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April 16, 2006A post for Daily Kos[I'll post this to my new diary on Daily Kos after my one week waiting period is up.] To shape our politics we have to shape our communications. Here is a little personal history about the Dean campaign and how communications shaped it. In 2003 I was asked by Steve Grossman to go to Burlington to work with Joe Trippi’s team on creating the Dean campaign’s internet strategies. At one point we were discussing a new tool that would allow Dean supporters to find one another. The original idea was to find supporters with 1, 2, 5 or so miles from your location. After some energetic exchanges, I was able to persuade Zephyr that the most important Dean supporter I needed to find was the one who lived in my building or on my block. We could then begin the face-to-face relationship building that would allow us to support each other in over-coming our inhibitions and to swing into local, retail political action supporting Dean: leafleting, hosting events in our homes, visibilities, and so forth. The key was that the Dean campaign, like the Clinton Gore campaign in 1992, trusted us to communicate amongst ourselves in a true, symmetrical, peer-to-peer model. As a result, both Clinton and Dean enjoyed powerful benefits created by their supporters. In contrast, the Kerry campaign did not. I was subsequently asked in April 2004, by the then CTO of the Kerry campaign, to work with a very small team of online community organizers [DemTech/DemComm members] to develop a vibrant peer-to-peer social networking strategy for the Kerry team. A small sub-group, including Howard Rheingold, AOL's Director of Community Management, Nanci Meng and Jon Lebkowsky, were tasked to create and submitted a draft proposal to Kerry HQ. We never heard back. We could only watch as Kerry imposed a traditional, asymmetrical, industrial era Master/Slave broadcast communications organizing principal on his campaign. Kerry did not trust the voters to generally do the right thing most of the time. Thus he was basically unable to leverage cooperative gain created by the collective actions of his supporters at the edges of his campaign. Kerry only understood power as it is created by asymmetrical relationships. This lead him to treat his supporters as sheeple, not as citizen activists. Dean, of course, also made some critical mistakes in his communications. Perhaps Dean's greatest error was his scream speech in Iowa. We know that Lincoln understood that his audience in the Lincoln - Douglas debates was NOT the people in the immediate audience, but rather the multitudes reading the telegraphed transcript in papers in distant parts. For this reason, Lincoln adopted a radically new telegraphic debating style. Or, more recently, my friend Dan Hurley was asked to address a Democratic convention some time ago. As he was getting ready, an old Kennedy hand came up to him and told him two things: 1] go to the beach the day before to relax, and 2; address the audience beyond the cameras, not the people in the room. Unfortunately not only did Gov. Dean not know this when he went out on the stage that fateful night in Iowa, but he had also not been rehearsed in BOTH an acceptance speech and a concession speech. Thus he was totally unprepared to leverage the opportunity of addressing the millions beyond the many cameras focused on him on that Iowa stage. A perfect example of how his communications strategy, on that night it was pure and simple 'wing it', shaped his political fortunes. All of this is a round about way of getting around to the point that we must understand how the dominant organizing principle 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. Currently we do not. The dominant organizing principal in American communications is one that is fundamentally asymmetrical “Master/Slave” in nature with limited ability for the average citizen to participate and dependent upon rigid control of the distribution process. Why else would the current beneficiaries of this organizing principal demand draconian Digital Rights Management, with Infinite Copyright, and go to such great extremes to vilify and demonize peer-to-peer approaches? Indeed, the current communications paradigm, as enforced by the FCC and thus the US government is, at its heart, anti-democratic in both principle and fact. In truth, our current communications concentrates power in the hands of a few, supports a politics of oligarchy, and rule by the wealthy 1%. One clear result is today’s dominant politics of money, with humanity working for Mammon. It requires that we be sheeple. I invite you to read the blog posts below to see some of my views of how else we might organize our communications in a true, symmetrical, peer-to-peer model. This is the only model that incorporates and energizes the core values of a politics of democracy. Daily Kos, with its support for lateral, symmetrical and peer-to-peer participation is a case in point. For another example, see “OhMyNews” a South Korean online news site written by its readers who now even pay each other as well. But now, if we want our democracy back, we must extend the symmetrical, peer-to-peer model to all modes of communications. We now have both the understanding and the means to do so. All we lack is the political will and the political power to make it so. So what will we chose for our future: Master/Slave or Peer-to-Peer? Here are links to four posts of mine that relate to this topic. 1] Master/ Slave or Peer-to-Peer 2] To Encourage or Stifle Wireless Economic Innovation? 3] Wireless Civic and Economic Development 4] Mammon, masquerading as "The Market", is a false prophet Posted by Jock Gill at April 16, 2006 3:02 PM | TrackBackComments
From my little corner of the world... the Democrats don't get "social networks" as well as the Republicans. Of all of the politicos that have read my "It's the Conversations, Stupid" article [and chapter in Extreme Democracy], the vast majority that have contacted me with a desire to implement something similar, are Republicans. They understand how to utilize the social structures in communities that attract those prone to Republican issues -- many churches and Amyway clusters, to name a few. What they have not done -- yet -- is map/measure/morph the networks they have. This is a natural next step to making the networks even more useful and influential next time around. Maybe this is because Democrats are made up of many diverse groups which have trouble bridging -- kind of like siloes in large organizations. Peer-to-peer communication inside the silo, but official-to-official between the siloes... which leads one silo to believe that the other silo is "not one of us". A united team/party will always beat a fragmented team/party. Article mentioned: http://www.orgnet.com/PoliticalConversations.pdf Posted by: Valdis at April 16, 2006 4:11 PM[For the record, this is one of the earliest complete working drafts of the proposal mentioned in this post. An edit from April 20th is posted as another comment.] Note: File posted on Socialtext DemComm Wiki on April 13, 2004 @ 9:00 AM by Jon Lebkowsky. “Expansion of Online Community Plan 1A” I. Political goals for Kerry online community Identify