
community."
Aldon
Hynes "After the election much of the work promoting P2P
activism slowed to a crawl."
Joe Trippi
"It was a fight every day to keep the master/slave beast at bay. [vs.
P2P]"
Rayne
"We are now in the middle of 'making it up as we go along' yet again."
Zack Exley
"We have an excess of 'ideas' and a deficiency of developers/engineers.
It's a shame."
Robert
David Steele "Gore needs to form a coalition shadow
government and use it to help elect people in 2006"
You can taste the frustration, catalyzing the kinds of
who-shot-John claims and counterclaims that feel so wasteful but which
probably help energize the group. I'm as amazed as anyone that there is
no comprehensive set of campaign tools out there, and that's why we're
working so hard on ORGware. I'm also amazed at how long it has taken us
to get as far as we are. If I'd realized in December 2004 that, in the
spring of 2006 we'd still be where we were in the fall of 2003, maybe I
would have got moving earlier. As I described last time, our
development was as accidental as purposeful.
We really need better ways of presenting the vital discussions
that Valdis Krebs describes in It's the Conversations, Stupid!
(pdf). As David Weinberger said
recently, The
nits are determinative. Consider how the structure of the
Greater Democracy site dissuade the reader from digging into this
important conversation, and how ORGware addresses the determinative
nits:
- The main post and comments all run together, making the
text hard to even approach, much less follow.
- Long posts should be automatically truncated, but expand in
place when the reader wants the whole thing.
- Two LONG documents are embedded in two of the comments.
Because the comments are not automatically truncated, these lists of
political requirements dissuade the reader from continuing. ORGware
encourages the writer to upload the original text files, which the
reader can open in a separate window to maintain context.
- All blogs and comments are also displayed as threaded
discussions, which can be collapsed and expanded as needed.
- Comments must be on the same page as the main blog,
condensed to a single line that the reader can expand at will.
- Comments need individual hyperlinks. It's also helpful if a
comment is posted to the reader's personal blog as a primary post.
Nevertheless, you really should read the whole
thing. The rest of this post is a summary that may be a
helpful introduction.
From Jock's original post:
We must
understand how the dominant organizing principles of our national
communications infrastructure shapes and determines our politics. If we
want a truly democratic politics, based on the notions of equality with
justice and fairness for all, based upon truly symmetrical
relationships, we will have to have a communications paradigm that
supports that goal.
Here's Rayne's description:
These
needs aren't restricted to candidates, either; there are
groups like Congressional District organizations, caucuses, more, that
all have similar needs. I'm involved on the tech team for one caucus,
has tech folks on board, but the tech folks end up in a turf-war over
the best technology, confusing the rest of the non-techs on the team.
The techs are also damned busy with day jobs, can't afford more time to
code. (Same group has spun its wheels for nearly a year...) Part of the
problem is leadership and accountability, but part of it is that the
question of best practices (for each platform, if multiples are there,
including a tool for weeding out the platforms based on capital
available and technology on hand) even enters into the equation. What
is a best practice, in layman's terms so that we can cut to the chase
and spend the time on coding and content?
That's
where I'm at, what I think is needed...p.s. I'm the ONLY geek
so far working for multiple Dem organizations and candidates, for a
county of 165,000 voters.
We at Open Resource Group think we have the answer, but we're
forced to build a comprehensive set of tools for each
campaign-in-a-box, for reasons I described
after the Berkman presentation 6 weeks ago: The public will
not use any tools that a campaign site does not provide.
Valdis Krebs
has thought about this deeply in his PDF:
Using the small-world model,
researchers investigated the effect of a single person's decision to
vote. A person's influence spread throughout their local
group. People were 15 percent more likely
to vote if one of their political discussants made clear their
intentions to vote. Within the research
population a citizen would positively affect the turnout decision of up
to four other people. The
researchers called this a "turnout cascade". In addition, the
increased turnout was found to favor the
candidate of the initiator. Human clusters tend to contain
similar preferences for candidates and
issues, thus an increase in participation was equivalent to an increase
in between two and three votes
for the candidate. Denser clusters tended to show higher
rates of voter participation.
