The layout of DC, where I now live, is also telling. The quadrants – NW, NE, SE, and SW – are split at the Capitol, considered the seat of power at the time of the District’s establishment. Yet the capital’s diamond-shaped boundaries center not there but on the White House — what most Americans would today consider the locus of U.S. power. No tourist, domestic or foreign, would fail to know the name of the President (the myriad T-shirts bearing his likeness ensure it), but without Kennedy, I suspect most visitors would be hard-pressed to name a single Congressman or Senator, even their own.

I’ve written before about why Congress needs a Geek Corps, and I continue to hope that the advent of a more decentralized social media will boost the relative power of our legislature vis-a-vis the Presidency, which had enjoyed peculiar primacy due in part to the dominance of broadcast media. President Obama himself seems to recognize the need to restore Congressional power with his deference to the legislature in establishing health care policy — maddening as that might seem to his backers.

1. Patch vulnerabilities. Whether or not you believe legalizing marijuana is a top-echelon issue facing the country, most of the top-rated MJ questions had little or passing relevance to the categories they dominated. The last category of question listed, “Budget,” became a honeypot for swarms of legalization advocates (the first seven of the top ten questions were on that topic), with only the addition of the word “tax” differentiating it from similar questions voted up in the “health care” and “green jobs” categories. I’m inclined to believe this was an authentic grassroots movement, but it could just as easily be engineered as a bot or mechanical turk astroturf campaign. What’s particularly pernicious about using crowd-sourced moderation is that the campaign wins either way: at a minimum, millions of Americans will be forced to read their submissions, even if only to vote them down.

2. Nuance the moderation: I voted on some 40+ questions and quickly began to realize that a straight up/down/abuse vote wasn’t capturing my opinion. For one thing, it became clear that if I wanted my interests to rise, I should vote against everything else (much like the way voters game multi-choice elections with bullet voting). It’s important for the system designers to realize that they are developing a game — a set of rules that determines winners and losers. For another, I found I had more specific things to say about each one: that a question was off-topic, or didn’t really ask a question, or was too generic, etc. In fact, I guess what I really wanted was:

3. Allow interaction: If the White House wants real civic engagement, it shouldn’t be built as spokes on a single hub (citizen -> President). The beauty of the Internet, like democracy, is that it’s many-to-many. I recognize that allowing citizens to talk to each other opens huge and difficult problems that make the deluge of posts demanding to see the President’s birth certificate seem trivial by comparison. Perhaps it’s up to civil society to pick up where Open for Questions leaves off — given enough lead time, citizen associations can build their own events off the town hall to host more robust discussions that can’t happen in the Presidential site. Still, this experiment is one of the closest things to a true public commons on the Web we’ve seen so far, and it’d be a shame if the only way to run it were a state monopoly that shunts citizen discussion off to private spaces.

4. More personality: One of the strengths of the town hall format is connecting abstract public policy to the lives of real, visible people. The format of Open for Questions (very limited space, no nuanced voting), however, privileged generic questions that went straight to the point and didn’t give a strong sense of who the person is and what their circumstances are. I felt a very strong difference in affect between Obama’s interaction with online questions (which was practically a press conference) to the video and especially live, in-person questions (which felt much warmer and more personal).

5. Or focus on the Internet’s strengths. Scratch that last suggestion. Maybe nothing will ever beat the face-to-face conversation for warmth and authenticity. Why not focus the online town hall on the very kinds of questions that town halls are terrible at: those best answered nonverbally (whether numbers, illustrations, or charts) or which require the President to draw on his advisors and not just the talking points he’s memorized. (We want the President to manage a team, not to be a one-man savant, after all). Stretch the new media team’s capabilities and see if they can create interactive charts, videos, or even games to frame or illustrate the President and his advisor’s responses.

Finally, let us acknowledge what has just happened: President Obama and his team have engaged over 93,000 people in an online town hall conversation. I hope this is just the first step towards a more robust system of citizen engagement.

The answer, obviously, is cyberspace. As our first Web-savvy President, Barack Obama should put his Presidential Library online. If his Transparency and Open Government Initiative succeeds, most of the Library will already be built by the end of his term. Then it’s a matter of working with his brilliant Web team to design, curate, and future-proof the space.

