Planting Liberally

Tonight I attended one of the "house parties for change" organized by the Obama campaign. The house parties are meant to contribute to an ongoing conversation about what to do with the energy and structure that was the Obama volunteer organization.

If you think you've heard this song before, you're probably right - this was the question faced by Dean volunteers in the aftermath of his 2004 defeat, and there are similar, smaller-scale challenges faced by other candidates at the local level all the time. Dean's campaign operation ultimately became Democracy for America (DFA), and it and its far-flung network of chapters are still kicking. Given the founding conviction s of DFA - that progressives need to show up everywhere, and that voting is just the beginning of civic involvement - it wouldn't be too unreasonable to say that DFA was a prototype for the DNC's 50 State Strategy in spirit, although the mechanics of DFA and the 50 State Strategy are very different.

The problem of what to do with Obama's campaign structure is very different, for a number of reasons. One, Obama's campaign was much, much larger than Dean's. Two, in early 2004 there was a huge overlap between the netroots progressive movement and the Dean campaign, whereas the Obama campaign of necessity includes plenty of moderate and establishment Democrats, and no small number of Obama volunteers were Republicans. Three, and perhaps most importantly, Obama was in fact successful, he now has to govern, and his supporters have reason to expect that their priorities will be represented in the White House.

There are a few basic ideas running around for what to do with the Obama campaign, and they seem to include the following basic options:

• Supporting Obama. The Obama volunteers will become a support network for Obama's legislative priorities in Congress, and will presumably become a group dedicated to pressuring Congress and the media.
• Being active and possibly critical. The Obama volunteers will be called upon to stay active in, and to continue to sound off on, national politics. That could include commentary on change.gov or a successor website, conference calls with a randomly selected subset of Obama volunteers, MoveOn-style house parties, and other activities.
• Becoming active in local politics. Essentially following the DFA model, Obama volunteers will be encouraged to support other politicians in Obama's mold at the local level, thereby keeping the campaign going and turning volunteers attention towards a more local level.
• Service projects. Somewhat like the early version of the Edwards campaign (OneCorps), volunteers will be asked to take on local, mostly apolitical service projects - helping out in food pantries, conservation projects, etc.

There are strengths and weaknesses for each of these options, but I think the main complication is the fact that Obama will soon be president, and there is a limit to the amount of political campaigning he can do. At the same time, the email list is intensely Obama-focused; if it were to grow into an organization that became a hotbed of criticism of the administration, Obama could simply shut down the email list. Contra-wise, Obama can't just hand off the email list to a third party; or rather, he could, but a lot of list subscribers would unsubscribe, or stop paying attention.

This is a serious conundrum, but I think one idea which emerged from our house party tonight was quite interesting, and that was to use the house parties simply as a springboard for further policy-oriented conversations - or salons, if you like.

Here's one way this might play out. Every month, the members of the Obama email list are charged with holding house party conversations about some broad topic. Hosts could receive some basic informational materials about the issue, but attendees would be free to discuss other sources of ideas on the topic as well - articles, movies, books, whatever. Each house party could be charged with answering a set of questions, and the administration could commit to taking that aggregate response into account when crafting and directing policy. What's more, the topics could go on a six-month rotation cycle so that if an issue was discussed in February, it would come up again in August, and house party attendees would have a chance to give feedback on the government's performance on that issue. There could even be a chance for issue task forces to develop, in order to give more focused and frequent feedback on an issue in between the "spotlight" months.

This approach would, I think, neatly sidestep many of the thornier issues involved in keeping the Obama organization alive. It is political without being essentially campaign-oriented. It allows Obama to gather support and feedback, but it is appropriately open to everyone. Most importantly, it gives the Obama volunteer network something to do, and an ongoing set of opportunities for involvement and action.

There is still the not-insignificant problem of how this operation would be managed. Would it be run from within the government, as an essentially non-campaign operation with the White House's official support - and would that mean that emails gathered through the operation could not be used for campaign purposes? Or would it be essentially a shell for the 2012 campaign, and therefore a non-governmental entity which requires its own fundraising arm? This question is a bit thorny, but I actually think either answer would work out fine in practice.

I'm curious to see what becomes of these house parties, although I'm a bit dismayed that the campaign's progress on this question has been so slow, and that the communication about this problem appears to be very top-down. Unfortunately, I've also heard this song before in Massachusetts, when Deval Patrick promised to keep his campaign organization involved in governing post-election. Although there was a lot of hay made about the idea early on, and a few citizen task forces convened, the effort eventually fizzled. Here's hoping that Obama is more successful in this part of the transition.

Although there's been a lot of talk about Obama's picks for Secretary of State, Attorney General, and Secretary of Treasury, we've heard comparatively little about Obama's nominee for Secretary of Labor; the post remains unfilled.  Although it's a low-profile post compared to some of the other Cabinet picks, the Secretary of Labor is of paramount importance to workers and unions.  A sympathetic Secretary can improve working conditions for millions or, as we saw under Elaine Chao, Bush's Labor secretary, can make life very difficult.

On Facebook this week, Mariya Strauss jump-started the dormant conversation on the Secretary of Labor with a campaign to nominate Mary Beth Maxwell for Secretary of Labor.  Maxwell is Executive Director of American Rights at Work, a research and advocacy group which keeps an eye on union-busting, hostile labor decisions, and other threats to workplace democracy.   In recent years, ARAW has produced hard-hitting reports exposing the union-busting industry, criticizing the Labor Department and NLRB for anti-worker decisions, and lauding employers for good employment practices.

Maxwell is not the only name being floated for Secretary of Labor.  Others include David Bonior, Linda Chavez-Thompson, Dick Gephardt, and Andy Stern.  David Macaray analyzed the labor position thoroughly shortly after the election, concluding that we need a true advocate for labor, not just a careerist or generically capable administrator. Macaray's choice for the position is Thomas Geoghegan, a Chicago labor lawyer and author of Whose Side are You On.

I don't have a real favorite in this contest, but I certainly agree with Macaray on the principle that the next Secretary of Labor should be someone who understands threat to workers deeply, is serious about enforcing and expanding labor protections, and is committed to the vision of a strong and vibrant labor movement.  Vigorous protection for labor unions is key to revitalization of our economy and of the progressive movement; it is another progressive positive feedback loop.   I'd be curious to hear whether other folks have any picks for the position, or whether there are any thoughts on other key labor appointments, like the NLRB.

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.

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?