Since the dawn of mass media, the most obvious activity of political campaigns -- especially presidential ones -- has been image-making. You paint a flattering portrait of your candidate and an unflattering one of his or her opponent. In this campaign "cycle" (as the professionals call it), the best-painted candidate by far has been Barack Obama. The lead story in the August 11, 2008 issue of Advertising Age (the day I am writing this) is "What Obama Can Teach You About Millenial Marketing". It begins,
Baby boomers and Gen Xers declared mass marketing dead long ago. We live in a world of fragmented media surrounded by cynical consumers who can spot and block an ad message from a mile away. But what Gen Xers and boomers may not realize is that the unabashed embrace of select brands by millennials, from technology to beverages to fashion, has made this decade a true golden era of marketing for those who know what they're doing. And when it comes to marketing, the Barack Obama campaign knows what it's doing. Mr. Obama's brand management, unprecedented in presidential politics, shows pitch-perfect understanding of the keys to appealing to the youngest voters.
It adds, "His success, it seems, is a result of both product and the branding behind it. The qualities he projects -- a cool, smooth aura, the communal values of hope and unity, his teeming crowds and his campaign's seamless graphics -- are the essence of appealing to millennials", which are "a more communal, pro-social generation than their predecessors". These young folks are "more civically connected", it says, and "find strength in numbers". It also credits the campaign's "mastery of cutting-edge social media, through the my.barackobama.com site (known internally as 'MyBO')", which is "optimized for millennial appeal".
It says the MyBO site "shows that Mr. Obama's campaign has made the leap from CRM (customer relationship management) to CMR (customer-managed relationship) better than many commercial marketers, according to Ms. Mooney (that's Helen Mooney, who follows millenial tracks at Fleishman-Hilliard's Next Great Thing blog), "Young people want to be in control of their relationship with a brand. They want to customize and personalize," as they can on iTunes, Mobile Me and YouLocate. The campaign's site allows this with its use of tagging, discussion boards, photo uploads and other interactive elements.
Reading this I am reminded of Isaac Asimov's distinction (in Second Foundation) between "the answer that satisfied" and "the answer that was true". Because there's a story behind MyBO and the social aspects of the Obama campaign, and it's not about branding, demographics,or even politics. It's about using technology to make democracy work.
That story begins in 2001, when a political operator named Joe Trippi went to work as an advisor to Progeny, the company headed by Ian Murdock, whose first name is the second half of Debian. Joe later became famous as the campaign manager for Howard Dean, during Dean's breakthrough presidential campaign in 2003. While Joe gets credit for using "social software" long before that became a buzzphrase, and for engaging a "netroots" of activist geeks, his own accounts give credit back to Linux developers and the open source movement.
Here's a snippet from Larry Lessig's interview with Joe in the midst of that campaign:
Trippi: I used to work for a little while for Progeny Linux Systems. I always wondered how could you take that same collaboration that occurs in Linux and open source and apply it here. What would happen if there were a way to do that and engage everybody in a presidential campaign?
Lessig: So is this an open-source presidential campaign?
Trippi: Yes. That moment when that was all going on made me think, “That’s sort of what we’re building here.” I guess it’s about as open as you can do it in modern-day politics.
In a Slashdot comment around that same time, Joe said his experience with Linux and Progeny "gave me a lot of insight as to what open source politics would be like and how the same principles could be applied. Really a lot of the same forces are at work if you think about it. Entrenched and flawed system, closed to everyone except the few that aim to keep control etc vs open dialogue, open collaboration, and a better solution emerging from the common actions of many. The country was not founded on the principle of self interest — it was founded on the principle of the common good. And its fascinating to me how on every front its the commons we need to build again."
In his own blog, Ian Murdock said of Joe, "Within the first hour of talking with him, Joe understood the open source movement as well as I did and was able to show me things I hadn't been able to see even after eight years."
The first time I met Joe was in a video IM session. Joe's face was on the screen of my laptop in California, while my face was on Britt Blaser's laptop, which he carried around the halls and meeting rooms of the Dean Campaign headquarters in Burlington, Vermont -- as if he were a waiter with a talking snack tray. The session was actually productive, and the tour worked so well that I was already familiar with the layout of the place when I arrived in the dead of Winter and the height of the campaign's energy: mid-January, 2004, on the eve of the Iowa Caucuses.
