Planting Liberally

Dispatches from the Religious Left will be released in about a week, on Oct. 1, 2008.  The book contains a wide variety of thoughtful essays on what the Religious Left is and how it should move forward, including a brief chapter on new media that my wife and I co-write.  If you happen to be in New York on Oct. 7, please drop in for the book launch:

Tuesday, October 14, 2008
7:00pm - 10:00pm
Middle Collegiate Church
50 East 7th St., New York, NY
RSVP: http://www.new.facebook.com/event.php?ei d=25908349317

This will certainly be a fascinating event, with featured speakers including Chris Hedges (author of "I Don't Believe in Atheists", and "American Fascists"); Rev. Debra Haffner (Director of the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing); and Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou (Associate Minister for Missions, Social Justice and Community Action at Middle Collegiate Church).  Frederick Clarkson, the book's editor and one of the main contributors at Talk2Action, will also be appearing.  The event will be moderated by the Rev. Jacqui Lewis, Senior Minister at Middle Collegiate Church, and will feature the church's gospel choir.

I won't be speaking, although you will get to see me in a suit, which, apparently, is still something of a shock to my college friends.  And I imagine there'll be a pretty lively Q&A.

It's quite exciting to be able to attend this event; I view this book as an answer, of sorts, to Michael Lerner's call for a movement of spiritual progressives in The Left Hand of G-d, with plenty of specifics.  I hope to see plenty of MyDD readers there!

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.

Yesterday Jack and Jill Politics announced the launch of the Voter Suppression Wiki, complete with an intro video from Baratunde Thurston (who used to co-host Drinking Liberally with me):

The goal of the wiki is simple: to document and expose reported cases of voter suppression, whether they be targeted at veterans, students, folks on foreclosure lists, or otherwise. The wiki also includes an action center to help activists get involved in preventing voter suppression. Anyone can register and contribute to the wiki - in fact, I did just that this morning, adding a link to Pollworkers for Democracy to the action center page.

Congratulations to Jack and Jill, as well as others involved in helping set up the wiki, including Jon Pincus. This is a great resource for pulling together all of the sundry voter suppression effort going on across the country, and for helping activists fight back.

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?

This week, Chris Bowers at OpenLeft has been encouraging readers to run their own media campaign. The idea is very simple: at a fairly low budget, anyone can set up a simple Google ad campaign, targeted geographically and by keyword. Bowers has been running two ads - one against McCain, the other against Palin - in his native Pennsylvania, and thinks he can reach a lot of voters on a fairly low budget.

The commenters at OpenLeft have been ecstatic about the idea, and I think it is exceptionally clever. In addition to the first order effects - exposing anti-McCain messages to a lot of voters in swing states - the campaign could also have an indirect sway over the campaign's own messaging strategy, by demonstrating in a quantifiable way the messages that work (and receive a lot of click-throughs) and those that don't. I suppose that's a long shot with this campaign, but it's nevertheless a possibility.

In any case, I'd be interested to see if someone could take this idea to the next level, and make the decentralized media campaign idea a bit more social. For example, would it be possible to set up a website which allows people to set up all of the parameters for a Google Ad campaign - the keywords, the geographic target, and the message/link which appears - and then to aggregate all of those campaigns on the website in some interesting way? There are a lot of different ways to do this - e.g. breaking down ad campaigns by state, tag-clouding the chosen keywords, and showing aggregate click-through and impression statistics. This kind of aggregation could be augmented with comments (suggesting refinments and tweaks to existing campaigns) as well as team fundraising pages, allowing site visitors to support one campaign or another monetarily. It's also possible to maximize and quantify the impact of a campaign like this by targeting all of these ads at an action-oriented microsite, which takes a user through the steps of signing up for Obama's email list, giving a small donation to the campaign, signing up for My.BarackObama.com, and so on.

This sounds, to me, like a good example of a simple business idea that could be modestly profitable, since after all the main point of this project is to sell Google ads. Technologically, this should be a relatively simple mashup of a community platform like Drupal with the Google Adwords software development toolkit. With relatively low costs, it should be possible to set the transaction costs - on top of the raw costs for the campaign itself - at a sufficient level to generate relatively decent profit margins. Besides the constant problem facing any social web platform - will anyone show up? - the only difficulty, as many OpenLeft commenters have already alluded to, is whether such an endeavor would run afoul of campaign finance rules, and whether or not Google Ad purchases would be considered campaign contributions. My guess is that this kind of project would have to be organized as a 527, or under the auspices of one.

If something like this doesn't take shape between now and Election Day, it's probably a worthwhile organization to develop, even so. Beyond the immediate need to go on the offense against McCain, as Chris points out, it's important to help develop and test messaging for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot, in an environment that's not controlld by the campaigns themselves. More than that, with Google beginning to sell offline media ads in newspapers, radio and television, there's no reason to restrict an ad campaign to Google Adwords (although it's much more gratifying, as real-time metrics are available.) Any takers?

Disclosure: My company worked on a small technical/design project for Open Left last year.

