Quote bank...
Leonard Lin
i'm here until nov - basically responded to a call for geeks
Leonard Lini gave a short off the record talk @ foo, and i can rattle off some angles if you're interested
Leonard Linbsd's story itself is interesting, since the cofounders came out of the dean campaign
Leonard Linhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_State_Digital
Leonard Linclay johnson, one of the founders is now working w/ greg elin at the sunlight foundation
Leonard Lini think the most interesting angle is looking at the application of the social web to election and subsequently in the administration
found kerri's earlier emails. Missed in blue state searches.
Doc Searls
just fyi.
Doc Searls
Leonard Linok, that's good to hear. i don't know anything about the pr firm, i'm sure they have their own epk and all that
I think all she's trying to do is line up appointments. thats's what flacks do.
Doc Searls
do you think the social web will work post-election? or how do you think it will work?
the angle i like is what it means for obama as the first internet prez. the campaign really gets it. partly b/c of good advisors (ie, joe rospars, one of the other bsd cofounders is dir of new media), partly b/c he's really smart and younger, and partly because the model maps pretty directly from his experience w/ community/bottom up org
Leonard Linmysociety has shown how it can work
Leonard Linbut if you think about it. no executive administration has even ever had a mailing list
Leonard Linimagine the current affinity groups and think about how it'd apply for policy... it could potentially be transformational
people get wowed by the dollars, but that's almost missing the larger picture (although the money changes things too)
a *really* interesting angle w/ the whole change congress stuff is that larry talks a lot about "access" skewing things
#transparent-democracy is good shit. Do we know who writes it?
Doc Searls
Leonard Lini know a friend's husband in the valley sfbay helped work on it
one of the nice thing is that obama has had advisors that aren't just the regulars. like samantha power on foreign policy, and goloub on economic stuff
access: you can see w/ the mybo stuff, where the anti-fisa thing group became the biggest on mybo (they pronouce it my-bo, rhymes w/ tae-bo) and forced a direct response
sure, direct source: http://get-fisa-right.wetpaint.com/?t=anon
Leonard LinGet-FISA-Right Statistics
* June 26: Launched by Mardi, 300+ members by Midnight
* June 27: 1,000+ members
* June 28: 2,000+ members
* June 29: 3,300+ members, in the Top 10 groups on myBO!
* June 30: 5,000+ members, #5 Largest Group on myBO!
* July 1: 9,500+ members, #2 Largest Group on myBO!
* July 2:12,000+ members -- and in the New York Times print edition!
* July 3: 16,000+ members, #1 Largest Group on myBO!
* July 6: 19,000+ members
* July 7: 20,000+ members
* July 8: 22,000+ We're #1!!! Because of You! (myBO Top Ten List)
6:02 PM
Seen this? http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/07/21/080721taco_talk_hertzberg
Doc Searls
Leonard Linhttp://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/rospars/gGxsZF/commentary
Leonard Linthis was the response
Leonard Lin2626 comments
Leonard Lindirect discussion w/ 3 of the policy staff in the comments
wow. BTW, just found this, via that New Yorker story: Borowitz Report: http://borowitzreport.com/archives.asp .
from a web search, might want to start here on mccain
Leonard LinAlso committing, according to Weaver: Mike Connell of New Media Communications. He designed, developed and managed the Bush campaign's websites in 2000 and 2004.
Max Fose, McCain's webmaster in 2000, is also back on board. And so is GOP technological entrepreneur Becky Donatelli, the CEO of Campaign Solutions. Donatelli helped to coordinate online fundraising for McCain in 2000.
Leonard Linyou might also wanna try signing up on the new "mccainspace"
Leonard Linit's pretty sad
Leonard Linhttp://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/7/20/151318/774/993/554283
one of the new netbooks/ultraportables: http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4498
Leonard Linrunning hackintosh: http://www.modaco.com/content/asus-eee-pc-http-www-eeeasy-com/270099/pauls-complete-guide-to-installing-osx-leopard-on-your-msi-wind-advent-4211/
above for upfront
Bluestate stuff.
There's an ecosystem. Not everybody does everything.
"The voter databases, some of the compliance tools..."
"We'll be doing the Web stuff. Somebody else will be doing the voter database. There's a fairly small number of vendors that work in this area. We've started to integrate with (them). So the systems talk to each other. We have APIs, they have APIs, and we build hooks that allw... 2:30... 50 states...