communications network and contacts Online social networks/progressive networks (including selected networks within social network sites, e.g. Kerry, Dean et al networks within Orkut, Friendster, Tribe et al.) Who are the influentials (online political citizens)? (They will be social hubs). See http://216.87.14.57/UploadedFiles/political%20influentials.pdf. “Online Political Citizens are not isolated cyber-geeks, as the media has portrayed them. On the contrary, OPCs are nearly seven times more likely than average citizens to serve as opinion leaders among their friends, relatives and colleagues. OPCs are disproportionately “Influentials,” the Americans who “tell their neighbors what to buy, which politicians to support, and where to vacation,” according to Ed Keller and Jon Berry, authors of the book, The Influentials.1 Normally, 10% of Americans qualify as Influentials. Our study found that 69% of Online Political Citizens are Influentials.” Energize/motivate organizers and influentials Educate, support, motivate, and energize Content Provide training resources -- convert from "want to win" to "how to win" Three kinds of messages: Vision for 21st Century Dem Party Delivery We can use the Internet as the method of delivery to key supporters, but we must also encourage them to replicate in other media for local distribution. Core documents published as html, pdf, and plain text Feedback loop -- there has to be a legitimate way for campaign to let organizers know how the campaign is reacting to their work an open channel (chat, forums) Leverage peer-level communication (David Weinberger’s point about the value of having the volunteers communicate with each other and using this communication to sustain momentum and keep core messages alive.) Provide examples of good organizing skills and organizers – (am) Attract and convince key constituencies/demographics Determine progressive/Dem influentials in these communities. Nurture online base of supporters by providing good guidance/communicating campaigns' needs to supporters Embed collective online initiatives in political context so that they are meaningful to people (ie. If Bush announces x, ask people to respond) Give people online resources (posters, fliers, etc.) that are sensitive to context and timing For the record, Nanci Meng did much of the work on that proposal, and I did quite a bit of work on it, too. Other members of the team included Cameron Barrett, Tex Coate, Nancy White, Bob Jacobson, Aldon Hynes, and Jerry Michalski. It's not 100% true that "we never heard back." The CTO that pulled us together left the campaign, but we were still in conversation when Zack Exley came on board. He was supposed to meet with us, but didn't, choosing instead to follow the top-down approach he'd learned at Moveon.org. The campaign focused on raising money rather than on building community. They might have done both, but they followed a priority based on the traditional assumption that a campaign's success is measured by the money it raises and the broadcast power it can buy... again, the top-down approach. To be fair, community organization would have taken longer, and since no one in the campaign had a feel for it, they weren't going to be comfortable devoting resources to it. 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. Posted by: Jon Lebkowsky at April 17, 2006 6:38 AMI concur with Jon's comments. Also contributing ideas and suggestions were Robert Steele and Paul Ray. There were eventualy 24 members of the Wiki. A few more items: 1] Zack posted his views on this on DailyKos back in Dec. 2004. See: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/12/21/161513/83 "I know both Zack Exley and Markos as colleagues I respect them which is why I was very surprised to see Zack's statements at Harvard and Markos post attacking Zack (and spelling his name wrong). Then I began to understand. The article was wrong, and Markos was being a bit hot headed. Below is Zack's response to Markos. The shorter version from Zack: "You got it wrong, here is what happened. Let's not fight, let's get organized." But please read the whole thing below -- it is the best account of the development of the campaign online this election cycle. If we are going to rebuild the Democratic party we need to have a honest and frank discussion about what everyone brings to the table and how to win. So please read Zack's letter and post your ideas and comments below." 2] DemComm was created on Aprl 02, 2004. Howard Rheingold made the first post on April 03. There were 133 posts in April 2004. Traffic fell off sharply after that. Posted by: jock Gill at April 17, 2006 7:33 AMLast version of the plan, as edited by Tex Coate on April 20th. Draft Outline Kerry Online Community Plan April 9, 1:33pm Online Community Plan Amanda's Consolidated Objectives I. Political goals for Kerry online community Geographical (State, city, county) 2. Who are the influentials (online political citizens)? (They will be social hubs). 3. Energize/motivate organizers and influentials Step by step guide: how to get out the vote. Relate Kerry campaign to this vision (2) Delivery c) Provide examples of good organizing skills and organizers – (am) Define and model best practices for communication. 4. Attract and convince key constituencies/demographics women Embed collective online initiatives in political context so that they are meaningful to people (ie. If Bush announces x, ask people to respond) B. Raise money C. Attract and convince key constituencies 4. Who else? D. Get out the vote E. Match local volunteers with precinct organizations 1. Precinct Power! Precinct Power -- No Vacancies! Here is a quick series of web clicks, about 4, to show you the nature of the problem and the opportunity. It is huge. The role of the precinct level grassroots has shrunk as campaigns have become ever more dominated by advertising in broadcast media. The incentive for restoring the precinct grassroots is fundraising at $50K per hour -- what Dean campaign and Moveon.org proved. As Bob Fertig of Democrats.Com writes, need to ask all of these groups What is the reality on the ground at the precinct level? How can we join and work with the existing precinct organizations? How do we promote "anticipation, cooperation and innovation" and avoid conflict between the offline regulars and the online newbie enthusiasts? It helps to walk the talk. "Precinct Power" must have a larger vision than simply electing Kerry. It must have a vision of revitalizing the Democratic party and giving it the power and resources to win local, state and national elections for decades to come. President Kerry with a Senate majority can do a lot more than a President Kerry with no majorities on the Hill. And of course we very much need to have the 5 senate seats at risk in the south hold and win! A goal: Every seat on every precinct & ward committee in the USA filled by September 1, 2004. No Vacancies! F. Enlist and revive grassroots energy of Dean campaign - "Deaniacs for Kerry" - Begin by allowing Deaniacs to identify themselves as such, in order to lower their psychological barrier to identifying with anyone else Create a discussion space for Deaniacs for Kerry. Include welcoming, enthusiastic, Kerriacs Aggregate