Several memories of that visit stand out for me. One is of Nicco Mele, minding racks of servers and other LAMP-based electronics, and grumbling about what a mess it was dealing with the various state and local party operators, each with their own patched-together tech, which usually qualified more as problems than "solutions". Voter contact databases were the biggest problem, he said. Some were in spreadsheets, others in old and proprietary databases, others on paper or semi-legible faxes of faxes of faxes. Another is of Zack Rosen, sitting on a box in the corner of a cubicle with three or four other geeks, hacking something in Drupal. Zack got involved through HackersForDean, which he did with Josh Koenig. Another is of Dave Winer, working on what he called "a really interesting RSS project to roll out in time for the Iowa caucus results on Monday night." Posting that same day (January 17), Dave added, "I am neutral on the Democratic presidential candidates. I may have opinions, but in my technical work, they're simply not relevant. I believe in politically agnostic tools."
Looking back, I think what I saw was the equivalent for politics of the Tech Model Railroad Club or the Home Brew Computer Club. It was where a new and highly practical tech movement started. Britt Blaser calls it "the first campaign that functioned more like a Web service than a marketing blitz".
The following Monday was the beginning of the end for the Dean Campaign, but perhaps also the end of the beginning for politically agnostic tools. That night Dean, who had been considered the frontrunner, came in third behind John Kerry and John Edwards. Worse, he uttered what became known as "the scream", and which later proved to be an unfortunate effect of microphone placement and editing by network television producers. With Dean out, Kerry and Edwards went on to head the democratic ticket, then lost to George W. Bush in November. Meanwhile, the "Dean Diaspora" began the work of equipping democracy for work in the Networked Age.
One of those techies was Jascha Franklin-Hodge. He told me, "I lived in Boston and I had moved up to Vermont to work on the campaign. When you work on a presidential campaign it eats up your life. you work seventeen hours a day, seven days a week. So, after I got back to Boston I started reconnecting with some of my friends that I had been ignoring for six months. And the thing I kept hearing from people was, 'Oh you worked for Howard Dean. That's so cool. I went to a meet-up and a I started volunteering in my local democratic party. I went up to neighbors and knocked on doors'. These were people for whom the experience of being involved wasn't just about supporting a candidate. it was also about finding their own political voice, finding their own civic talent. That was what re-launched this business. It's so much of what we've been about, and it's so rewarding to see unfolding again four years later. It's just this tremendous sense of communal empowerment of people who may not have been involved in the political process. People for whom, for whatever reason, didn't think they had a voice, are now using tech to be a real and active participant in the process."For me on a personal level what really struck me when I got back from dean, i
The business Jascha's talking about is Blue State Digital, a company he co-founded in 2004 with Clay A. Johnson, Joe Rospars, and Ben Self. In a story for its June 24 issue, Business Week called Blue State Digital "Obama's secret political weapon". Some numbers at the time: $200 million raised online, 2 million phone calls, 850,000 users, 50,000 campaign events. By the time you read this, those numbers will be way low.
My own acquaintance with what they call "BSD" and the Obama campaign came on June 3, in an email from Jim Thompson:
The Obama campaign is looking for people who do big LAMP.<http://my.barackobama.com/page/s/techinterest?foo>(I love the 'foo' reference.)Seems like a great LJ / LW story.McCain's campaign runs Windows:widget:~ jim$ telnet <http://www.johnmccain.com>www.johnmccain.com 80 Trying 64.203.107.147... Connected to <http://www.johnmccain.com>www.johnmccain.com. Escape character is '^]'. HEAD /index.html HTTP/1.0HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found Content-Length: 1635 Content-Type: text/html Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 X-Powered-By: <http://ASP.NET>ASP.NET Date: Tue, 03 Jun 2008 22:58:07 GMT Connection: closeConnection closed by foreign host.
The ad recruited "exceptionally talented web developers who want to play a key role in a historic political campaign and help elect Barack Obama as the next President of the United States." Specifically recruits would "Introduce cutting-edge social networking and online organizing to the democratic process by empowering everyday people to participate on my.BarackObama". For this they required "A deep understanding of LAMP development processes and best practices", "Experience scaling large LAMP application", "Experience building complex applications using PHP and MySQL" with "deep knowledge of MySQL performance and query optimization" and "Advanced or expert CSS, Javascript, and AJAX skills". * At least 5 years of professional web development experience
*
They hardly needed to advertise. As Jascha put it to me, "The work that we do does put us at a huge advantage when shopping for talent. What we do is bigger for a lot of developers than making software for a bank. Going back to my work for Software Tool & Die in high school, I've realized that you need a company culture where people want to work. We want geeks to get up and be happy in the morning, and think 'I'm building something today that millions of people tomorrow are going to use to help change the world'."
