Planting Liberally

Having spent a fair amount of time on My.BarackObama.com and at Obama volunteer rallies over the last couple of weeks, I think it's safe to report that Obama's grassroots are reasonably well-organized. However, its grasstops could use a bit of help.

Perhaps this is an artifact of living in the Boston area, where you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a dozen Obama supporters. But from all appearances, Obama volunteer organizers in the area are slowly getting overwhelmed with the tidal wave of demand for volunteer opportunities. Recently I spoke with an organizer who told me that he had posted a small phonebanking opportunity on My.BarackObama.com at some unholy hour, like 3 am; he had a dozen volunteers by 11 am. As far as I can tell, he and a handful of other organizers are making a heroic effort to keep up with this demand, but they just don't have sufficient support from the campaign.

Now, in some ways this is just a problem we have to grin and bear - I don't expect Obama to put many resources in Massachusetts, and I'm actually a little surprised that there's even a single Boston field office. (It's dedicated to funneling volunteer power to New Hampsire, and registering students here so that they can absentee vote back home.) But there is a lot more that the campaign can do to support its volunteer leaders, particularly through My.BarackObama.com.

If you've explored the site in any depth, you've probably seen that My.BarackObama.com is a pretty good, action-oriented community site. There are some lightweight social networking features there, similar to what you'd find at DFA-Link or PartyBuilder - the ability to create groups, to blog, and to establish friendships with other users. But the real bulk of the site is dedicated to allowing you to find and attend events, raise money, and make phone calls for the campaign. This site answers a basic question - "how do I get involved?" in a very detailed way.

Where My.BarackObama.com fails, though, is in helping people who are very, very involved take the next step up, and help organize their fellow volunteers. There are a number of features volunteer leaders could make excellent use of, and which the site could provide. For example:

• Leadership roles within groups
• Private messaging between leaders
• Event planning for leadership-only events, especially organizing meetings
• A public email address for leadership - e.g., cambridge@my.barackobama.com - which all leaders can access and which volunteers can easily use to contact leadership
• An issue tracking or project-management system - similar to dotProject, or Mantis - which is integrated into the public email address and which leaders can use to process requests and keep each other appraised of various ongoing projects
• Document sharing features

In many ways what I'm suggesting is that the Obama campaign add something like the 37Signals suite of office communication tools into its system, and then open up those tools to a limited set of "super-volunteers", perhaps on an invite-only basis.

Now, I'd doubt that the campaign has the time it requires to pull something like this together in time for it to make a difference. However, this is the kind of thing that a group of volunteer web developers could pull together without some effort, using open source tools like Drupal and, when necessary, pulling in functionality from Google Documents and other sources.

I'd be curious to hear whether or not there are already efforts like this underway, or whether there are enterprising web developers looking to slap something like this together. And I'd certainly like to hear from super-volunteers - is this something you could actually use, or have you already found a solution on your own? Please use the comments to let me know.

One way or the other, I hope the lessons learned from this campaign don't evaporate after election day. The political social networking tools in the progressive universe, having evolved from DFA-Link, to PartyBuilder, and now My.BarackObama.com, have come a long way, but there are still more improvements that should be added, in order tohelp embattled volunteer organizers next time around.

Recently the Obama campaign quietly released the Neighbor to Neighbor tool, an innovative approach to field work which releases volunteers from the need to go to a campaign office in order to reach potential voters and volunteers. This tool has been kicking around Democratic circles for a while - first in the Lamont campaign's postcard tool, then in MoveOn's phonbebanking system for the 2006 general election, as well as Deval Patrick's DIY canvassing effort in the run-up to his landslide victory in Massachusetts.

The basic idea is simple. If you want to volunteer for Obama, just go to my.barackobama.com, and either sign up or register for an account. Once you're logged in, you'll see a list of "Neighbor to Neighbor" campaigns on the left hand side of your screen; click one of them, and the website will take you through the necessary next steps. At the end of the day, you get a list of people who the campaign needs to contact - either prospective volunteers who you could bring on board to increase capacity, or voters who you could convince to vote for Obama. You also get a script to use when you're making calls. When you're done with the calls, you record the results of each call (Was the person home? Will he or she volunteer / vote for Obama? etc.). The campaign has a good video explaining the process, too:

I'm very pleased to see this system come on-line. It's an excellent way to empower volunteers and to radically ramp up the campaigns potential for volunteer activity. If you're not signed up at my.barackobama.com, head on over there and register now. Then schedule some time to make Neighbor to Neighbor calls in the next week.