the suitable Deniac blogs G. Bring some order and alignment to the hundreds of grassroots groups, provide tools and guidance, funnel their ideas to the campaign H. Long-term local alliance-building -- on to the Congressional and other elections after November; making sure we are not just capturing and serving grassroots support of Kerry, but all those who want to build strength of Democratic Party (five southern senate seats at risk, etc.) I. Generate support and enthusiasm by turning on the blogging community The blogosphere consists of hundreds of thousands of micro-communities. By energizing bloggers, those communities can be educated and invigorated to achieve the campaign's aims. 1. Give bloggers something to talk about. The Kerry blog is the obvious place to start. J. What else? II. Key objectives in pursuit of those goals A. Plan and launch a Kerry community of communities website that provides a focus for the many groups with a compelling statement of purpose, directory of resources, and well thought-out design -- supports local self-organization, but gives them means for national dialogue and collaboration. (Other than what exists on the kerry site already? They have pages built that could be made to serve this purpose better. Much of it is already available via the Action Center HQ, or could be if it was designed and executed better. - JC 4/20) B. Support self-organization with toolsets and guidelines for local groups C. Set up an FEC-clean way to help community volunteers to support campaign staff D. Prove to campaign staff that online community efforts pay off, E. Prove to online grassroots organizers and volunteers that the F. Go to local precinct and ward meetings -- need to understand and know who is working on the ground, market research, thus establish trusting relationship between online and offline groups. III. Technical infrastructure A. Portal (like Deanspace, a general frame with unified daily B. Individual blogs C. Group blogs (Scoop?) D. Message board for a couple hundred organizers? (Venice is open source message board software, for example) E. Voice services such as Vonage -- we don't provide technical F. IM -- we don't provide technical access, but we provide how-to info G. Texting-- we don't provide technical access, but we provide how-to info (this one deserves some thought in regard to GOTV tactics) H. Provide easy instructions on using off-the-shelf software: how to arrange a quick ad-hoc meeting via IM and inexpensive, secure, conference calls, for example. Actively outreach to communities to offer them what we can provide to support their effort. I. Events calendars J. Online/offline coordination - Names and contact info for online supporters should be a subset of the campaign's master lists of supporter information so that messages, newsletters, pleas for help and support, volunteer opportunities, get out the vote efforts, etc. are centrally known so that the campaign has a sense of the most effective way to contact that person or otherwise use their information. This also avoids duplication. (Does the campaign have a privacy policy?) - JC 4/20 IV. Social/management infrastructure A. Define role of community manager to oversee: B. Can a representative structure bring ideas up from hundreds of individual groups and channel guidance on political objectives to grassroots? An open community for community organizers that is small enough to be manageable? C. Guidelines for what groups can do -- first inquiring, then D. Training for online facilitators? F. Develop community philosophy G. What else? 6. Timetable: A. Complete draft plan by April 22, circulate to larger group for B. Publish and begin to implement plan as early as possible in May. C. Retune in June. D. Hitting on all cylinders by July. 7. What else?
Random comments: Valdis writes, "Maybe this is because Democrats are made up of many diverse groups which have trouble bridging" SNAP! This is one of the top issues I've been talking a lot about recently. We need to get better at bridging social capital. DailyKos is great at bonding social capital. We should be looking for tools, that help us with the bridging social capital. I think Jon's comments on who did what reflects one of the issues of really opening up communications. 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 poltics. Posted by: Aldon Hynes at April 17, 2006 8:28 AMJock -- I agree with most of your post including your critique of the Dean effort. Two points I would make. 1. We were making it up as we went along and (initially at least) building it with no funds and little political experience. 2. 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. You were instrumental in helping to keep us on track (for as long as we stayed on track). thanks I have been stewing about this post since I first read it, Jock, haven't been able to articulate the frustration -- no, disappointment is a better word here -- about the failure of the Kerry campaign to "get it". But you and I have had a few exchanges over the last several years about the nature of organizing at local level; I know that another part of the Kerry problem was that there was a failure to transfer "branding" from a national effort to a local effort. By branding I mean not just messaging but operations; too much of operations could be tied up in the personality that was directing the state in question, resulting in a complete absence of M/S or P2P at state level and below. (I'm using Michigan as an example, and I'll leave it at that, no names. I've reviewed the numbers with a PoliSci prof; we didn't do much better here than if we'd done absolutely nothing.) There's also a continuing problem with strategy, grokking that there are two disparate populations of folks that need two delivery systems. To ignore that either one exists is a mortal peril. There are still folks who get their primary message from television, and the rest increasing from online sources. Both paths must be mediated. I'll point to the current Michigan's governor's race as an example, where a 10-pt. lead dissipated because one candidate spent heavily on television while the other spent next to nothing on television. If this keeps up AND there is an ineffective management of both master/slave and P2P from here forward...I may have to move to Canada. Aldon is also correct in his comments about the disparate groups issue. We are SOOO damned conscious of our limitations in organizing between entities, sooo careful not to transgress any FEC regs, that we have not developed the overarching umbrella infrastructure that would provide unifying tools to the entire progressive movement. There's also the "what about my issue?" separateness that Armstrong/Moulitsas write about in CTG that compounds the separateness -- but I hope that CTG will encourage groups to see past differentiation and move to mutuality. And unfortunately, as Joe T. said about the Dean campaign, we are now in the middle of "making it up as we go along" yet again. We are in the throes of a campaign year and trying to build something out of ether as fast as we can on a shoe string. What's needed is a concurrent fasttrack/dual-track develop-release think tank that creates the umbrella we need, and FAST. Posted by: Rayne at April 18, 2006 6:22 PMThis is a great thread, and I hope it lives another day or two so I can write a more substantial contribiution later. I'd like to respond to Jon's criticism regarding not taking time to meet with and correspond with various folks that the CTO had pulled together before I joined the campaign. I did have several long conversations with members of that group, but I didn't participate in a long corespondence with the whole group. 