My first encounter with the campaign itself was at one of those thousands of events. I was invited by an email from a colleague at Harvard's Berkman Center, near which we've been living for the last year while I've worked on a fellowship. The email's subject was "WHAT SHOULD OBAMA'S PLATFORM BE ON THE INTERNET & DEMOCRACY -- JOIN THE DISCUSSION JULY 28, 7PM". The meeting was at Gallery XIV on Thayer Street in Boston's South End. We got lost for awhile looking for it (street signage is kind of optional in Boston), but realized we had arrived when we spotted a long mural of posters bearing the mashed visages of Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama. Turns out the discussion was also a Gallery XIV celebration of that very image: a painting called "Abraham Obama", by Ron English.We were trying to find Thayer Street, in Boston's South End. Specifically, we were looking for a place called
The surreal quality of the setting was matched by the discussion itself, which was compromised by three followers of Lyndon LaRouche, all determined to route conversation toward their own emphatic and unbending views -- mostly on issues far afield of "internet and democracy". From what I gathered, LaRouche himself hates the Net, and so did these guys. But they did provide an interesting contrast between the relatively open stances of the Obama campaign and the doctrinal absolutism of those who download their opinions from what you might call a closed source.
There was a clipboard and a sign-up sheet, and a polite request to become more involved; but nothing high-pressure or cookie-cutter in the way the meeting was run. Was it typical? Hard to say. But you can pick up a lot of clues just by comparing the Obama and McCain websites and how you can interact with them.
I signed up awhile back on both sites. While McCain's site offers plenty of ways to get involved, it's not as engaging as Obama's. And while I hate anybody (or any organization) using first person pronouns on my behalf, it's hard to argue with the success of my.BarackObama.com.
When I go to my MyBO web page and look for events within 25 miles of my zipcode near Cambridge, 64 come up. (Again, it's August 11 as I'm writing this.) They run a wide gamut: community organizing meetups, musical performances, speech-watching parties, gatherings at farmers markets and carnivals, fundraisers with notables, church picnics and barbeques, stagings for voter registration walks, carpool caravans, youth organization rallies, school alumni coffees... the list goes on and on. All within the next month. Each event is marked by a little symbol on a Google map. Above both the list and the map are red, orange and green buttons: a KML one to open the same map and data in Google Earth, an XML one to make the event search into an RSS feed, and an ICAL one to create calendar files. There are two links each on the page to Find an Event, Plan an Event and Manage Your Events.
To the right of the map is a my.BarackObama column. From the top it has My Dashboard, My Neighborhood, Friends, Events, Messages, Groups, Fundraising and My Blog. The last six are headings to the right of a "+". Expand those and you'll find 18 ways to engage with with the campaign. And still there is plenty of white space. The page's action is fast, smooth, simple and straightforward.
When I go to the McCain campaign website and look for events within the same 25 miles, 16 come up. Nearly all are appeals to join phone banks or to volunteer in some other way. The only three exceptions are parties by individuals. All are on the same "national event day" and have the same copy.
Of course this isn't fair. Massachusetts is not only an exceptionally blue state, but home to Blue State Digital as well.
So I just ran the same test for 85018, a zip code in central Phoenix: the heart of McCain Country. There I get 23 Obama events and 16 McCain. Obama's have the same variety as those around Boston. McCain's all seem to be stamped out under personalized headers. There are 13 parties (mostly given by individuals) on the same "national event day" as those in Boston. Each has the same boilerplate copy. Three are scheduled for other times. Two of those involve veterans.
So, how does Blue State do it? And how exactly are Linux and open source involved? Here's how Jascha put it to me:
We make tools that look outward. Take events management systems. In the past they were made so an organization could post its official calendar online. We said that's great but not nearly as interesting as letting your supporters create their own calendars. So we created tools where the first priority was to make it easy for somebody coming onto the website to host a house party, or to arrange to pick up litter alongside a highway while wearing t-shirts for their organization: everything from the mundane to the innovative. We wanted to make it easy to create an event, schedule it, make it searchable, handle RSVPs, and for people to do their own fund-raising.
