Brand new ideas from 2004
On Political Campaigns
Originally published 5/19/04, as a subset of Democracy’s To-Do List
What have we learned about campaigning in the Internet era? The Dean Campaign seemed to be the answer, but was not. In fact, it was a better-equipped iteration of many previous “breakthroughs”, like the Goldwater, McCarthy and Perot campaigns. But many naive citizens took the thrilling possibilities at face value. These enthusiastic efforts crop up periodically and have always failed. How might a real political revolution occur?
Open Resource Group has been working on the mechanics of the solution since mid-2003. Our mission: Help regular folks find the next Mr. Smith and send her back to Washington. Without something at least as good as ORGware, We The People haven’t got a chance. With that as our mission, our goal is to equip political campaigns to use our tools to win by being an unstoppable member-driven movement rather than an insiders’ media-driven snow job.
Here are the overarching ideas that can help the next idealist politician overcome this pattern of excitement and rejection:
- Be a Seed Crystal
As with semiconductors, your social algorithm needs a seed to start crystallizing your social network. Howard Dean was such a seed crystal, but John Kerry was not. Barry Goldwater was conservatism’s seed crystal, but George H.W. Bush was a damper. Al Gore was nobody’s seed crystal. Bill Clinton is a force of nature, not a seed crystal — no movement persists. Harley-Davidson is, Buick isn’t. - Smart = Busy = Distracted = Stupid
Design for the Largest Common Denominator. Programmers think “users” are stupid, but they’re just too busy to decrypt your impenetrable, too-cute-by-half web site. - Roll the DICE
Most people won’t adopt a new application or convene over at Meetup or Base Camp to do your work if you don’t provide all the social networking functionality they’ll eventually need, on your web site. Unlike techies and activists, they won’t go build their own blog or register to organize events at eVite. They need to be able to do everything on your site, so you need world-class programming in an interface that’s DICE-compliant:
1️⃣ Deep
2️⃣ Indulgent
3️⃣ Complete
4️⃣ Elegant
- Stepping Stones
- People need to move to be a movement. Online activism is the wild west for most people, so they need to move in baby steps (from browser screen to browser screen) by which their slight interest evolves into an Aha! moment, on to active debate, to recruiting their friends, to investing money, to voting. Even a city slicker might feel secure standing on a flat rock in a roaring river. If there’s a similarly hospitable stone a short step away, flat and dry and not too smooth or mossy, you might just step on it if it’s in a direction you’re a little interested in. Pre-build these small safe havens that are worth visiting for their own sake. Make each one comfortable enough to hang out for a while. Your future advocates don’t know they want to cross your river. Let your activists swim; Help the rest of us to wander toward the prize.
- Deputize Celebrities
- In the summer of 2003, People at Dean rallies wanted autographs from Zephyr Teachout, Matt Gross and Nicco Mele. The more celebrities you create in your movement, the greater its heft. Every celebrity is a new seed crystal and you need all you can manufacture.
- Lattice of Engagement
- Locate every member in identifiable relationships. It’s a movement, so everyone wants to know someone who’s more of an insider (mini-celebrity) in this exciting enterprise, and they want to be important to others who are newer to the movement. The movement wants constant news about its movement and the members creating motion.
- Strawberry Roots Activism
- Grass is nice, but your front lawn is dependent on you for seed, feed, water and weeding, each seed pushing out just a few blades for us to admire. Rhyzomes, like strawberries and crabgrass, are more creative. Once started, they shoot out opportunistic runners which put down roots in hospitable circumstances. If the new plant prospers, it puts out its own runners, and so on. Strawberry roots activism may be the future of politics.
Political pros are wired for centralized intelligence, and most political tools reflect that bias. Until we move past that mind set, campaigns will exhaust themselves trying to create buzz rather than riding a wave of buzz inspired by the campaign but not built by it.
- Federation of Hierarchies — the basis of strawberry roots activism
- Mass movements have to be egalitarian, which many activists confuse with hierarchy-free. But your movement needs all the hierarchies you can spin off, because work-group hierarchies are the only way to get things done. Let your people form hierarchies on-the-fly, where they can meet and do the work of politics by collaborating in the three areas that every movement needs: Buzz, Members and Money.
- Govern Early and Often
Discover each member’s values and maintain her personal values profile. Inspire each member to manage their values profile as assiduously as they manage their address book. Discuss values constantly and money peripherally (except when giving it energizes your members). Tabulate and aggregate the policy preferences of the members to transform unwelcome email broadcasting into a vibrant conversation. The Dean campaign’s professional policy advisers were supremely disinterested in polling the campaign’s most committed supporters and tabulating their policy preferences. They refused to have the candidate “tied to the explicit interests of his base.” Naturally, they got what they wished for. - iTudes
- Movements need iTunes for Attitudes. Before iTunes, no one imagined that we’d need such a complex environment to buy and listen to music, but somehow we’re there now. It turns out that managing music was more complicated than we thought. So is democracy. With skill and luck, your people will spend as much energy expressing their political preferences as they now spend tweaking their music collection and publishing their favorites.
“The elements in ORGware reflect real needs in politics and governance.”
— Phil Windley