Despite my enthusiasm for this system, I think there are a few things the campaign could do to improve upon it, if there's time:

1. Publicize it better. I've seen almost no mention of Neighbor to Neighbor anywhere, except for a passing reference on a blog post (and I can't remember where that was.) I had some idea that this would be coming online eventually, since I remember hearing about it during Patrick's campaign, and I can't imagine that the Patrick campaign had a single tactical or strategic innovation that wasn't shared with Obama. But a Google search for "obama neighbor to neighbor" turns up a good post by Jack and Jill, an embed of the video clip I posted above - and very little from the Obama campaign itself. Despite having attended a couple of volunteer organizing meetings in my neighborhood over the last week, I've heard nothing about Neighbor to Neighbor. Why not publicize this great new system on the email list, or at a bare minimum make volunteer organizers aware of it?
2. Make it Facebook-savvy. I've installed the Obama Facebook application, I've registered on my.barackobama.com. Why did I have to do the two things separately? Much more importantly, how come the one doesn't seem to know anything about the other? Why isn't My.BarackObama.com trolling through my Facebook friend list and asking me to invite those of my friends which are also on its list to register to vote, volunteer, or otherwise get engaged? Why can't I find out which of my Facebook friends are listed as undecided, so I can chat with them about the election, or possibly clear up a gap in the campaign's records? As far as I can tell, the Facebook application is just a content delivery mechanism, which seems like a serious underestimation of Facebook's organizing capabilities.
3. Better matching capabilities. What I've heard from professional tele-fundraisers is that the best people to staff the phones on a campaign are either those who are naturally good at telemarketing, or those who are demographically similar to the target population. It seems obvious enough, but that kind of smart matching rarely happens on political campaigns. Currently, the Neighbor to Neighbor program matches me with other people in my geographic area (since I asked to speak to prospective volunteers, anyway). That's a reasonable way to approximate demographic matchup, but there are plenty of people who live near me but aren't at all like me. Potentially, a web developer in Ohio or a Jewish grandmother in Florida would be a much better person for me to talk with than a lawyer down the street. Yet the system doesn't ask me anything about my occupation, religion, racial identification, or other demographic indicators, and I can almost guarantee that on the other side, there's no cross-referencing of voter registration records to commercial databases that could reveal similar information about voters.
4. Open up the data. From what I can tell, there's no way to get this data and write a program to do something interesting with it. That's significant, as both of my last two points could be addressed by a sufficiently energetic team of developers, without the supervision of the campaign, writing data-mining or Facebook-mashing applications to make the Obama campaign's database come alive. The point is, these two ideas might be the tip of the iceberg, and there could be other, smarter applications waiting to be unleashed. This point is all the more significant because, I'd wager, data-miners and web developers are probably emphatically pro-Obama. The weight of technological innovation is squarely in Obama's camp this year, and the campaign should press that advantage to the hilt. I recognize there are important privacy concerns regarding this data, but there must be some way to properly license or protect the data while allowing outside developers to innovate on top of it.

At this point, Obama's exceptionally strong ground game could easily be the difference between victory and defeat. Neighbor to Neighbor could be a game-changing application that blows open the potential for volunteer engagement in the campaign. It's a wonderful tool, but it needs a bit of tweaking at the margins to really make it shine. I'd love to hear from others - have you used Neighbor to Neighbor? If so, what are your thoughts or critiques? Any thoughts about Obama's ground game from an in-the-trenches perspective?

Last weekend I posted about the idea of buzzing against McCain as a tactic to augment the McCain Googlebomb project start by Chris Bowers. The idea is to schedule regular "bursts" of anti-McCain memes throughout the social networking-o-sphere, in order to create negative "buzz" around John McCain. My diagnosis is that many people think they know McCain well, based on hazy impressions left by positive media coverage. The hops is that a steady stream of negative messages coming from friends and relatives will help clear up those hazy impressions, and encourage voters to deal with McCain as he is - a conservative politician who will be just as disastrous as George Bush was as president.

To make this idea a bit more concrete, what I'm suggesting is that at some regular interval (let's say twice a month, for argument's sake), progressives pick a day to "flood" the blogs and social networks with anti-McCain messages. The particular steps I'm thinking of include:

• Bloggers writing posts which spread the meme
• Social networkers digging, stumbling, Facebook-posting, and otherwise recommending those posts
• MySpace, Facebook, and other social network members posting notes, bulletins, or blog posts which reinforce the meme
• Facebook members creating and joining groups which reinforce the meme
• YouTube members posting and recommending videos which reinforce the meme; bloggers and others embedding those videos on their blogs or profiles

... and I'm open to other suggestions. There are more elaborate things we could try, too, such as designing an anti-McCain badge which displays the meme of the day in some kind of catchy way, or designing a contest website to choose the favorite anti-McCain video of the week, or something like that.

I'd also like to think up ideas for anti-McCain memes. There's plenty to go on here, but here are some initial ideas:

• McCain has a very conservative voting record
• McCain is breaking campaign finance laws
• McCain is a Bush lapdog
• McCain wants to stay in Iraq for 100 years
• McCain is a lapdog of the Religious Right
• McCain kissed up to Jerry Falwell to win the nomination
• McCain is rehashing forty-year-old ideas that don't work
• McCain is tied to lobbyists

And there are plenty more we could add to the list.  The important point is that each meme should be thoroughly documented and proven with relevant facts, articles, etc.  Those details can be dropped in the blog posts, YouTube videos, Facebook group overview text areas, etc.  That will take some effort, which means, first, that we'll need a fairly big crew to pull this off well, and second, that we'll need a bit of time between each burst - that's why I think two weeks is about right.

If you've got other ideas for buzzing against McCain, I'd love to hear them!  Fire away in the comments...