Almost all of our tools put user interaction and user creation first. When people log into their existing account, the first thing they see is a dashboard that shows events happening near them. The system allows RSS feeds to be exported to show events. My RSS reader shows me all the Obama events that are happening near my home -- a constant stream of stuff.
The two services we use most in the context of events are Google and Yahoo's mapping and geocoding APIs. We'll geocode your address with lon/lat, and use that to place nearby events.
We have lots of databases of other geographical information. For example, the lon/lat center of a Zip+4. Congressional districts for zip codes, census information, census tract, block numbers... this allows us to do sophisticated things, but also rudimentary stuff to improve the user experience. If you're just filling out a sign-up form, we don't require you to put in everything. If you donate later, we can get your address then if you don't want to give it at first. We try to maximize the data we get out of whatever the user gives us, to maximize a smooth and simple experience.
On the back end we use lots of open source libraries and tool kits. We use YUI, and ext, which are javascript UI libraries. One of our developers is the creator of the Horde project, which is a big open source PHP framework with a whole set of tools including Web mail and a whole lot of pieces on top of it. So we use the Horde framework where appropriate.
We look around at all these open tools and say to ourselves "We don't need to re-create the wheel here." So for example we don't write our own database connection library. We're using ADOdb, which is one of the more popular ones for PHP, and python as well. We use chair, which is PHP's library of tools and utilities. We use a number of pair modules in our site, for everything from sending email to doing caching... The stack is LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. we use things like memcached. We use open source monitoring tools.
We use RSS all over the place: events, blogs... we use it to link parts of our own system internally, say to share information between two different client systems, or between two parts of our system. Wherever possible we try to build those interface points around accepted standards for interchange. If they need to be opened up, or if the client wants direct access to them, we say "go ahead and use whatever RSS library you have."
If we're working with a tool and add a significant feature to it, or fix a bug, we of course share that with developers and the project. Our own front end stuff isn't open source.
The front end, however, is all stuff that we've purpose-built for political and nonprofit organizations -- or anybody that wants to engage membership with a bigger goal in mind.
That stuff's not open source, but I'm not sure it's a secret sauce, either. What Blue State does best is methodological, not just technical. More importantly, it's the most visible participant in a movement that has many other participants that have grown down many other paths.
Bobby Clark, Dean’s first web-savvy hire, became the Deputy Director of Progress Now in Colorado and hired Blue State Digital to build a member-driven site, ProgressNowAction.org.
Blue State Digital's Joe Rospars took a position at the Democratic National Committee and implemented an extension of the Progress Now platform as the Democratic Party Builder. Later, Joe took the platform with him to the Obama campaign and grew it into BarackObama.com. Joe now serves as Director of Internet Services for the Obama campaign.
Nicco Mele founded EchoDitto with Jim Brayton, Harish Rao, Michael Silberman, Justin Pinder and several others. EchoDitto is headquartered in Cambridge, MA and focused on strategy (not coding) and building sites for non-profits. They make heavy use of open source, including the Drupal platform for content management, with modules added to support member connection.
Andy Rapaport hired Zack Rosen, another Drupal wizard, to transform his DeanSpace project into the CivicSpace platform.
Among many other things (such as founding and running ORGware, Communities Done Right and Open Resource Group), Britt Blaser now presides over the Independence Year Foundation, a non-profit organization he founded for building online social networks that improve governance. He says, "The platform architecture and user orientation is based on lessons learned from the Howard Dean campaign and the Spirit of America project".
So much stuff is going on. To look at one small technical wedge of that, here's Greg Elin, a Dean-era veteran now working for the Sunlight Foundation (which has founded and contributed to dozens of efforts, all Net-based and devoted to making government more transparent and accountable):
Almost all of our projects and funded projects are open source (though sometimes our code is a bit hacked so it takes a while to release it.) Nearly every group I know is completely invested in open source: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache... The frameworks are being rapidly adopted: Rails, Django, Symfony... The work I'm most interested in these days is dynamic-scripting -- what I think about as "flow-and-go" data sets instead of what Jeff Jonas coined as "rack-and-stack" data sets. Dynamic scripting is Unix pipes! That is, every application does input and output. We leave the world of databases-make-reports and enter the world of RSS-flows -n and RSS-flows-out.
