Obama and Politics 2.0: Documenting History in Real Time
In July of 2008, Nancy Scola wrote a really insightful post documenting a critical aspect of the Obama Social Media Campaign – Video. Enjoy!
I’m taking a crack at liveblogging an event tonight [ed. -- now last night] at NYU featuring Arun Chaudhary, director of video field production for the Obama campaign, in conversation with Ellen McGirt, senior writer at Fast Company and author of magazine’s April 2008 cover story “The Brand Called Obama.” Arun left his job as an adjunct film professor at NYU to produce video that pulls from public events, behind the scenes, and one-on-ones — unique creative content that populates BarackObama.com and a YouTube channel. Let’s get started.
Asked about the new media team, Arun describes at least 50 people crammed into one corner of an office building floor with with “pictures of JFK and graph paper tacked up on the wall.” Arun says the new media team spends a fair amount of money, but they’re buying fishing poles rather than fish; the broadcast quality footage they capture, for example, can be used for advertising in addition to online video. Asked about past campaigns he tried working with, Arun says they saw media as “too precious” to take creative risks with.
Arun explains his hire by the campaign by saying ‘you can learn the politics. You can learn how to navigate these worlds. But you can’t really learn the trades very quickly.’ The campaign has been attracting successful people that way, he says, naming Facebook’s Chris Hughes, who came on to handle social-networking. Arun then screens a well-crafted mock movie trailer calling people to a rally in New York’s Washington Square Park that features Obama in slightly goofy situations. Ellen: “We’ve never seen anything like this before”:
Ellen asks if the technology was in place three years ago to make video like this. “The technology was there three years ago, but I don’t think the right audience was,” says Arun. Back then, he jokes, there were just six hundred of the same people commenting on political blogs and that’s it; online participation today spans a wider segment of the population.* Ellen ask how he managed to get approval for the trailer video from the campaign and the candidate. Arun laughs a bit nervously, “I don’t know if the candidate saw it,” but says that it made its way, he believes, to the level of campaign manager.
The next video was crafted to call people to the pre-Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa, as, Arun says, showing organizational strength was the key to getting attention and momentum in that state. Ellen asks if there was a concern that Obama and guest attendee John Legend were the only African-Americans seen in the clip. Arun pointed to the Internet Archive’s Prelinger Archives as the source of the overly white footage. (At the actual event, the video team had five cameras and five videographers in place capturing footage.):
Next video. An Iowa call-to-caucus piece, says Arun, is a campaign classic. It both asks Iowans to caucus for their particular candidate and educates voters on how to actually go through the confusing caucusing process. Both the Obama campaign and the Edwards campaign went the route of a dated instructional-style video, he says. (Arun praises the Hillary Clinton campaign’s call-to-caucus video which featured Bill Clinton eating a cheeseburger and saying something along the lines of “exercising is hard, but caucusing is easy.”):
It was the campaign’s “traditional media” team, says Arun, that whipped together a quick response to the Clinton campaign’s 3 a.m. phone call ad. But the new media team tracked down the young girl in the stock footage, Casey Knowles, an Obama precinct captain in Washington State. In the one-minute video, Casey deconstructs the techniques in the Clinton ad — the blue tint to the footage, the “scratchy voice” — and slams the “politics of fear.” An ad like that, says Arun, would never make on air, but works well online:
The candidate was in Terre Haute, Arun says, when the news broke that Obama had earlier made remarks in California concerning “bitter” Americans. Obama inserted a response to the incident in his Indiana speech. The new media team, says Arun, edited, packaged, and released the candidate’s own words within 19 minutes of the speech’s delivery. A lesson learned, says Arun, is that people are actually interested in the “sound blast,” and will watch long clips in their entirety:
He also cites Obama’s speech at their Chicago headquarters.The 14 minute clip shows the candidate addressing his staff, both in person and through a conference call (which creates a few minutes of less-than-thrilling footage when the call goes dead and Obama has to stall while it’s reconnected). It wasn’t deliberately shot low-fi for an extra dose of authenticity, Arun says, as some people suggested. There was no intention to create some sort of “Tanner 88″ moment. It was just, he says, that there was an intern manning the camera:
Asked by Emily about what an Obama administration might bring, Arun says that the role of video in an administration would be even more powerful than in a campaign. He mentions the broadcasting of health care meetings — creating a broader base of people who are able to keep an eye on the proceedings. The idea, Arun says, is not ‘telling people who tell people to tell people,’ but to use video to tell people directly. The role of video in governing, he says, is to achieve the goal of “cutting out the middleman.”