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 tradjedy 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. Posted by: Zack Exley at April 18, 2006 7:07 PMZack, I have to take issue with your post. First off, if you had long conversations with members of the demcomm team, no one mentioned it. In fact, everyone on the team commented on the fact that you were unresponsive. I think it would've come up if you were talking to one or another of us. You certainly weren't talking to the most active members: Jock and I, Howard, Nanci, Tex. I mean, it's fine with me if you decided to take another approach, but it's disingenuous of you to suggest that you were responsive when you were not. If you *had* talked to us, you would have known that we had a number of developers in the conversation on another list, called demtech, and they were ready to do whatever they could to help. This included the former Deanspace folks and the developers of Advokit, among others. We could have implemented much of our plan (and Cam's) without significant cost to the campaign, and we could have managed the effort without drawing on your resources. You made a choice to go top-down, and I'm sure you had your reasons - but you missed the opportunity to address the grassroots at minimal cost and overhead, and I can't accept an argument that you listened to our suggestions and they were not expedient or realistic. That's just incorrect. Posted by: Jon Lebkowsky at April 18, 2006 11:15 PMWell, who are those developers -- cuz there's a lot of cool stuff they could work on now. I did ask around for them back then. So give me their names so I can reach out to them now. As for Cam's "ideas" (a group blog) -- the Kerry campaign told him "go do these, and we'll link to your community and tell the mailing list about it." But he didn't have developers who would actually build it (why didn't he have access to those you mention?). He said he needed a large investment from the Kerry campaign to hire people. To this day, we have an excess of "ideas" and a deficiency of developers/engineers. It's a shame. We need more walkers and less talkers. Posted by: Zack Exley at April 19, 2006 12:10 AMI am quite thrilled to see Joe Trippi comment. It was a great frustration to me that Jock and Michael Cudahey (20% of the Republicans) and I were not able to "break through" to Dean when it could have still made a difference. My rant on why I would vote for George Bush instead of Kerry, May 2004, appears in retrospect to be spot on, but even I could not have imagined how lunatic and radicalizing Cheney-Rove could be. From where I sit, the dog-catcher issue remains "does your vote count" and the means to win is, as Jock suggests, ending the Master/Slave idiocy of the Republican Lite (Democrats) and Republican Parties that are looting the Republic. Al Gore has my vote. Hillary Clinton would make a great secretary of state. She has the power to deprive Al Gore of the nomination, but she absolutely cannot win. She is not electible at this time. I'm going to put some thoughts together and share them with Jock, and if he wants to post them, fine, but 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 Cudahey 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. Posted by: Robert David Steele at April 19, 2006 11:51 AMAs Zack says, this is a very rich conversation to which I wish to add some ideas from a conversation last night with Bill Wood, Carolyn Rosen and Lino Avellani at our Medford Democratic Meetup that I have barely started processing. We need to consider how to move towards clusters of self assembling nodes that are structured to support the "We" and not the "I" of ego power seeking. These groups need to allow us to express our authentic voices such that we can be both followers and leaders. At any given time, the authentic voice best matching the problem/task/challenge at hand is the leader we all agree to follow. Change the situation and a new leader emerges and the former reverts to following. For example, we have a union organizer as a member of our group. On labor issues we take his lead. We have a handicapped person in our group and on those issues he leads us. We can do this because we have enough confidence that our authentic voices are respected and that we are truly peers, not of lesser status in the shadow of an "I". For Peer-to-Peer politics to emerge, we need to recognize that there is more power in "We", as it has many "I"s. On the other hand, the solitary ego power of the "I" leads to asymmetrical structures such as the top/down, master/slave or “broadcast” models that have gotten us into the mess we are in today. Politics driven by private agendas seeking the asymmetrical power of "I", can never be Peer-to-Peer. We need to recognize those structures and organizing principles that are "I" based and counter to the greater power of the "We" the people. For example, part of recovering our Democracy will also require us to consider how we can learn from doing how to work together. This strongly suggests that we consider two years of mandatory national service at age 18 or 22, as well as putting a strong civics program back into our public educational system. If, in the Boston Marathon, we can all cheer on all of the many different runners, in many different conditions, from many different backgrounds and countries, and celebrate their efforts and accomplishments in a great day of community spirit, why can we not do this every day in our daily lives? Politics is a marathon of a different nature, if only it shared the values of its 26 mile relative. We can chose a marathon of the “we” or the marathon of the “I”. How will we chose? Heads up, gang. Got anything else you think is critical to this concurrent-dualtrack '04Post-Mortem/'06Development-Production process, do your best brain dump. I'm going to link this post this along with a commentary to a site read by certain gubernatorial and senatorial candidates' offices every morning. You've got about 24 hours to make it count, if they remain on their usual read-the-blogs-first-thing schedule. Ditto on the developers issue, though. I desperately need them at local level and I can't find one who'll come out of hiding to save my life. I could spend 40+ hours a week just generating content for a handful of candidates, let alone local party sites -- and I've got noone getting my back on code. There's a market function here; demand is high, why give it up for free? Unless you can figure out how to make it leverageable...or you can grow your own FAST. Perhaps chumming high schools with internships is one possibility; look at Google's "Summer of Code" contest last year, too, as a model. Could we scrape up enough cash for a program that would generate code during the summer to use in the last 3 months of the election season? Posted