We've made great strides in addressing that problem. one of the big lessons for the campaign is that you can't do something different everywher.=e. that'll kill ya.
Technology is so integral to every aspect of the campaign that you've got to be smart about how you approach it.
approach on the fly?
real estate -> live web
working both sides of that.
reconciling the need to have a clubhouse, a structure that's piece of real estate on the one hand and hve this organic live thing ...
working both sides
5:00
our experience coming out of the dean campaign gave us a strong sense of the power of interactive websites. not just nominal superficial interactivity, but the kind that connects 2 supporters on opposite sides of the country, and gives them the together or discussing an issue. That's our bread and butter. distinguishes our company. productive, practially-focused user ction.5:46
always a balancing act. always need portinos of your site that talks a=bout the pro formas
good at producing materials and making it available..
if your'e a nonprofit that's been around 30 or 40 years, youve gotten pretty good at telling people what you do, and producing the materals that go along with that.
We ask how do yu open that up? You've got your mission statement. How do you open that up to everybody showing up at your website?
tools that look outward. Take events management systems. IN the past they were made so an org could post its official calendar online. We said thats 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 on to the website to host a house party, or to arrange to pick up litter alongside a highway while wearing t-shirts for your 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. to do their own fund-raising. If I want to create a houseparty, they can make it easy to give online while rsvping... and its all part of the process.
almost all of our tools put user interaction and user creation first. software that facilitates colaborative p2p. from one-way publishing to interactivity.
the idea is that the first thing you might do is see if you have events.
if people log into existing accont=s, the first thing they see is a dashboard that shows events happening near them, blog posts
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 make extensive use of those services. We have lots of databases of other geographical information. For example, the lon/lat center of a Zip+4. Congressinal discticts for zip codes, census information, census tract, block numbers... this allows us to do sophisticated things, but also rudimentary stuff we use 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.
For the most part we build all the kind of front end things you see ar our tools. 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 an (infa) Web mail and a wle lot of pieces on top of it. So we use the horde framework where apporopreate.
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 useing AEODD, 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 everythig from sending email to doing caching... we use a lot of 3rd party oss. The stack is a LAMP stack: linux, apache, mysql, php. we use things like memcached, we use open source monitoring tools.
The front end, however, is all stuff that we've purpose-built for political and nonprofit organizations or ny that wnts to engage membership with a bigger goal in mind.
we use RSS ll 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 shre athat with developers and the project. Our own front end stuff isn't open source.
How do you scale?
from the hjman side, we've had to scale our business quite a bit. since the dean campaign we've been on a consistent growth curve. Taking on a presidential client, articicularly one as successful as this one has brought additional challenges for us, but I think we've always had the idea that we want to be a long-standing resource of knowledfge and skills for the democratic party, for nonprofits, for all our clients. So that they don't re-invent the wheel either. we want to make sure that our growth is both sustainable and scalable.
We want to make sure we share the knowledge in the company among new staff so that it carries forward past the election. This can help us overcome a problem common to businesses like ours, which tend to be seasonal. They shrink and grow over and over. When we started we realized that this was a terrible way to run a business. we've always wanted to build the business so it can consistently grow. And we expect to continue that in the next year aftr the election is over, and in subsequent years.
we try to hire developers and othr staff who are able work closely with our clients. We have this huge base of software that we can leverge when new clients come on board, but we also recognize, particularly with our larger clients, that they are going to want to innovate too. they want to try new things. Maybe it's a way to do events, to do group organizaing, to do fundraising technique. OUr team can respond quickly to develop, to build out something scalable and functional and make happen. Take it from an idea and bring it all the way to fruition and successful/ That's our secret sauce,if you will.
What's great about working with the Obama campaign is that it's so full of talented people constantly looking to break new ground, to gry new things, to raise the bar. It's been a wonderful relationship, to have that kind of interactivity.
AS you know this campaign has borken any nmber of records. We've had to scale the systems beyond any early expectations we may have had, and found that the technical platform that we selected, LAMP stack, and Linux in particular, has been tremendously manageable. Anybody who has ever built a large LAMP application will always tell you that there are always scaling challenges. You say, "Y'know that architectural decision we made back when we were sending ten thousand emails a day insted of a million emails a day isn't such a good one." But there is so much experience out there in the open source community, that we can find support at every level in the stack. Many of the problems we've had are ones that others have had before, and there is such a sense of communal responsibiltity to helping each other, and helping the users.