Then instead of raising money for one library, put the funds into the public library system nationwide, so all 50 states benefit. That would be a legacy all Americans can be proud of.

Non-quotability is often fatal to those who survive on media exposure, and in the early days of 2007 it seemed Obama’s campaign would drown in his words. Yet thanks to a deep and wide funding base, he survived long enough to turn that liability into a core asset. The Obama campaign is credited with doing an end-run around the media, going straight to the people through email and Youtube, but the candidate’s rhetoric aided that strategy. Summarizing his speeches is like paraphrasing a poem, which drives the public to seek out the original — the full text of Obama’s inaugural speech currently sits in the NY Times’ top 10 most emailed, and of course his so-called “race speech” famously convinced millions of Americans to sit down for a 40+ minute talk about one of America’s most difficult issues. By using complex constructions that resist distillation, Obama minimizes out-of-context critics, although he cannot mute them (witness the “bitter” comment).

Obama reached the pinnacle of oratory in his New Hampshire concession, which turned narrow defeat into triumphant victory. But brilliant as it was, the speech would have languished in the circles of hard-core Obama supporters were it not for Will.i.am and Jessie Dylan’s recognition that its core, can-do optimism needed a fuller articulation than the mainstream media could provide. So they set the speech to song, and suddenly many millions more were willing to stretch their attention from a 10-second soundbite to a 4:30 journey.

It was a stroke of brilliance for Will.i.am, and maybe of luck for Obama. Never since the rise of mass media has a campaign succeeded on assuming not only the basic intelligence of voters, but also their willingness to hear out a complex argument. The technology to bypass top-down media is one cornerstone of Obama’s success as a communicator. His nonreductive rhetoric is another. And if he continues to convince Americans to dig deeper into complex issues and not settle for the pat answer, we are already on our way to the change we need to take back our country.

I’m here at the Internet & Politics conference at Harvard University, co-hosted by the
Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Institute of Politics. The purpose of
this event is to gather leading practitioners and scholars to reflect on lessons
learned from the recent Presidential election and preliminary thoughts on moving
forward from here.

The majority of the conference will be held by Chatham House rules — no attribution.
But the keynotes are open, and here’s the first one, featuring Prof. Marshall Ganz
(Harvard Kennedy School) and Jeremy Bird (Obama for America).

Marshall is giving a backgrounder on organizing as a general matter. He has significant
resources available on this topic elsewhere, but here is the quick summary:

What’s needed for purposeful collective action?

1. Leadership: Achieving shared purpose in the face of uncertainty.

2. Community: A collective entity capable of exercising agency.

3. Power: A community able to use its resources to achieve its purposes.

Enablers:

1. Shared values (broader than interests — they are the sources of motivation)

2. Peer commitments

3. Shared structure

4. Shared strategy

5. Shared action

6. Action that is clear, specific, intentional, and can be learned from

To what extent can new technologies support these activities? (Or detract from?)

The Obama campaign emphasized carpenters, not tools.

Now for Jeremy’s response:

The “Jazz” and “Classical” metaphor from 2004 describes the connection well. Start with
the startegy and look at technology as a resource. Four stories that illustrate the
interdependence between technology and strategy.

1. April 11, 2007 — Florence, South Carolina. Not necessarily the most tech-savvy
state. In putting together tickets, were planning to capture emails, but then decided
to also capture cell phones. In December with Oprah, asked 30,000 to text the campaign
and also capture their numbers. Texting underappreciated — were able to text just the
team leaders. Or have volunteers send back pictures to keep other teams motivated. South Carolina house meeting program. Sam Graham-Feldson came to shoot video.
Despite the written program, no one knew what they were doing. What the video did was
tell the story: both to the rest of the campaign and to the community. (at 7:31, all the volunteers knew we’d won via the text message program).

3. Maryland. Teams who organized themselves using the MyBO tools. With two weeks left when Jeremy arrived to GOTV. This was a very different environment with much tighter connectedness. Through the ‘Net, bring together the volunteers into trainings, sufficient to hit every voter 3 times before the primary.

4. Pennsylvania. 8 weeks to go while TX and OH is going on. Took the online tool, PATeams tool, that allowed volunteers to log in and target neighbors. It was the “classical” and the “jazz” coming together. It enabled the volunteers to set and hit goals without setting up an office, to connect folks together and not just “go online and make calls” — they felt they were part of a community. Eventually led to the neighbor-to-neighbor tool.