by: Rayne at April 19, 2006 1:18 PMWhat 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. Posted by: Jon Lebkowsky at April 19, 2006 2:46 PMFirst, an all-in-one kit containing both a manual/directions and links to create a customized webpage-blogsite. Sure, CivicSpace is a GREAT tool, but to the average candidate with NO technical skills, this is overwhelming and too much, very off-putting. Most local candidates needs something with a simpler interface, just a plain vanilla blog-type tool with a vehicle for dialogue with constituents and an ability to accept donations online. Remember that the overwhelming bulk of candidates running for office are in the race for school board, county commissioner, dogcatcher -- and not state-level or national office. These folks are often just cutting their teeth with blogs, too, aren't regular readers of DKos or TPM or MyDD, etc.; they need to be able to post their position, ask for feedback and for votes. (Cripes, I spend a LOT of my time just coaching on fundamentals of secure computing and software...don't get me started on opposition research...) I'm currently buying domains, setting up Blogger sites with a redirect, getting initial content up on site with an eye to "branding", cross-linking with other local Dem party/club sites, have gotten this down to a science where I can crunch a unique site in under 2 hours -- but the next step is on-line donations. We could do PayPal easily, but are there better tools? Can't we get something more out-of-the-box that contains all this on a step-by-step basis? As for volunteers: we really need a network, a place where folks can drop in, post a "Help Wanted", get the extra help they need above and beyond the bare fundamentals. Perhaps part of this problem is a simple promotion issue; I'm personally not familiar with DemComm or DemTech, and I'm not a complete slouch in the blogosphere. 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. Thank goodness I don't have an actual job right now. Posted by: Rayne at April 19, 2006 3:47 PMRayne, when my wife ran for State Rep in 04, I set up a proto-CivicSpace based website, which I then cloned for a bunch of other candidates. I've done similar stuff for local town committees. I think using the multi-site functionality of CivicSpace you can crank out very powerful campaign websites very quickly. Personally, I think a key thing that is needed is not so much the 'installation wizard, or instruction manual that does everything' as a group of people that can act as effective bridges between traditional campaigns and geeks. All of this said, it feels to me as if we are drifting from the key issue of Master/Slave versus peer-to-peer. Whether it is the campaign staff dealing with volunteers, or people here with brilliant ideas, looking for someone to implement the ideas for them, we still have ideas emerging from some center, as opposed to nuturing the edge to come up with and implement ideas. Posted by: Aldon Hynes at April 19, 2006 6:27 PMAt some point, Aldon, we still have to build the environment we need for the future, for 2008. We have to get people who've not been engaged online, who now want to be there, into this new ecosphere. The more challenging it is for them, the less likely they are to see P2P as a viable option; the more likely they will remain engaged in M/S. Coming up with a full complement of resources will certainly go a long ways to bridging this cultural shift. Education is another enormous challenge, too. I'll give you an example of a cultural education opportunity I ran into just this month. I had all kinds of feedback that the local party website wasn't up to date...we had problems with hosting and client-based software, finally got both resolved, only to find that NOBODY was actually reading the website anyhow (thank you, Sitemeter) even after relaunch and daily posting. These average Joes in the trenches still believe that a website is little more than a Yellow Page ad so that people can contact them; they wait for their bi-monthly snail-mailed newsletter for their news from the party. OMFG - that's a lifetime in internet time. The money expended on this could pay for development, of course, but they haven't culturally adapted to seeing this. Continuing to develop M/S relationships online only encourages this entrenchment; there must be some sort of education process as well as personal rewards for migrating away from M/S. The Kerry campaign wasn't sending anything out that the local party members weren't getting from their leadership or that bloody newletter; they needed to be told earlier about SBVT, how they could respond, given strokes for engaging in this response process (maybe awarding "combat medals"), generally encouraged to do more to step in the breach and do more for the candidate. There are more education resources emerging; CTG, for example, provides a wealth of information about the 50,000 foot view and the view from the trenches that local activists rarely ever received. More groups are providing training, i.e., DFA's training camps and now Night School, Wellstone, more local programs. But there is still a hole in many of these programs about the P2P component vs. M/S and Broadcast, and how to mediate these simultaneously. In my case specifically, I'm going to have to pull out of the air something for the Broadcast segment with no money; we're already doing P2P and M/S both, but need this 3rd leg. Canvassing work will help, but it's not the end-all-be-all... So, to add to the laundry list Jock/Jon already posted (Kerry Community Plan), there needs to be some educational component specifically addressing the three legs, P2P-M/S-Broadcast, and vehicles that approach plug-n-play for rapid adoption. But that's just my perspective out here in the field... Posted by: Rayne at April 19, 2006 6:55 PMThe way to deal with complexity in setting up the tools (like CivicSpace) is to have volunteers or paid staff who have knowledge like Aldon's and can create something that the campaign can use, and be on call for support. The larger campaigns should, of course, take some of the money they're blowing on broadcast and invest it in community building via P2P, but they don't see that yet - they're just now seeing the top down tech stuff like Moveon, and the stuff Zack was doing for Kerry. Even the Dean campaign had that issue, as Joe pointed out... I think one of their key issues was that they got caught up in the success of raising money online and drifted away from the community-building potential. It's good to raise money, but if you're going to spend much of it on broadcast, you should consider whether it's better spent seeding a movement in your behalf. That's high risk, but sooner or later somebody's going to do it. I'm sure the politicians are not going to be into cutting edge applications, I've seen that all around. And they don't necessarily want to build more participation into the system... to the extent you're advocating for particular positions and not seeking consensus, democracy's not that attractive. The grassroots power-to-the-edges people aren't going to get much satisfaction from any political party. It might be more effective for us to build around the politicians, to build our own influence from the bottom up. The Dems may come around or a grassroots network might evolve into something like a new party. But my main point is that we won't have much success trying to confront politics-as-usual head-on. We have to build our own network and our own coalitions. Posted by: Jon Lebkowsky at April 19, 2006 7:21 PMRouting around obstacles is of course what the Internet teaches us to do. But it is more than this we need. We need to offer Show Me results that show the positive advantages of our organizing principles and the resulting "story" they enable. It is just this common story that will also help bind us together and help overcome the temptation to drift back to the I.Me world. We need weSite, not iSite. weLife, Not iLife. What, for example can we learn from OhmyNews?
