Recent blog posts
Sites that link here
Oh Eight
I was graciously invited to a roundtable discussion with Senator Edwards the other day. I spent the entire alloted hour sitting grumpily with my arms crossed.
There was a formidable amount of insight and talent in the room but I'm not sure of how much use it was to Edwards. Most of the questions Senator Edwards posed revolved around leveraging technology to reach Americans and to galvanize them to affect political change. Most of the ensuing discussion revolved around technology policy. If the take away was that in order for Senator Edwards to leverage technology and technologists skills he should endorse reasonable technology legislation than I'm not sure if much was accomplished
We had a lot of success on the Dean campaign leveraging the talents and insights of domain experts towards the goals of the campaign. We ended up getting a fair amount of bad or impractical advice but by and large we were effective in filtering out the useless and honing in on the important. Primarily this was because we grounded everything we did and invested in to our community of constituents and to the goals of the campaign. When things on the campaign got really crazy we had a firehouse of experts and their advice available - and we ignored most of it.
Our community itself was our filter and it successfully incubated thousands of ideas concurrently. The best bubbled up to the surface and the rest were never heard of, and thats why we were successful. The dean campaign wasn't magic created by whiz bang technology, it was simply the most focused and comprehensive community organizing effort we've ever seen. And the technology itself was an afterthought. DFA was by and large powered by Convio, Meetup.com and Yahoo Groups.
Comments
Re: Oh Eight
I've been thinking more and more about how to do a lot of these things, in preparation for starting up something that's designed to lead by example. Here are some semi-collected notes:
* Without an effective value proposition (e.g. that your campaign can succeed and if so will make things better) it's almost impossible to build real momentum.
* Using the internet effectively takes lots of hard work more than lots of hard technology. The biggest mistake campaigns consistantly make is in under-allocating human resources to make technology work for them.
* Campaigns that want broad appeal online need to be flexible and smart with how they communicate. A website that offers a monolithic message is missing the boat. Create conversations and language that people can take offline into their own communities.
* In contrast with a 30-second ad spot, the net gives you unlimited time with your audience. Make use of it. 95% of web traffic is hit and run, but capitalizing on the other 5% will let you push your message offline with word of mouth.
* Get people on your staff who understand the internet. Give them resources. Let them make decisions.
BTW: have you seen what Kinky Friedman is doing?
Re: Oh Eight
That picture had me laughing out loud. That's really sad that so many people there chose to waste the Senator's time with their agenda, instead of giving him insight into that important subject. What relevence did technology policy have to the discussion?
If the question is, "how can politicians use technology to create real, and despretly needed political change?" It would seem outright offtopic to reply: "Senator, we legislation to improve America's broadband infastructure."
Maybe they just always wanted to be lobbyists, and they couldn't resist the chance? ::shakes head::
On a sidenote, this further confirms my suspicion that most of the "usual suspect" experts have their heads up their... er, never mind, its sunday. I'll be polite.
Re: Oh Eight
Most of the people in that room had important practical advice. It was a shame not much came of it ;(