5. Ohio (general election). We started to shoot all sorts of video. It was one of the most important things we did, because it told the story of what we were doing. Nationally, we set up VoteForChange.com that allowed people to download and turn in voter registration forms. As every individual downloaded the form, it gave organizers information about voters — but it turned out it was the most rich source of volunteers. These were young people who sought this out themselves.

These are still designed with field and new people sitting together. In 2008 we’re still figuring out if new media is a separate thing. We’re trying to figure out how to make organizing and online organizing work together.

In Maryland, a statewide group of 150 were already meeting every Saturday, all volunteers leading their own teams created through MyBO. Is it possible to use this technology for smaller campaigns? How to do it without the 2,500 paid campaign organizers that the Obama campaign had? The person who raises their hands first to be the leader may not be the best leader. One of the key questions is how to build leaders – how to define, how to select, are there tests? The hard part is that many of these are interpersonal skills; it’s not like learning geography. Marshall is trying to develop a distance course, but people will enroll as teams, not individuals. “Self-organization” is a chimera, a wish. It takes skill and practice. Buffy, in CA, was able to produce more calls per organizer than most other states using the technology to leverage. This was not the traditional leadership structure: we launched interdependent teams with shared norms, which diverged from the usual top-down individuals who burn out or have other issues. Coaching plays a critical role here. (Just because it’s face-to-face doesn’t mean it’s traditional).

Videos to ask people to sign up were very effective – saw great numbers. A good video, connected to a real narrative, and a way to capture people who say they want to do something connected to that. One of the real challenges is communication of emotion, affect, via the Internet. It’s easy to express emotion but harder to experience it, lacking the empathetic component. Video enables empathetic communication.

Counterfactually, what if Cesar Chavez had different tools – what difference do the tools vs. the carpenter make? If the Farmworkers collapsed because of a lack of accountability, then this risk is heightened without empathetic interaction. There was a time when the Farmworkers tried to market rather than organize the boycott – disastrous – perhaps the Internet would make this worse.

What to do when the wrong person becomes a team leader? Fire them. In PA, with only 8 weeks, we messed up. We spent too much time trying to figure out how to support bad leaders. Is there was more transparency because of the Internet tools – more data to measure outcomes.

 Change.gov is, with “deliberate haste,” trying to figure out how to move forward. Still going through 500,000 responses to the survey, much of it qualitative. Last week’s conference of best team leaders to figure out what worked in the campaign. This weekend another round of house parties to keep getting more feedback. All of this is to figure out what the community wants. We’re not just asking the house parties to meet but do a service project around the holidays.

Re: Marshall’s interview with TechPresident – Marshall now states he perhaps was being impatient without an understanding of “deliberate haste.” The campaign is gathering lessons learned, which is wise.

But governance is different than both campaign mobilizing and community organizing. It’s key for us to know how to set up the organization. Also, the campaign was doing a lot of learning from mistakes and successes, and this has some resemblance to gathering feedback from the citizenry. A movement hasn’t emerged within an administration before – but why can’t government get people involved in the same way that the campaign trained team leaders.

The Obama campaign had enormous resources – “Don’t expect that to be the norm.” People contributed because they wanted to know that there’d be an office in their community – they could see the results. Alinksy: “There’s organized people, and there’s organized money.” Barack figured out how to do both.

You can offer tools, but you have to get people into the tools. The context was vital.

Game designer and scholar Ian Bogost considered it a washout election cycle for political games. McCain had his “Pork Invaders” arcade gimmick, and Obama bought ads in Xbox Live (largely an indulgence). But I would argue that 2008 represents a watershed moment for video games, a moment when the medium showed that it can, indeed, change the world. My.BarackObama.com (“MyBO”) didn’t just communicate ideas. It encouraged people to go and do something.

MyBO awarded Obama supporters with points for taking real-world actions that would likely help the candidate win the primaries and the general election: making phone calls to voters, hosting gatherings, and donating money. MyBO wasn’t the first website to use game mechanics to stimulate real-world action. In 2004, ILoveBees sent thousands of players on a worldwide treasure hunt to promote the traditional console game Halo 2. In 2007, World Without Oil had participants imagine a world where oil prices become astronomical, then adjust their lifestyles in response. Over 18,000 people joined in, recording changes large and small that prefigured what people really did do in the actual oil shock of 2008. These Augmented (or Alternative) Reality Games all found ways to blend the virtual and real.