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. All of that is a pretty powerful motivator. We've worked on that from day one. 29:50.
my experience with democrats is that they are very open to embracing the opennes of the internet and allowing for user-generated content and user participation. Thatfits well with the ethos of the party.
[note... build a base of stable stuff, yet improve it constantly. compare commercial businesses with boom and bust, grow and shrink; while nonprofits want to grow continually, even if their business is seasonal.]
This campaign is a tremendously well-run operation. As a vendor we feel like they've innovated tremendously. Like any natl campaign it is large, but also open to new ideas. work on both the high... seems to be an org that really works well. the big stuff... innovtive spirit.
different departments intearact with. new media dept... get in touch with the campaign.
what's new and interesting learned along the way...
learned a lot about scaling, to accomodate growing traffic. It's been in some ways very validating in the last few months. Because we've seen a campaign that's run a national race that's used these tools very successfully, and that's created a nationwide online community on an unprecendented scale in the political space.
When we didn't have the opportunity to put that idea to the test in 2004, we said we want to build a suite of software and a company that can help make this a reality for a presidential campaign on a nationwide basis.
For me on a personal level what really struck me when I got back from dean, ilived in bost on 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 I got back to boston and started reconnecting with some of my friends that I had been ignoring for six months. and I started going to parties and haning out... . 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 por I went tup to nh nd knocked on doors. all these for whom the experience of being involved wasn't jsust 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 whome, for whatever reason, didn't think they had a voice, are using tech to be a real and active participant in the process.
What about after the election.
Can't speak for Obama campaign. What we've seen in the past few cycles -- and it was particularly pronounced in 2006 -- was that a lot of our clients who ran for office and won, trust their online organization, their website, their email list , whatever community tools they had... they kept them online and active even after thay took office. So the tools then became something that playhed a role in their governance. We saw this with Martin O'Malley, who won in Maryland. Duval Patrick, right here in Massachusetts (who is not a client of ours), has also done this quite well.... they make that community of supporters part of governance as well. Of course there are (legal) restrictions on who can say what and who can email whom.
Another intersting example is what Howard Dean did in 2004, when he transformed Dean For America to Democracy For America. 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 own 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.
Mobile phones, gps, text messaging, ... I think right now people are in a very experimental mindset whenit comes t mobile technology. It's another channel for reaching out, especially to people who may not have an internet connection, or may not want to get emails.
it is another channel to reach out to supporters.
ther's a lot of lookingat what does and doesn't work. I think coming out of this elsection cycle . thre is a lot of interesting experimentatino going on at the local and national level, also localy within labor unions and nonprofit organization that do issue advocacy, to see how to make the best use of it.
Four years from now.
You'll start to see more integration with some of the social sites that are out there. In some ways the social abilities of a modern political ? ... very focuesed, very purpose built, very focused on getting people to take action individually or together. But it doesn't tie in necessarily with the existing social networks that are out there on the internet or are incresingly part of people's daily lives. These are less a novelty than they were four years ago. Now they're key elements in how people coordinate, how they keep informed, how they look for jobs... There are a lot of interesting initialives around whe facebook is doing, Google's OpenSocial... we wtry to make these systems work well together and integrate together.
The political space can certainly benefit by playing nice with ohter services that are out there.
I tink you'll see an increased level of sophistication in the ability to do list segmentation, to get a picture of what people are doing online, what motivates people, and to help them with activities and tools to.. "What's the right next step for a given person?" Right now if you come onto most political websites, there are a few options for things to do, but it is not an especially personal experience. Knowing that somebody who signed up for the email list migt be interested in creating an event or joinging a group... trying to give people better tools to deepen their involvement, to deepen their engage,ment with whatever the cause or the candidate is.... making that process smoothser.
We're doing a better job of applying the knowledge we're gathering already, doing more testing, into how people view their online activities in the context of their larger civic sense... and making sure that the software and tools available to them fit in well with that.
Leveraging systems for campaign and governance
THOUGHT: INFLUENCE OF ADVERTISING. Still selling. Still asking for money. Which buys TV. See PHil