How do we teach people to use cell phones with photographic, video, and audio capabilities as the people's broadcasting network [PBN]? Is there a WeNews site that makes it easy to upload our P2P journalism for the PBN P2PNews? This would build on blogs, vlogs etc. But the goal would be We, not Me. And of course we pay ourselves! Why else do you think I am about to spring for a Nokia 6682? As I am fond of saying, the Revolution WILL be Broadcast! By us -- on the PBN P2PNews! Do you think we could Americanize OhmyNews and morph it into a vehicle for telling our stories from the P2P perspective? Jock PS: How many of us can do multi-party encrypted video meetings with Apple’s weSite? Drop me an email if you want to try playing with this tool. We need to exploit all of the weTools we can beg, borrow and invent. Or is that weVent? Posted by: Jock Gill at April 19, 2006 8:16 PMCell phones, definitely, have needed a Rapid Response to several events recently where a smart mob would have been best suited. But you should have seen the looks on the faces when I tried to explain "smart mobbing"... Will look into the weSite. Haven't looked, but does Skype have closed conference capability that is secure? Posted by: Rayne at April 19, 2006 10:44 PMMore feedback coming in over at MichiganLiberal.com about this thread. Note this comment: http://www.michiganliberal.com/showComment.do?commentId=3090 Posted by: Rayne at April 21, 2006 12:03 AMLeaving a note here for Jon Lebkowsky: I see you're speaking at MeshForum; how much of what you'll say about connecting networks might fit within the scope of this thread? Wish I could attend the event, will have to settle for feedback afterwords -- but I do wonder in advance of the event whether one of the key challenges is managing multiple networks that are mediated differently. Posted by: Rayne at April 21, 2006 12:27 AMJock et all - After reading this before - and all of the comments, I spent some time drafting a response - and discovered myself writing for quite a long time. Better to show you my thoughts on Peer-to-Peer at Political Gastronomica... http://www.politicalgastronomica.com A quick and dirty summation: 1. Not OR, it should be a combination of both As for sheeple - I do not think it is an issue of disrespecting the supporters, as much as it is a prioritization of tasks and time. One thing I ask, place yourself in the shoes of people like Mary Beth Cahill, Joe, Zack, and others in the midst of what is essentially a moving train with thousands of moving parts - and you need to do everything PERFECT. How easy would it be for you to manage the tasks - and your life as well. We talk about the productivity gained out of computers, networking and aggregated knowledge. Has technology truly increased our personal bandwidth? How many people are you able to connect with - on a personal level - in a single day? Posted by: Sanford at April 22, 2006 5:38 PMThe point of my comment was to say that we all (including me) should be more careful about painting with the broad brush of campaign "X" doesn't get it. The candidate has something to do with it. All the Jocks, Zacks, Aldons etc etc can only do so much and innovate so much if the candidate deep down doesn't really get it. Because if the candidate doesn't really get it -- then it gives permission to others in the campaign who "do not get it" to produce hurdles -- to sandpaper the edges or just plain make life miserable for those that do. Take that with Sanford's fast moving train with thousands of moving parts and sooner or later the shit hits the fan. To date we have not had a candidate for President who truly "got it". I would have implemented anything that I could have gotten passed the Master/Slave Corps or had the resources or time to focus on and get built in time to meet the political demands of the campaign cycle. I was the campaign manager and I still had to fight to accomplish what we all got done. Zack wasn't the campaign manager so it is probably even a bigger miracle that his team accomplished so much in the general election. We may never know what battles he fought and lost inside the campaign. While I agree with Zack's - let's look forward and do it right perspective. I've come to believe that the most important missing ingredient is a candidate who truly "gets it". Posted by: Joe Trippi at April 23, 2006 12:20 PMRayne: I haven't thought through what I'll say at MeshForum, but the issues behind this thread will certainly be relevant. Sanford: I agree with much of what you say, though I'm not sure you have to have absolute perfection in all you do in order to win a campaign - but I think you're exaggerrating to make a point. And I'm certain the Kerry campaign set the priorities that made sense to them, though the complaint here, I think, is that what made sense to them was traditional broadcast politics, and they missed an opportunity to facilitate a different kind of organization that might'be made a difference at the polls. I think an hour's conversation with the group you put together would have led Zack et al to productive bottom-up develoopment blending a community and political approaches effectively; this would also have been good long-term for the party. It would've been our version of the kind of groundwork the right has done so effectively through other channels (churches, business organizations, and various partisan groups). The top-down/broadcast measures associated with the traditional Dems and organizations like Moveon (which has never been effective at grassroots organizing) - even the Dean campaign, because the traditional pols within the campaign were not doing 'cooperative coordination' with the grassroots mobilizers - these are all that the Democrats seem to know. People don't vote Democratic because they have a sense that they belong to the party. Those who voted for Kerry were voting against Bush, and that's not enough. I'm afraid that most Dem organizers are terminally clueless about this. Posted by: Jon Lebkowsky at April 23, 2006 12:39 PMSanford, I enjoyed your three part post and would say I generally agree. And Joe, I likewise agree with your note this morning. The focus of my posts is not so much on campaigns, by that time, as Sanford and Joe can attest, it is probably already too late, but on the organizing principles of the parties themselves. If a party is organized on a peer-to-peer basis, it will be a natural thing for its campaigns, and candidates, to reflect the core P2P organizing