Q&A
Question: There’s a discontinuity in your work with high video quality and no sound mixing. Why?
Arun: We shoot as high quality as we can because it might be used for broadcast, but get used to it — a lot of the networks are going so broke that they’re getting rid of their “sound guys.”Question: What role with user-generated content play in presidential campaigns?
Arun: Using voter-generated content while probably remain “an unrealized ideal.” Much of the content that gets sent to them is “a little strange.”
Question: Why is new media going to make young people come out and vote?
Arun: It isn’t. Barack Obama is what is going to make people come out and vote.
Question: If you embrace an interactive politics 2.0, how do you avoid politicizing governing?
Arun: I think we’re ready for 1.5. We’ll [ed. -- a clarification: "we" here is a reference to political campaigns in general, and to the tools that might come into common use -- not a reference to the Obama campaign in particular] have virtual townhalls, for sure.
* Updated to correct: The original line referenced political blogs; in making the joke, Arun was referencing hard-core blog commenters.
Social Media and Politics – From Obama to Iran and Onward…
Here is a great post by Rob Paterson on Social Media and Politics – From Obama to Iran and Onward…
What is democracy? Is it just a vote every 4 years? Is that all the citizen has?
Who ensures that even that limited moment of choice and opinion is secure and trustworthy. How are the votes counted? Who ensures that the people have even voted? You don’t have to be living in Iran to wonder about that!
How does a candidate get chosen? In the west it depends on a party and immense sums of money. In other places, the regime makes the call. It is all but impossible to become powerful without having made a deal with the in group whether this is in Iran and the Mullahs or anywhere.
What might democracy become in the age of Social Media?
Could President Obama have gathered the financial and voter support in his campaign without it? I think that it would have been unlikely. Are most politicians responding to what happened in that election?
I don’t think so. For I think that they miss the point.
The tools of social media are just that. Tools!
The point is that to engage the people you have to have a cause that strikes to their heart. Obama had that.
What the tools do is to make a real cause too powerful for the status quo to push under the rug.
In Iran, people are risking and losing their lives for change. In the before Social Media times such as at Tianemen Square, the regime can and did utterly squash dissent. I don’t think that this is possible today if the cause is well enough supported. Yes, the regime can set up a massacre that may stop the demonstrations. But the legitimacy of the regime will be ended. Their only chance then will be to become a North Korea or an Burma – a true pariah. The story will not end there.
The tools and the supporting global community are enabling the story to be told. The world is a witness.
There is also another aspect that I see. Our response to the traditional media is usually helplessness and then numbness. We see terrible events but we can do nothing but feel bad. Traditional media is so one way and so passive.
But people outside of Iran not only know what is going on but many are actively engaged in helping or in providing emotional support. This was even true for the Obama campaign. Millions of non Americans became personally engaged in the election in a way not possible by simply reading the paper or watching TV.
The Obama campaign – but regretfully not the Obama administration – and the Iranian push-back – will surely be seen in retrospect as a Tipping Point in the evolution of democracy. What will happen, I cannot know yet.
But the regimes everywhere will have to take note. There is a line of self interest and oppression that cannot be crossed. For if it is, the “Sleeper will awake”.
The voice of the people is no longer restricted to the ballot box. No longer subject to the control of the ballot box. No longer subject to the needs of party affiliation or millions of campaign dollars.
I don’t know how this will play out but it sure sounds more democratic to me.
Business/Tech/Real Estate Social Media Meets Politics: Pols Chasing Publicity Find Web Waters Welcoming
Here is the first of 3 great blog articles on Social Media & Politics, written by Jackson West of SF Appeal Online Newspaper.