There have been a lot of interesting stories running across the wires in the world of progressive culture this week.  Unfortunately I don't have time to really analyze each of them in-depth, but I thought I'd point them out here:

 

• Michael Wolff profiles Roger Ailes, owner of Fox News Channel and the Wall Street Journal, in Vanity Fair.
• David Moberg has a great piece on Working America in The Nation.  Working America is the AFL-CIO's "community affiliate".  Essentially it's a large (2.5-million-member) list of non-union members who sympathize with the union's position on a number of bread-and-butter issues, and it gives the union the ability to extend its electoral might outside the boundaries of its membership.  What's more, Working America has also started enlisting its members in support of labor organzing drives, picket lines, and the like.
• Over at Build the Echo, Tracy van Slyke talks about digg moving to the left, and progressive new media activism inspired by The Young Turks. Progressive media creators, especially vloggers and podcasters: read this post!  Disclosure: van Slyke's organization, The Media Consortium, is a client of my company.
• Again at Build the Echo, Jessica Clark highlights this great video (another good example of progressive new media activism) about Obama's Challenge:
  
  That Amazon discount code, again, is: RGVTUIQY.  You can also buy the book at Powells.
• Global Labor Strategies has a challenging, thought-provoking post about the big-picture problems facing the labor movement, both in the US and abroad.  They argue that service sector organizing and EFCA won't cut it, given the ways corporations are reorganizing globally.  It's a fascinating piece, and well worth consideration.
• The UFT announces the opening of a labor-friendly charter school in New York City, by Green Dot Public Schools.  Given the way charter schools often pit public education advocates against teachers unions, and especially in light of all the hey made about the tiff between the DC city council and DC teachers' unions, I think this is an important development.  It's not a revolutionary one - Green Dot operates a number of schools in LA already - but something we should be keeping an eye on nonetheless.  Still, I think it is one more bit of evidence that these two progressive cultural institutions don't need to be at odds.

 

Shelby and I have some very exciting news: we're about to be published! A brief chapter we wrote on new media will be published in Dispatches from the Religious Left, due out in early October. The chapter is about how liberal religious organizations can use technologies like blogs, podcasting, and social networks to reach new audiences. The book includes a lot of leaders in the world of politics and liberal religion, including Dan Schultz ("PastorDan" at Street Prophets); Rev. Debra Haffner (Director of the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing, and a leading Unitarian Universalist minister); Marshall Ganz, (community organizing guru and lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School); and Robert Edgar (former head of the National Council of Churches). The editor is Frederick Clarkson, who is a long-time scholar of the religious right, and the publisher is Ig Publishing, which is an up-and-coming progressive publisher that has also published Youth to Power and Framing the Debate (both written by progressive bloggers-turned-authors.) You can find the full list of authors on Frederick's blog, http://frederickclarkson.com/. It's quite humbling to be part of such esteemed company, and we feel very lucky to be included in the list! I haven't seen the other chapters, so I'm also excited to see what the other authors have to say. If you're interested, you can buy the book right now at Powells, at http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9780978843182-0. There's also going to be a very brief "book tour" of sorts, including an event at Middle Collegiate Church on Oct. 14 and another event at Harvard Divinity School. More to follow on that. If you know anyone who might be interested in this topic, I'd certainly appreciate it if you let them know about the book and send this along. We're both very, very excited about the book, and we think it'll be a great read!

Right on time for Labor Day, the University of California has some good news for the labor movement: membership is slowly but surely bumping up. According to "The State of the Unions" series, union density stands at 12.6% of the labor force, up from 12.1% last year and 12.0% the year before that. Following a long, long trend of falling union density, these are historic numbers, and cause for celebration on Labor Day.

Now, these simple facts can obscure some important details under the surface. A good deal of the growth is due to organizing in the public sector, as well as rising unemployment among non-unionized workers. Furthermore, organizing a group of workers is not the end goal, but rather the first step on a road to a more equitable workplace. So in addition to being happy about higher unionization rates, we should also be concerned about the quality fo the contracts that unionized workers are getting, and the degree to which those workers have a say in their working conditions, terms of employment, and so on. More than that, there are still a lot of open challenges left for the labor movement to address: the movement is aging, and has not yet figured out how to organize the large, community-minded Millenial generation; new technologies are transforming the economy, and unions must find a way to organize green-collar, biotechnology, and computer technology workers; massive immigration is changing the face of the country, but unionization rates are a bit lower among foreign-born workers than they are among US-born workers. To be sure, in some areas the labor movement has already begun to address these issues. Efforts like the Blue/Green Alliance, Qvisory, the Freelancers' Alliance, and the political alliance between labor unions and immigrant rights groups, are all important initiatives to address these challenges.

So while we should enjoy Labor Day and the good news reported by the State of the Unions study, we should be mindful of the challenges ahead. The labor movement is growing, but we need to work harder to address some of the deep problems in our economy.

Chris Bowers posed a striking historical theory at Open Left this week: compared to Europe and Canada, the US has been a basically progressive country for most of its history, and the past 30-40 years of conservative dominance is a historical abnormality. He also suggests three causes of this conservative dominance: the Cold War and its resulting military-industrial complex, high rates of religiosity, and the American apartheid state. The election of Obama, so goes the theory, will seriously chip away at the apartheid state, and will thus help chip away at the era of conservative dominance.