MyBO was the first serious ARG deployed by a political campaign. Sure, I’m stretching the term “augmented” a bit (unless you’re one of those who believed that all Obamabots lived in an alternate reality). And aren’t fundraising thermometers also a reality-based game where putting in $50 makes the mercury rise? I suppose – but what made MyBO revolutionary, and what puts it in the same category as World Without Oil, is that it also asked participants to engage in non-digital, non-virtual activity. You can donate money without leaving your bed or interacting with another human being. But calling voters requires an authentic human touch, even if the medium is digital (as it was for a colleague who Skyped voters on November 3 from Cairo, where she was at a conference).

Gameplay on MyBO was far from perfect. Part of the problem is that the boundary between digital and real remains only semi-permeable. For example, in January, my partner and I drove down to South Carolina and spent a week in the trenches, eventually helping to run a bellwether staging location. For this – and for our subsequent work in MA, VT, and PA, we scored a big fat zero, because there was no way to let MyBO know what were doing. Meanwhile, others were apparently gaming the system by hosting bogus events or flipping through phone numbers without actually calling anyone, perhaps hoping to win various awards. (The site did limit the number of numbers it would give you within a specific period of time to limit this kind of abuse – or, I suppose, wholesale data-mining).

A typical quest (note the in-game manual):

Perhaps the biggest problem of MyBO as a game was its failure to scale. It was disheartening to log in and see that you were in 266,442nd place. True, the points and ranking were meaningless (except for the ten lucky phonebankers who got to meet Sen. Obama), as they are in any game, and I suppose you could argue that the fact that there were 266,441 other people doing more work than you also said something important about the campaign. But the system would have been far more motivating if your cohort group was more local: all Obama supporters in your state, city, or your MyBO groups. After all, the strength of the grassroots resides in its person-to-person connections.

The scoring system never did go local, but in early August 2008 the developers swapped out points in exchange for an Activity Tracker. Instead of winning absolute points, supporters “leveled up” the ranks from 1 to 10 (10 being highest). Groups as well as individuals also scored points, which helped people find others who were actually doing real work. Previously, it was hard to get a sense of how you compared to other volunteers: 266,442 sounds pretty low on the totem pole, but not if there are over a million registered users!

Some were upset by the change, which demonstrated that the points really did motivate some. Wrote one of the top 500: “GIVE ME MY POINTS BACK!!!! THEY DO NOT BELONG TO YOU!!!!!” – words not unlike an MMO player whose epic weapon has been nerfed. But for those lower on the scale – which would include all n00bs, the lifeblood of any campaign or MMO – the switch removed the sense of futility that pervaded the game before. (Points also decayed over time, which also gave n00bs a fighting chance. Consider it an estate tax for scores).

For most supporters, the points likely functioned as a curiosity. Still, the point system helped signal what kinds of activities really mattered, and it probably had something to do with the over 200,000 events hosted and 27,000 groups created on MyBO – an impressive number even after you discount some set of bogus ones put on to game the system. And then there’s two other scores, 203 and 8,481,030, the margin of victory for Obama in the electoral college and the popular vote, respectively.

A resounding victory for President-Elect Obama. And, I suspect, for the future of reality games in political and civic campaigns. (Full disclosure: including one I’m now working on a civic engagement game for Fair Trade).

In this series of essays I’ll look at how Obama’s new CTO might transform American democracy in three areas: civic engagement, administrative transparency, and legislative advocacy.

(Cross-posted at techPresident)

I. Civic Engagement: less than Peace Corps, More than taxes

Barack Obama promises to re-ignite American civic life; he repeatedly proclaimed that the election wasn’t about him but rather “you.” His Plan for Voluntary Citizen Service describes “a craigslist for service,” with “user ratings and social network features.” Frankly, this idea is rather dull and unimaginative, besides being redundant of Idealist.org. (Also, most nonprofits need commitments, not one-shot volunteers; Match.com offers a better template than craigslist). But the Plan does point out the gap in civic participation options between merely paying taxes and making long-term bodily commitments to the military or the Peace Corps.