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other popular sites for publishing online have become ubiquitous in the news media, if not in everyone’s actual day to day lives. Recently, public officials have successfully made it onto the bandwagon by adopting these tools in their campaigns, fundraising, volunteer recruitment and, of course, garnering publicity. But are these tools truly being used to connect directly to voters and their concerns, or are they just another way to campaign?
Barack Obama certainly made hay online, with plaudits, publicity and private contributions rolling in over the course of the campaign thanks to a popular Twitter stream, Facebook chatter, and a social network, MyBarackObama.com, powered by software from local company Six Apart. Yet once elected, the new media music died. His Twitter stream went silent for weeks, and only four updates have been made since election day.
Local politicians who are “tweeting,” or regularly posting messages to Twitter, include State Attorney General Jerry Brown, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera, State Senator Leland Yee, State Assemblywoman Fiona Ma, and San Francisco Board of Supervisors Clerk Angela Calvillo, on the Board’s behalf. Befitting a brand new form of communication, they’re all using it differently. The one common thread is that they would presumably all be relatively easy to reach, especially by a constituent and member of the press.
Adriel Hampton works as an investigator for the San Francisco City Attorney’s office and has kicked off a congressional campaign for California’s tenth district. An avid user of Twitter personally, he maintains a profile on Facebook, and is an active participant in a social network called GovLoop, where public employees are exploring ways to better connect public service with private taxpayers. It was at his urging that the City Attorney’s office created an account on Twitter.
“We’re trying to be transparent and apolitical in a way that advances the public interest, the public’s right to know and builds public trust in the office,” Hampton said of the tone and impetus of discussion on the site. Certainly transparency and authenticity seem to be two benefits most often cited by proponents using these new communications tools in government.
Some of the decisions made San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and his large communications staff and coterie of campaign aides seem to belie those types of good intentions. Newsom recently used Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to officially announce his entry into California’s 2010 gubernatorial election, garnering much media coverage and a few donations in the process.
Newsom’s aides in City Hall and his campaign team have been using these and other online tools for some time, but his office is not known for embracing radical transparency. For instance, while Newsom’s account often features replies to other Twitter users, responding to questions from the press is another matter. Repeated emails to his press secretary Nathan Ballard went unanswered (as did an email to Newsom’s likely gubernatorial opponent Brown).
Maybe the emails got lost in the shuffle. So why not play along and get in touch using Twitter? Because asking questions publicly using the service’s reply feature has gotten reporters in hot water.
“We don’t ask the mayor questions on his Twitter feed,” said San Francisco Chronicle city desk editor Audrey Cooper. There’s no need, she argued. “A press office has a lot of different ways to communicate with the press.” And they probably won’t start any time soon, especially in the wake of San Francisco Bay Guardian reporter Steven T. Jones’ experience.
Having been blocked from accessing Newsom’s updates after he asked a question publicly, Jones was accused of “flaming” or harassing the mayor online, and declared the equivalent of a -DCohn1 5/3/09 2:05 AM “troll” by Ballard. Not that it came as a particular surprise to Jones. “We’ve literally had the office door shut in our face before,” he said of his paper’s relationship with the mayor’s communications team.
So tools like Twitter don’t necessarily level the playing field for access, but they do offer an opportunity to make an end run around tough questions from critics and appeal directly to potential supporters without having to go through traditional media channels.
Tomorrow, in part two of this three part series, we’ll take a look at how well online tools work for organizing and funding campaigns. A candidate who could win office with only passionate volunteers and lots of small donations would presumably prove less beholden to the status quo of institutional support and corporate interests. Sounds great in theory, but does it work in practice?
CIA Invests In Firm That Datamines Social Networks
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Wired:
“In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ‘open source intelligence’ — information that’s publicly available… Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords. ‘That’s kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,’ says company senior vice president Blake Cahill. Then Visible ’scores’ each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. (’Trying to determine who really matters,’ as Cahill puts it.) Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface.”
Apropos: Another anonymous reader points out an article making the point that users don’t even realize how much private information they’re sharing over these services.
Politics 2.0 – Real Democracy is close
Here is a great post by Rob Paterson on Politics 2.0
I had one of those coming out of the shower aha’s today. I think I see how Obama might be able to get the changes that we have all dreamed of – both for right and left.
So first I ask why is it impossible to get any real change – real change being defined as something that has to overcome the establishment in any field?
