Greater Democracy: More on Power and Energy

April 23, 2004

More on Power and Energy

There have been some great comments written to my previous blog entry and I want to thank everyone for their great comments so far. In particular, I really like Michael’s comments about chemistry. I've often thought about political activity in terms of different levels of activation. Granted my chemistry is about as weak as my physics, but here is the way I tend to think of things.

At the lowest energy level, is the typical non-registered American. There are a lot of them out there. One of the goals of the Dean campaign, and also of groups like ACT, etc., have been to get non-registered Americans registered. There is a certain amount of energy necessary to get people registered. Once they are registered, they remain registered (at least for some period of time until voter rolls are cleaned up).

However, people have pointed out to me, although I don't have statistics to back this up, that newly registered voters are actually the least likely group to vote. If you want to get a vote, you should try to get it from someone who has consistently voted in the past.

So, from the person registered to vote, the next energy level is someone who actually votes. It has been noted that once someone gets used to voting, it typically becomes a habit and they vote consistently. An interesting task to think about is looking at voter rolls and targeting registered voters who haven't voted, to try and get them up to this energy level as voters. I don't hear a lot of talk about this.

To me, the next energy level, is the volunteer/donor. The Dean campaign did a great job in getting people who have not been active before to be volunteers or donors. Again, when people get activated to this level, they are more likely to stay involved.

Then, perhaps the highest energy level is the candidate. The Dean campaign has done some good work in getting people to be candidates that have not been candidates before. I like to hold up my wife as a perfect example of this. Again, once you've been a candidate, you are most likely going to be a candidate again.

Let me now switch gears to thinking about the barriers to getting people up to the next energy level. Michael talks about the how “gathering together, scheduling, finding a meeting place, getting everyone there, figuring out goals and methods, all take tremendous energy.” This gets back to one of the things that I think is so important about Meetup. Meetup does a great job of handling many of these issues. They find the meeting place, sometimes with help of Meetup Hosts. They get people there. They even provide tools for setting an agenda.

Some of you may note that Democratic Town Committees do the same thing. They have a regular meeting place and time. They have their goals and methods. Yet people have commented that DTCs are often ineffective in bringing in new people. I would suggest that DTCs can run into a problem that the new DFA groups need to be very careful about, cliquishness. The most successful Meetups, and for that matter, the most successful DTCs seem to be those that are making a big effort to bring in new people. They publicize their events they make newcomers feel welcome when they show up at DTC meetings or Meetups. Again, Meetup does a good job with this, sending out messages to Meetup hosts talking about how to make people feel welcome.

It seems as if the biggest barrier to people getting more involved is people not knowing how to get more involved, being afraid of getting more involved, and not feeling welcome at getting more involved. These are all barriers we need to be aware of and trying to find ways to lower.

Posted by Aldon Hynes at April 23, 2004 8:26 AM | TrackBack

Comments

It would be great to be able to do a longitudinal study of the effect of Meetup participation on voting, and a survery of voting habits of participants in political meetups. My purely anecdotally based, and non-scientific hunch is that they consist mainly of regular voters or "higher energy" level people. I think that they do play a role in activating new voters judging from the number of registration forms we go though. I think we could do better if we tried. Considering the millions of new registrants the GOP is paying to get which tranditional means, it might be an interesting experiment to organize meetups SPECIFICALLY for imparting non-voters with enough energy to register and vote, but NOT centered around a party or candidate. Kind of a really fun politically charged party to get people fired up. The Party tends to be very passive (tabling) or very manpower intensive (door to door) about how they approach the task. Neither method is paricularly good at using group dynamics to juice up the participants. They should do meetups regularly with decent budgets for entertainment, a motivational speaker, door prizes, free food and refreshments, etc. This will get people out, into a group, and onto the voter rolls. Use what people do care about to get across what we care about. Celebrities, free junk, sex, booze, fun, music, parties, Professional Wrestling, Sports stars, whatever it takes. Just a thought.

What I really wanted to say was that good social software has the effect of lowering barriers and reducing costs of organizing. Meetup is a good example. But it can also flatten organizational structure and decentralize decisionmaking by allowing experts great weight in the social system. This is born out by studies of the effect of groupware and intranets on corporate sructure and decsisionmaking. The current Party is structured very much like an early corporate heirarchy, only with more internal democratic process. Perhaps what the Party needs is what corporations got, a healthy dose of IT innovation centered around internal processes; groupware and intranets. Geographic distance, synchronicity, ad hoc use of collaboration tools and the compatibility issues that creates, the diffculty in communication with the large groups, the storage and dissemination of organizational knowledge, the identification of experts, the generation of ideas and solutions, and power botlenecks are all ameliorated or facilitated by good groupware tools. Such systems further reduce the cost of active volunteering, office holding, and leadership within the party which providing a fluity and openness to the social network that a purely rule-defined, delibrative body-based heirarchy cannot match.

A great project would be the customization of a free cross-platform, browser based (maybe PHP) workgroup suite that is easy to install and maintain. It should be specifically designed with task flows suited to the creation and coordination of events and meetings as the central focus, with good knowledge archiving tools, scheduling, conference (but not video), and e-room / whiteboarding for file transfer and collaborative work. It would be nice if it would integrate will with VOIP for messaging. I think one of the best investments a local or state party can make is get rid of the need to look up contact information for local party members. Get a virtual PBX and a single number contects all relevant parties on their own follow-on extension. It needs to be easy and encouraged for people to talk to Party officials and members, especially PCs and local committees. That level of ease in communication is vital to make sure that people DO communicate regularly, and not just via mail. It is hard to build real relationships with text only.

Posted by: Michael at April 23, 2004 6:40 PM

I appear myself a bit confused with your comment. Let me guess, this message describes the political power and energy, in other words the degrees of political activity...?Am I right?

Posted by: Marina at August 31, 2004 5:04 AM