Two examples of flow. A sunlight database, LouisDB.com scrapes the Congressional Daily Record daily, transforming it into XML. Garrett Schure (Sunlight Labs developer) and Josh Ruihley, did word count algorithm on the Congressional Record to come up with Congress's "Word of the Day" and the microsite http://capitolwords.org which goes back to 2001 and has an RSS feed, API, and widget people can put on their site. Louisdb.com makes it easier to search the Congressional Record (what was said on the floor) -- and now there's a script boiling it down into tweetable content -- that others could use, too. Second example, from MySociety: TheyWorkForYou. It provides profiles of what Members of Parliament are doing in Parliament by parsing Parliament's daily record and votes. Lastly, many sites rely on the work of Josh Tauber's http://govtrack.us b/c . Josh scrapes all sorts of data on bills and Congress and transforms it into XML. Josh's data is open and so now is his code. It's a tremendous contribution.
And what about Howard Dean? Well, he now runs the party, as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. DeanForAmerica morphed smoothly into DemocracyForAmerica. Says Jascha, "He took all these people, who in some cases had taken over their local democratic party organizations, and helped them channel that energy and that civic spirit towards electing democratic and progressive candidates around the country. They've raised money for people. They've gotten the word out, coordinated volunteers. Here in Boston you had a city councilman, Sam Yoon, who won an at-large city council seat with tremendous support from DFA. All these people who had been involved with Dean went out and volunteered for Yoon.
Britt Blaser:
Before Dean, politicians don't know the Internet was created by makers, not by machers, which is political-speak for powerful deal-makers who rule politics through influence, money and arm-twisting. The Dean campaign's Internet staff -- its makers -- was the nucleus of a new class of political experts, focused on means rather than ends. Like Linux hackers, Dean’s makers felt and acted more like a guild than partisans and they similarly related more easily to people outside the campaign than to their bosses. Since most of them were volunteers, the concept of boss didn't mean a lot to them. They were seeking collaborators outside the campaign for political purposes, but the tools they built map surprisingly well to governmental purposes, since every issue becomes law after a successful campaign for hearts and minds and money.
Which all sounds very good. And it is. But is it good enough? Of all the interactions I've had with Dean-vintage veterans, one with Liza Sabater stands out. Like several others, she lamented the late CivicSpaceLabs, which -- among other things -- did wonders with Drupal.
"The truth is that there is not one open source project out there that comes closes to the promise of CivicSpaceLabs", she says. "And that to me is the fundamental difference between the 2004 and the 2008 elections. For all the talk about Obama's campaign being netcentric and groundbreaking, the code to their site is still proprietary. I don't foresee the Obama campaign releasing that code to make it easier for any and all people to replicate what they have created. Same thing, by the way, with MoveOn.org, Democracy For America and even the organizing tools created by the DNCC."
Greg Elin puts uneven progress in perspective:
Programmers and technologists who grew up with the web and with open source have been entering the political and e-government arena the past several years bringing with them the tools and practices of their open source and web 2.0. They are collaborating with -- and sometimes competing with -- existing technologists who were often activists who learned spreadsheets and databases and desktop publishing and then the web to communicate their message. So we are seeing a geek-i-fication of everything from campaigns to good government groups to government itself. More open source. More frameworks. More collaborative communication among individual developers. It's uneven, it's bumpy, but it is definitely happening. The tipping point has occurred now in politics and government -- the question remains only where the tree is going to land.
Phil Windley, the former CIO for Utah, and to me one of the best sources of both technical and political wisdom, tells me he sees himself standing outside this campaign cycle, viewing it with some disappointment. "My view from here is that the 'Net is being treated like a big broadcast medium with a built-in cash register". Every one of those umpty-zillion emails and page impressions on behalf of both presidential candidates comes with Donate buttons and links. This is pro forma, of course. And it has the positive effect of diffusing the kind of political influence that comes with large contributions. But the shake-down is still there. Is the bottom line what democracy is about?
Whichever candidate wins in November will be elected by a very different machine than the kind that produced presidents in the past. That machine will be more democratic in many ways than the old one. But machinery, and machinations, will still be involved. Those machines are still top-down, not bottom-up. Even the "Customer Managed Relations" Ad Age talks about are still done with tools provided by the vendor: in this case, the campaigns.
There's still a fight going on, between control and freedom. It's been there all along, in technology as well as democracy. What will we have when the citizens truly are independent of political machinery? Whatever it is, it's still our job to make it happen.
Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal and a fellow with both Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and the Center for Information Technology and Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has been writing for Linux Journal since 1996, and has been a voter since 1969.