principles. That is, the Kerry campaign of 2004, for example, reflected the master/slave [top down/broadcast] organizing principles that the Democratic party has used and relied upon for well over 100 years. As Joe points out, many folks in and out of the Dean campaign were also products of the old Democratic organizing principles and acted accordingly. Our job is to create a political party that embraces peer-to-peer concepts as one of the fundamental organizing principle of their politics. The question is whether any of the existing parties can evolve into a P2P organism. Or are they essentially trapped in their legacy organizing principles? So a key question becomes: Is it reasonable to work to change an existing party or is the only realistic solution to build a new party that is P2P from the ground up? So my question back to Joe is this, if the candidate is the product of “the party”, can we ever expect a candidate to “get it” if the party does not? For a good report on working towards the P2P political process, check out this interview featuring our own Aldon Hynes: Your thoughts? Jock Joe: When I describe "Perfect" - I mean, in the business of politics - where your every move is scrutinized, your mistakes are potential fodder for your candidate or yourself, and there is a variable line of people looking for your seat - what does this process engender amongst the staff? And note, the word used is "staff" - not "team". And, it is interesting - when I think of grassroots, I do think of the churches and the synagogues - and how effective they are in building up their networks. They have motivated people because the organization/effort they are involved in impacts their lives on a local level. It is his connection that matters - just like the high-schools and colleges we have gone to - that strengthens these bonds - and allows for effective delivery on the goals of the campaign. But does this form a new political party? Or does it give supporters - motivated supporters with powerful tools - a way of leveraging their personal power to impact the process - and make our parties listen to what we want? Has the article described a new political group - or demonstrated the power of our tools - and how they can have an impact on how we work and communicate? Posted by: Sanford at April 23, 2006 4:39 PMMan I wished I had more time to get into this. Jock you ask a great question I will try to get back to answer it as soon as possible. Trippi Posted by: Joe Trippi at April 24, 2006 11:12 PMAs a veteran of the Kerry campaign who was on board before my friends Sanford and Zack, I have several comments to add to the digging into history that is going on in this thread. I write as someone who has been involved in campaigns for more than twenty years, starting with John Kerry's first Senate race in 1984, 5 years at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, 4 years at the Democratic National Committee, and a year-and-a-half as blogmaster for John Kerry's 2004 campaign. Political consultants do not get rich, for the most part, by embracing novelty. If someone bold enough to try a new approach happens to win, then it's much more likely that other consultants will experiment with the form in the next cycle. This kind of steering while looking in the rear view mirror has been one of the most difficult hurdles for proponents of Internet organizing to overcome. Let me talk about the intensity of the top-down model. Campaigns are about plans. Very carefully crafted plans; plans that are intended to avoid surprises while absorbing anything that does go wrong. There are quarter-by-quarter fundraising goals. There are field organizations to build. The model is as top-down as can be. So almost every single person who does campaigning for a living, until very recently, has been steeped in this top-down way of organizing the world (or pickled as some would suggest!) The Marine instructors at boot camp could not do a better job of indoctrinating their recruits. Peer-to-peer organizing does more than turn the top-down model on its head. P2P means that the campaign has to, in a sense, let go of some of this fierce planning, that the campaign has to trust that putting money into P2P will result in returns to the campaign at least as good as investing in fundraising. We all know that understanding how to modulate letting go is a fundamentally hard thing for humans to do. If we let go, we are no longer in control. And without control, how can you win? So fear is in the saddle. Fear of losing. That fear is what online organizers have to overcome. But there's a chicken-and-egg thing here: most political players are going to want to see P2P work in a real campaign. Until 2004, most campaigns were unwilling to invest the resources to use P2P methods. Except for the Dean campaign, which found itself in such dire straits that the prospect of change was hardly more threatening than the traditional model. And the Dean campaign just happened to have a consultant who was already known for being crazier than the rest of the consulting community, who liked to do off-beat commercials. (I worked with Joe on some commericals in the late 1980s) As illustrated by the fairly detailed plan earlier in this thread, there were plans to do more online organizing floating around the Kerry campaign. In fact, I remember seeing similar plans at the DNC in 95-96. But no one wanted to execute such plans, especially John Kerry's first campaign manager, who turned away approaches from MoveOn and Meetup, before the Dean campaign embraced Meetup. Dean's second quarter fundraising success finally forced the campaign to begin taking the Internet more seriously. (That's the quarter where the famous bat went soaring on an hour-by-hour online countdown to the FEC filing deadline.) The Kerry campaign did not add a blog (I was the blogmaster in the campaign) to its website until August 2003, well after the Dean campaign. And it's true that until the closing months of the campaign, the focus was on fundraising, and not community building. But the absence of community tools was not due to lack of interest on the staff: Sanford, Zack, Amanda, myself, and others lobbied as hard as we could for more resources to build these tools. If you have never worked inside the hypercharged atmosphere of a presidential campaign, it is difficult to understand how hard it can be to Zack is correct that the Kerry campaign in the end did do some serious online organizing, but not until the last few months of the campaign, when it was too late to see what other benefits might have happened. After the fundraising successes of the Dean and Kerry campaigns, the door is more open than it has ever been to admit a real online organizing model into the heart of a campaign strategy. We have to keep the pressure on all the candidates, but I am certain that at least one will follow this path. ***** On Robert David Steele's point about organizing overseas, there are several million Americans living abroad, and there is a Democrats Abroad organization. This group is a great target for online organizing because they are so far-flung. Posted by: Dick Bell at April 25, 2006 11:51 PMDick, thanks for articulating so well the rationale for the top-down approach