Rather than promote volunteer “crowdsourcing,” I hope the Administration will push what it did so well in the campaign: build good infrastructure, provide deep training, and support team-/ community-building. In short, Obama should invest less in volunteers and more in the infrastructure of volunteerism – including powerful technology tools.

Open myBo to social entrepreneurs

A technology infrastructure to support volunteerism should, as Clay Shirky puts it, promote “organizing without organizations” – filling the innumerable niches now empty across our communities’ landscape of needs by investing in would-be social entrepreneurs. My.BarackObama.com (”myBo”) allowed any Obama supporter to become an instant leader by hosting an event. More importantly, it then did automatically what a good organizer would do: send out reminder emails the day before the event to make sure volunteers actually show up. (Most organizers I know think phone calls are better, but the basic idea is there). In other words, myBo was, in a rudimentary way, scaffolding habits of highly effective organizers. A lot more can be built: imagine the iPhone app’s “Call a Friend in a Swing State” function reconfigured for local activism.

MyBo, or some Open Source knockoff, should be opened up to anyone who wants to round up friends and neighbors to make a difference, as well as to anyone who wants to tinker with new features. No software can, of course, convey the “spirit” of grassroots organizing. But well-designed systems can scaffold the basic activities of a competent organizer, enough to give such efforts a fighting chance, especially if coupled with training or mentorship.

New media for all

Indeed, the Administration can do even more to support the work of would-be community entrepreneurs. In the last months of the campaign, Obama’s new media team released a bevy of micro-targeted videos that urged, for example, supporters to volunteer in Ohio and taught the basics of how to do a phonebank (see, more generally, the Organizing Resource Center). I don’t know how often local organizers used these videos (some of the more lackadaisical offices I visited really should have), but a bank of similar resources could really help jump-start local efforts.

(While I’m daydreaming here, imagine a corps of new-media geeks ready to craft similarly spectacular videos to promote the local AIDS action day or hunger walk).

The fierce urgency of leveling up

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a civic engagement infrastructure needs to convey “the fierce urgency of now.” Without the galvanizing energy of a final E-Day showdown, local grassroots efforts need other motivating devices. MyBo had experimented with offering points for taking on different activities; it scaled poorly and was eventually replaced with an activity level system. A game-like interface, scaled down to the local level, could use a scoring rubric to help convey to citizens which activities were most urgently needed, especially if Obama himself is pushing and motivating service at the macro level.

A hand up, not hands-on

None of this infrastructure need come directly from the Administration, of course. Many of these ideas are already floating around, from Idealist.org to Facebook’s Causes app. And, as Jonathan Klingler points out on The Next Right, the federal government is probably not the best place to house innovative civic experimentation. But if the Administration doesn’t directly underwrite civic activities, it can still invest in new infrastructures for civic engagement. Just as MyBo unleashed local innovation for a political campaign, so too can new software systems launch a new era of grassroots activism all across America.

The morning of November 4, 2008 found me — like thousands of others all across the nation — rushing from door to door the final phase of the get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort. In those pre-dawn hours in rural New Hampshire, the fate of the election came down to the mundane work of footsoldiers armed with low-tech (yet high-gloss) door hangers and paper walksheets.

But only this literal last mile was low-tech. Everything leading up to this moment was built on a solid, database-driven foundation. And so it’s easy to imagine how the mechanics of campaigning might evolve over the next four years:

