[GRT] Distributed campaigns

Two companies creating software platforms for national political campaigns — Democracy in Action and PICnet — are leading a session on distributed campaigns. I guess it's important for activists to know about DeanSpace and the rest of the glorious regalia about which the panelists are talking, but I can't help thinking that the teaching maybe ought to be going in the other direction for once. (On the other hand, I'm about to give two or three talks on the same topic over the next few weeks. Pardon my hypocrisy.)

Audience member: The campaign failed because it didn't give those ivolved a way to reach those who were at the next level of marginal involvement.

Me: (in response to another audience member) It seems to me that the problem is an internal inconsistency that can't be easily resolved. Control is the enemy of scale, but campaigns are necessarily about control over message (both because campaigns see themselves as marketing organizations but also because campaigns stand for something).

Britt Blaser: We're looking at a big picture and saying it failed when in fact there were lots of little things that worked or could have worked if small changes had been made. Maybe, says Britt, campaigns ought to be totally transparent...nothing but an accounting function.

Dick Bell: (Kerry campaign blogger) You're actually running 50 campaigns. And the Dean campaign wasn't connected to the grassroots organizers. We need to figure out how to integrate the grassroots and the traditional political organizations, integrating the permission-free and the need for control.

The Dean presenter says that the Dean campaign was aiming at putting an application layer between the local DeanSpace groups and HQ so there could be meaningful communication up from the grassroots, aggregating the data in meaningful way.

Audience: That's what bloggers do. They digest positions and have a medium-level audience that can percolate up.

Katrin Verclas: I'm involved in very local campaigns and we use listserv. It works like a dream. If you go to down where the grassroots organizing is actually happening, we'll tell you what we need. And it's not the stuff you've designed for the national level.

Oxfam website guy: We feel the tension between control and allowing bottom-up involvement. We need to control our message, so when people come to us and say they want blogs and chats... [FWIW, Oxfam. is my family's favorite place to donate money.]

Audience: Don't forget to acknowledge that software freedom makes this possible.

Audience: How do we use this in our AIDS campaign?

Democracy in Action: The national organization can use it to create local sites instantly, with branding or not. The local organizations each have their own campaign site. There's two-way communication between the local and national. They support RSS feeds. The national campaign has control over the local sites.

Katrin: It's all about local leadership. You're talking about a push down. But the other piece of a distributed campaign is leadership from below. Some national organizations are beginning to get that, but the true leadership development is truly user driven. But the national side is more marketing driven. We need leadership development. It's one on one. It's human. You have to know where your leadership is and then you give them the tools.

Democracy in Action: We've tried to pay attention to that. The national campaign is an organizing structure but it's not meant to be pushing information down to local groujps so they can regurgitate it. It's two-way.

[I said, in the course of a comment here, that I love the presenter's sw, but I was confused. I actually don't know Democracy in Action's stuff. Probably excellent, but I didn't mean to give it a ringing endorsement. Oops.]

[And, yes, www.DemocracyInaction.org is an unfortunately ambiguous domain name.]