within campaigns. There's clearly a difference in perspective and approach between folks like you and Zack who are conditioned by the demands of the political establishment, and those of us with online community backgrounds who've spent our years organizing online communities and social networks, and more lately exploring the potential for Internet tools to organize the grassroots more effectively. I'm afraid I can't accept your contention that you or Zack or anyone else within the Kerry campaign or the Democratic establishment advocated a p2p approach, and I never saw the Kerry campaign go there, so I'm not sure what you're talking about when you say "the Kerry campaign in the end did do some serious online organizing" if you're suggesting it was driven by anything other than top-down thinking. But there's no point in arguing the past. What of the future? Speaking for myself, I'm not interested in working within the existing party structure. Of course we shouldn't ignore partisan politics altogether; the Bush presidency has taught us that it does matter who's in the White House, especially when the Executive isn't balanced by the Legislative branch. But I'm clear that the kind of political force we build online will be independent, ad hoc, and will be effective, not in replacing the established structure, but in swarming it, i.e. organizing via networks to influence policy and decisionmaking. Jim Moore's "second superpower" concept is spot on - in the network/p2p realm of organizing, we can think globally, building effective coalitions that are relevant to many nations and many policy frameworks. In 1997 when I first wrote about "nodal politics," I thought what we now call a p2p approach was possible. Now I think it's inevitable. But I won't try again to convince a candidate campaign that it's an important approach for them. It's not going to work if they're not already there. (I'm somewhat hopeful that Mark Warner will join the 2008 mob of potential presidential candidates, because he has the clueful Jerome Armstrong, Nathan Wilcox, and Trei Brundrett working for his PAC, and they understand both top-down and p2p approaches.) Posted by: Jon Lebkowsky at April 26, 2006 11:38 AM
Two thoughts in response to your comments, one cribbed from a 2004 Zack posting on Kos, and one from my own experience. Here’s what Zack had to say on DailyKos in 2004 about how the Kerry campaign, very late in the game, did do something more with online users than bombard them with fundraising emails: “Thanks in large part to Tom Matzzie, who we pulled over from the AFL-CIO, we built the biggest and best organized Internet-driven field program ever. And this is what I mean by that: in the swing states, local organizers posted canvasses, phone banks and whatever using our get local tools, and we'd send out tons of email to people with the locations of their nearest volunteer opportunities. We also built, thanks to Josh Hendler (formerly of the Clark campaign), a volunteer phone banking system that allowed volunteers in non-swing states to make a big impact by calling and recruiting volunteers in swing states. We turned out -- from our email list -- from 50% to 90% of the volunteers in different cities and towns in the swing states. (You're right, we didn't do enough in non-swing states.)” As to life inside the Party, if you’re a P2P proponent, you can do whatever you can to educate and move the powers that be. Some of the most painful moments in campaigning occur when the campaign does something that you know is just plain stupid, and that any efforts you made to chart another course have come to naught. And a campaign can simply NOT do something that you know needs to be done to ward off attacks or strength the effort, and no amount of talking and memo writing can make it happen. It may be true that the party structure is so completely rotten that it is useless for anyone to work inside the party for change. But I think changing a party is simultaneously harder and more subtle, with people working largely on the outside for a while, and coming into the party orbit when the time is ripe. These frustrated conservatives did not go off and try to start a third party, recognizing the extreme difficulties that anyone, left or right, faces because of the deeply rooted structural and legal obstacles that were designed over the years precisely to cause third parties to fail. Since the early 1990s, I have seen the Internet as the backbone for tools that will make it easier for outsiders to build organizations that ultimately were capable of participating and changing the structure of all kinds of existing organizations, electoral campaigns being only one area among many where people are doing this work. These organizations can achieve successes completely outside the political sphere. What they can do, whether they’re paying attention to politics or not, is to give people a sense of agency, to let them experience what it feels like when people unite and make things happen, in whatever sphere they choose to operate. Sounds like we're in fundamental agreement, Dick. Posted by: Jon Lebkowsky at April 27, 2006 3:06 PMSo...where are we on this? What are the take-aways that we should continue to address? IMO, I think we need to address the following: 1) Development and promotion of a think tank-type organization that a) identifies successful approaches for activist organizations, b) identifies best practices that transcend changes in technology, c) identifies new trends and models as an early warning system for organizations, and d) helps short-term and small organizations navigate a matrix of media necessary to reach voters. This think tank must be on-going, become an umbrella to which all progressive organizations can go to for guidance; it must receive wider promotion as a go-to so that best-of-breed solutions are more widely available. 2) Identification and development of bleeding edge-early adopters and evangelists who are able to influence the field across all progressive organizations; these folks should be encouraged to try-out new methodologies, provide feedback to the think tank and encourage distribution of technologies at grassroots levels. Ideally, this segment would also connect developers with implementers. 3) Construct an umbrella underwhich all progressives can operate cooperatively and collaboratively -- effectively, a Bazaar of open-source organizing. In some respect, we are talking about the creation of a key and missing component to the VLWC: a marketing arm that is roughly equivalent to the VRWC's combination of Leadership Institute + CRC4PR.com + Heritage Foundation/TownHall.com. Moulitsas and Armstrong point out how effective these VRWC's organizations have been; we need to build something far better, far more effective. Crazy that we haven't already done this, given the brain power and capacity on this side of the aisle. Posted by: Rayne at April 29, 2006 12:57 PMThis thread was very useful to me in thinking through some of the problems in a campaign that I participated in -- on MoveOn 2004's Leave No Voter Behind. I've been blogging about it on MyDD and DailyKos -- and I link this thread in the following post: Post a comment
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