1. Cloud campaigning: The weakest chain in the GOTV effort lay between ID’ing supporters and processing that information before the next push. Driving completed walksheets 30 miles to HQ, entering the numbers accurately, and printing it all out again in time for the next day’s walk proved too Herculean for even Obama’s vaunted team. On E-Day, my canvassing list included names I’d identified a few days earlier as non-supporters (though it’s also possible that the campaign used some other logic, like demographics, to put them back on the walk list). Web-enabled smartphones like the iPhone can change all of this. Just as MyBO enabled supporters to call voters from the comfort of home, so too will the walklist of the future stream straight to your phone as you go door to door, with results beaming directly back into the central database. In four years, cell phone data services might be robust enough to do this in rural Iowa as well as downtown Philly.
2. Canvassing, the RTS: Back in January, I hung out with Voter File Manager for the SC primaries Kyle Cox and watched the data sausage get made. One of our side projects was setting up GIS maps for the E-Day boiler room. The maps were, I’m told, a success — one of our field organizer friends later marveled at their ability to see numbers pop as a result of redeploying canvassing teams from over-performing to under-performing precincts. For the general election, Project Houdini turned the voting data live (it “disappeared” the already-voted off canvassing lists). For now, the Houdini system relies on human poll watchers to telegraph names to HQ. (Back in January, at the staging location we ran we did this same work by hand, crossing names off canvassing lists after we’d gotten word that they’d voted). In four years, I’m expecting campaign boiler rooms to also feature live dots showing exactly where all the “troops” are, too, just by tracking the location of the phones in their pockets. It will be every strategy gamer’s dream come true.
3. Advanced data mining: Once data can be captured live, incredibly rich data mining becomes possible. That an undecided voter worries most about health insurance is incredibly valuable for future persuasion efforts. So, too, is the fact that she is home at 3pm on a Wednesday — something that can be gleaned from live data updates. (Surely this same data is already being harvested out of MyBO calls). This DKos diarist’s joke about how much the Obama campaign knew about voters may not one day be that far from reality.

Of course, with any change comes risk, and technology for technology’s sake is a dangerous temptation. Project Houdini was a huge advance over the paper-based system we used during the primary, but it requires a huge amount of manpower that may not be available to every campaign (indeed, it wasn’t deployed across the map in the Obama campaign on Tuesday, either). Here are a few concerns that data jocks should watch out for moving forward:

1. Data integrity: Apparently both the McCain and Obama campaigns’ databases were compromised, perhaps by foreign agents. And rumor had it that the competing campaigns in the primary muddied competitors’ supporter data, leading to total segregation of the database by candidate. But it doesn’t take ill intent to screw up data, just sloppiness.
2. Naive rules: Data mining requires not just good data, but smart rules to make sense of the numbers. What happened to Wall Street quants around exotic derivatives can easily happen to campaigns, too: bad assumptions can add up to bad performance. Maybe it makes sense to target older, presumably retired, voters mid-day and the younger ones very early or in the late afternoon. But what if, in one particular area, the older folks are still employed, or the younger ones work from home? Sometimes, the best methods might be the dumber ones.
3. Training the soldiers: Garbage in, garbage out still applies. All the data in the world don’t change the fact that canvassers are out in the neighborhood to make human contact and to persuade voters over to their side. Canvassers need to learn the skills needed to do that well. And after persuading a voter, they also need to know how to code them — a “2 – Lean” for one canvasser might look like a “3 – Undecided” to another. Data are only useful when they’re reliable, and that depends on a fairly precise measuring instrument — well-trained volunteers.

Of course, I’m talking here just about campaign technology, not governance. While it’s possible to imagine deploying some variant of this kind of effort to put pressure on Congress to pass health care legislation, most of the day-to-day of democracy works quite differently, and for all of the Obama campaign’s reputation for bottom-up innovation, most of it happened around tactical operations, not strategy, and certainly not policy-making. I’ll have more speculation on that aspect of the future of civic technology later…

(Cross-posted at techPresident).

For as long as I’ve been alive, the common wisdom has purported certain barriers to be insurmountable.

• that America would not elect an African American president
• that the specter of socialism will always truncate consideration of shared solutions to shared challenges
• that an honest politician is either an oxymoron or a dupe

Several days on the other side of Election 2008, these barriers have been crossed. What I thought was impossible is now very real. In place of the common wisdom, I am trying on some brand new beliefs:

• With an African American president, we might, just might, be able to have that much-needed conversation about race in America.
• We can engage in creative problem-solving about the shared challenges we face – from covering the uninsured to creating a top-notch public education system for all – with all options on the table.
• We can tell the truth, practice the Golden Rule, love our enemies, and (sometimes) win

If Randy Pausch is right and the barriers are there to show how much we want our dreams, then America has proved itself to want certain things much more than I thought. But, more deeply, if this election teaches me anything, it is that with God, all things are possible.

I don’t believe God favored a particular candidate on Tuesday. But I do believe that God enabled us to cross some debilitating barriers so that we could more fully pursue God’s compassion and justice in this time. And for that, I am grateful and full of hope.

- Rachel Hope Anderson

(Terrier courtesy of tanakawho, cc2007)