Bowers's theory directly conflicts with the famous Schlesinger thesis, which argues that we have cycled back and forth between eras of conservative and progressive dominance which have lasted about 20 years each. On balance, I think the Schlesinger thesis is a bit more accurate, for a number of reasons.

• Bowers's thesis doesn't account for the government's policy towards Native Americans and African-Americans. The US was far behind the rest of the Western world in abolishing slavery, and its aggressive and brutal expansion into Native American territories compares similarly to European imperialism in the 19th century. So on these two policies - which were the foundation of the country's existence, remember - the US was no more progressive, and in some ways even more regressive, as its European counterparts.sed in the 19th.
• The culprits Bowers names are not one-sided in creating conservative culture. Many churches, as Chris readily admits, formed the foundation of the abolition and civil rights movements, and supported labor unions. The military, for all its problems and its undoubtedly conservative pull, has a progressive undercurrent, both in its capability (so far vastly underutilized) to protect marginalized people throughout the world, and in its capacity to socially promote marginalized people at home. The apartheid state remains, of course, a massive force of conservatism, but it has been around since the country was founded (with a brief hiatus during Reconstruction, perhaps), and in fact it was slowly receding during the recent period of conservative ascendance.
• On top of that, these culprits aren't unmatched. In the same time that we took a sharp right turn, more and more people graduated high school and went to college, and more and more people delayed marriage or eschewed the traditional heterosexual nuclear family altogether. Both of these trends probably made us more progressive as a culture, on the whole. And if the military-industrial complex made deeper investment in the safety net impossible, Social Security and Medicare demonstrated the feasibility of such grand investments in a very tangible way.

Of course, I don't deny the fact that the country has taken a sharp conservative turn in the past thirty or forty years; that is obvious. My point is that sharp conservative turn isn't so much an anomaly as it is a continuation of a very long historical trend, identified by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

I also think it's plain that there are structural features of the Constitution which virtually guarantee this kind of cyclical ideological history. Lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices, the staggered nature of the election of each third of the Senate, and the capability of dissidents to gather strength in state and local government before running for federal office, are all a part of this cyclical nature of our ideological history. Technology, which can make the governing ideology obsolete overnight and make radical ideas suddenly pragmatic, also plays a part.

I'm been very interested in the Schlesinger thesis over the last years, and particularly in the last few months, as it appears more and more likely that we really are on the verge of another progressive cycle. It's certainly exciting to be able to see that happening, and to be a part of that moment. More than that, if the theory proves true, then we are due for two or three decades of progressive dominance. That's a very long time, and there's a lot we can do with that kind of time and power. The question is, what? What would we do with the country if we knew we had two or three decades to play with? Medicare-for-All? A renewable energy economy? True racial and sexual equality? A dramatically smaller military? A democratic China?

As fun a game as this might be, it's also a bit depressing. After all, if Schlesinger is right, we're due for a countervailing conservative resurgence in 20-30 years. If that's true, then what kind of buffers can we create against that future time? More than that, what can we do to keep our own progressive moment going as long as possible? How will we guarantee that we don't overreach and end up, as JFK put it, inside the tiger?

I have some thoughts on some of these questions, and perhaps I'll write them up separately a bit later on. But if you have anything to chime in, I'd love to hear some thoughts.

Full disclosure: My company worked on a small technical/design project for Chris and Open Left last year.

Zack Exley has a short piece up about the phenomenon of evangelical Christian house meetings - informal extra-church prayer meetings that create a kind of secondary structure in religious communities.

Exley is interested in the nature of praying and other activities at these meetings, which I suppose is interesting.  But what I find intriguing is the striking similarity between this kind of activity and the political awareness-spreading/fundraising house parties made famous by progressive trailblazers like Howard Dean and MoveOn.  At the time, these meetings were hailed as a new kind of community, perhaps capable of replacing some of the social capital which Robert Putnam claims we've lost over the past generation.

It's clear there are important differences between Christian house meetings and progressive ones.  The former have a long-term goal of fellowship and religious activism, whereas the latter are usually organized around a fundraising or volunteer recruitment goal.  The former are not centrally organized - sometimes not even supervised by religious leadership - while the latter are usually initiated by a central organizing committee, e.g. the Dean campaign or MoveOn's online house party tools.  The former, at least in the case Exley points to, are regularly-occurring meetings that build community among a relatively stable group of people, while the latter are sporadic meetings that feature a loose group of strangers.

Still, I wonder why it's not possible for progressives to imitate these house meetings - particulalry, why it's not possible for religious progressives to imitate them.  This reminds me to some degree of some of the more interesting organizational proposals in Michael Lerner's Left Hand of G-d.  In that book, Lerner suggests building neighborhood groups of spiritual progressives across the country, who gather to discuss current events, pray together, etc.

I'm not sure if anyone in the religious progressive movement, aside from Lerner, is thinking about this kind of thing seriously, or how to foment this kind of activity, but I'd certainly welcome hearing more about it.