Jon Lebkowsky:
The
approach we were advocating could be a factor in future elections,
and an online, community-based/grassroots movement, could provide an
effective alternative to the current two-party structure that wouldn't
necessarily replace either party, but would provide for greater
participation at more levels. We shouldn't be too idealistic about
this, however. Concentrations of money will always be a significant
factor, and millions of people with no money will still have less power
than a few wealthy corporations and millionaires/billionaires.
I don't agree, for reasons that will take two years to make
clear. Aldon Hynes
remarks also on the lack of work being done to bring the needed tools
on line:
There is
a lot of focus, some of it very important, on who is really
adding to campaigns. Some of it can be about ego and not especially
productive, but some of it is about measuring activity and helping
people become more productive.
My big
concern is that after the 2004 election much of the work
promoting peer to peer networked social activism seems to have slowed
to a crawl.
Hopefully,
with the 2006 cycle we can see a resurgence of interest in peer to peer
enabled politics.
Joe Trippi
thanks Jock Gill for his contributions to the Dean campaign and reminds
us:
Two
points I would make.
- We were making it up as we went along and
(initially at least) building it with no funds and little political
experience.
- There is an implied belief among many that there was
tremendous agreement inside the Dean Campaign to take the Peer-to-Peer
path over the Master-Slave model -- this simply was not true.
It was a
fight every day keep the master/slave beast at bay. In hindsight the
miracle was that we held it off as long as we did given how many inside
and outside the campaign relished master/slave over peer-to-peer.
Zack Exley
reminds us that there are far more ideas than working code embodying
those ideas:
At
Kerry, we would have jumped at any help offered in community
building -- or any area. But what was most often offered from outside
the campaign were ideas - not implementation. Sure, ideas can be a big
help. But we needed developers to implement, designers to design, and
testers to test. And of course we know that not all ideas actually take
off in practice (remember Deanlink?) -- so you can't blame a campaign
for not sinking precious time and resources into ideas in the run up to
a critical election.
And I'll
say once again, we didn't just raise money. (Though we did
raise a huge portion of the entire campaign budget online.) Most of our
team's effort for the last several months was spent on driving field
organizing. We built tools to enable that. It WAS a great tragedy that
it was focused almost 100% in swing states, which is why most people
who comment on this stuff didn't see it.
We could
have done it all way cooler if we had more talented
developers who could build stuff as fast as all of us *idea people*
could think stuff up. But we didn't. So we had stark choices to make:
give Deanlink another shot, or raise more than $100m and mobilize 250K
volunteers in the swing states.
If we
only had one good developer for every Internet
strategist/guru/author -- then we'd be living in a new and wonderful
world of online organizing indeed.
writes:
I think
we also need to go into stealth mode. Gore needs to form a
coalition shadow government and use it to help elect people in 2006,
and then use the 2006-2008 period to do peer to peer not just in the
USA, but overseas as well. If Michael Cudahy can deliver a 20% bounce
from moderate Republicans, I believe I can deliver a 20% bounce from
other non-Democrats, and a further 20% bounce from foreign relatives of
voting immigrants.
And wraps it up:
What are
your requirements? I pointed this discussion out to members of
the demtech email list and invited them to drop by, but members of that
coalition developed platforms like CivicSpace (for community
development) and Advokit (for GOTV coordination), and other Open Source
tools have appeared (e.g. CiviCRM). You can usually get volunteers to
set these up.
I hate to disagree with my editor and co-author twice in one
post, but I must. Unfortunately, campaigns do not have the insights nor
the patience to engage in the long and arcane conversations that might
theoretically result in the volunteers setting up "CivicSpace (for
community
development) and Advokit (for GOTV coordination), and other Open Source
tools". They want their site working by Tuesday, not an involved
conversation that might start next Tuesday, if the volunteers show
up.
And I cannot over-emphasize that the campaign site's users
will not put up with a User Interface any less obvious than an airport
kiosk.
9:03:12 PM 
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