Earlier this week, Chris Bowers fired up the 2008 Use It or Lose It campaign. For those who are new to the campaign, the idea is simple but powerful: get Democratic Representatives and Senators who are in non-competitive races to pay all of their dues (which can be quite substantial) to the DCCC and DSCC, respectively. These kinds of transfers are a legal, quick way to raise a lot of cash for the committees, and thereby to make a lot of new races competitive. Chris estimates that we can raise as much as $6.5 million this way, and the campaign was very effective in 2006.
I think this is a brilliant idea, but I'm intrigued by the crowdsourcing (that is, distributed data collection) angle. Distilled to the basics, this is a fairly straightforward crowdsourcing campaign, a couple of times over: get a group of volunteers to collect data about which Democratic Congresspeople are safe this year and how much money they have; then get volunteers to call those Congresspeople and ask them to pay their dues. The key to success of the campaign is putting together a database which volunteers can use collaboratively to post updates and track progress in a systematic way. Chris is using Google Spreadsheets for this purpose; that's a great tool and it's a great way to get the job done in a pinch.
However, it occurs to me that this kind of crowdsourcing task will only become more important in the future, and I think there's a way to streamline these kinds of campaigns and to make them even more powerful and robust. Below, I propose the creation of a general-purpose crowdsourcing platform which can be used to fire up a distributed progressive pressure campaign on a variety of public institutions - Congress, the media, state legislatures. The platform would make the lives of crowdsourcing organizers a little easier; it would enable our crowdsourcing campaigns to be more broadly distributed; and it would enable those campaigns to carry second-order effects which could help the progressive movement accrue and organize power over the long run.
There are a variety of campaigns where we could use improved crowdsourcing capabilities. To begin with, there are cases where we want to whip a Congressional vote or subcommittee vote on a key bill, like FISA or the bankruptcy bill. Along similar lines, there are cases where state-level blogs will want to whip their state legislature on a high-profile vote. These will likely be the most common uses, but there will also be cases where we want to pressure media outlets to take some step - like pressuring Ron Fournier to recuse himself from stories about the 2008 campaign, asking newspapers to carry more progressive syndicated columnists, or asking TV stations not to air Republican propaganda. There's also potential for other kinds of commercial campaigns, like asking pharmacy chains to require pharmacists to fill emergency contraception (or fighting the next War on Christmas, I guess). I imagine unions might make good use of such a platform for nationwide organizing drives, as well.
A typical crowdsourcing campaign is fairly simple, if labor-intensive; it usually requires the following steps (more or less):
- "Casing" a campaign, i.e. doing some high-level investigation to ensure that there is potential for massive distributed pressure to be successful
- Gathering data about who to contact, what their contact information is, and what specific "asks" to make of them
- Narrowing the list of all possible contacts into a universe of "probably-persuadable"s
- Making contacts and collecting responses from public officials / media outlets
- Reviewing data and checking the progress of the campaign
A crowdsourcing platform would allow progressive activists to fire up a crowdsourcing campaign, and would minimize the work necessary in each of these steps. Here are a few of the features I think would be necessary:
- A ready-made database with contact information for all Congressional offices, state legislative offices, and media outlets in the country, searchable by zip code or by state;
- The ability to collect and append campaign-specific data to this database, and to narrow the list of officials or media outlets into to target a "persuadable" universe;
- A general-purpose form and phone-script creation tool, capable of creating a form similar to the one which Obama's Neighbor-to-Neighbor program displays to volunteer phonebankers
- An easy-to-use data input tool, whereby volunteers could easily find their public official or media outlet, get the script needed to make the call, and enter the results of that call
- Reporting features, capable of quickly creating lists of public officials/media outlets who have been persuaded or are persuadable, and a link to a contact form for that public official; these lists should be embeddable, so that blogs participating in the campaign can display campaign updates easily
- A blogging / anecdotal reporting feature, capable of capturing success stories and campaign updates; and similarly, a microblogging feature; the feeds from these blogs should be available for easy aggregation into existing blogs
- "Evangelizing" features, including widgets, buttons and social networking "sharing" tools which campaign evangelists can use to distribute the campaign on blogs, Facebook profiles, etc.
The tools necessary to develop a crowdsourcing platform like this are not out of reach. Using an extensible content management system like Drupal, it would be fairly easy to throw together a prototype within a week or two. The database of contact information should be relatively easy to obtain, if a bit irritating to maintain.
Down the line, it's easy to imagine a system like this being used to build power for the progressive movement, beyond the first-order impacts of a succesful campaign. For example, if the system tracked the number of volunteers recruited by each campaign evangelist, then individual activists and organizations could wield the system's tracking reports as proof of their influence, in order to create further pressure in the future. Additionally, the crowdsourcing platform could be integrated with ActBlue, allowing campaign volunteers to "reward good behavior", and, in tiny steps, to build a campaign war chest for progressive incumbents in off-years. This kind of war chest development could also help good progressives at the local level rise to state or federal level on the strength of their good behavior.
Eventually, I imagine that a crowdsourcing platform would be the logical counterpart to the online electoral machine that progressives have built over recent years. If we are going to have online voter registration tools, phonebanking tools, and general-purpose political social networking tools, then we should follow up on our election-year campaign activism with off-year lobbying activism.
I'd like to hear what your thoughts or on such a platform - particularly from folks who have worked on crowdsourcing campaigns in the past, and have some perspective on the kinds of features which would be useful to have in a platform like this. I'd also certainly love to hear from technologists interested in putting together some kind of pilot, as I think this project would be a fun task for a BarCamp or developer jam session. Finally, what are your thoughts on the larger role of crowdsourcing, or other lobbying tools, in the ecosystem of progressive online tools? What else could we use, and what more could we do to be more effective? Fire away below!
Disclosure: My company worked on a small design project for Chris and OpenLeft last year.