To have a real change – there has to be a President who will risk political capital and a majority vote in the house. By design right now this is impossible. Why?
Because until now the President has needed a lot of money to get elected and to have a chance of a second term. Because until now Congressmen and Senators need a lot of money to get and stay elected.
Because until now, the electorate were largely ill informed, passive and often even helpless. Their only involvement was to vote every few years and, even then, many chose not to do even that. Why should they? They knew that the decisions were being made by another process.
Washington has been bought by lobbyists. The lobbyists represent the establishment. The phone rings in a senator’s office. It is you the voter. A second phone rings, it is a major lobbyist. Which call gets priority?
No wonder we are all cynical.
How could health care or agriculture be reformed when all the money is behind the status quo and money is what is needed?
That is until now!
By building a vast grass roots organization by using 2.0 principles, Obama was able to raise more money than by using the traditional lobby pools. He not only got more money but he is less attached than any president in generations to the special interest himself.
Is this organization going to go away now? No – there are signs that Obama intends to grow this organization. Here is the link to his new site, Change Gov, just released yesterday. It is clear that he plans to go around the Hill.
He is preparing for the war of the future – A People’s War – where the President has a direct ongoing relationship with the people of America.
Roosevelt started this. His use of radio in the 1930’s was a masterstroke of using the then new media – to talk in a conversational way with the people. Now the President can listen to our conversation and converse with us.
I expect that we will start to see a new electorate – an engaged electorate – that will grow out of the grass roots campaign network.
I hear rumours of a new “Peace Corps” not to be deployed in foreign lands but at home. I see that community development and engagement will become paramount in the years to come.
So where does leave the old power brokers on the Hill? Isolated!
The smart Congressmen and Senators had better follow suit and fast – they will have to catch up with the people and the President. The real money that they do need will come from their engagement in the betterment of those that they represent.
The voters will awaken. They will start to be active. They will seek to take back their power so that what affects them most – so that decisions that affect them the most having access to good work, to energy, to food to a good environment and to better healthcare to a better education will be made by them and not a by a few who care only for themselves.
So politicians will have to awaken too. It will be more than their voting record that will be watched. It will be their larger actions to help their people. The greater transparency of our time will shine on them all. Those who serve the people will be rewarded and those that serve the elect will be punished.
Where does this leave the lobbyists? The best lobbyist will themselves have more than a check book. They will have to represent groups of active engaged voters or leave town.
A real change in health care demands that the insurance companies, the drug companies and the doctors have to be taken out of the position of political control.
A real change in energy policy means that the oil and coal companies have to be taken out of their control position.
A real change in how we spend money and on what in defense has to taken out of the hands of the main suppliers and the senior officers who serve them.
A rel change in how our financial system is governed means that control needs to be vested fram the leaders on Wall Street.
A real change in food systems means that BIG Ag has to lose control.
Without going around the Hill. Without directly engaging the People both in the policy and in the action – real change is systemically impossible.
This is Martin Luther all over again. The system cannot be reformed from within. A new direct model is the only way.
This is possible. For the first time, real democracy is possible.
How Obama is Using Web (and Enterprise) 2.0 in the US Primary Campaign
Great post by Bill Ives on How Obama is Using Web (and Enterprise) 2.0 in the US Primary Campaign
Yesterday Hillary Clinton made a come back to win 3 of the 4 contested primaries but Barack Obama was able to close early gaps to gain significant delegates and keep his lead in the pledged delegate count. There has been a lot written on the organizational strength of the Barrack Obama campaign. Part of this comes from some creative use of the new web, both on public sites and within the organization. One of the tools they are using is Central Desktop, a collaboration platform for business teams. Yesterday, I spoke with Isaac Garcia, CEO of Central Desktop, on the day of the Texas primary on what the Obama campaign was doing in Texas and what they did in California. Prior to our conversation I read his Central Desktop blog post, “Barack Obama and The Long Tail of Politics.” It spoke well to the general issues of the long tail, but I wanted to know what they actually did with the software, and Issac filled me in and took me to the Obama Texas site to see some stuff while it was still up. I was very impressed.
Howard Dean made effective use of meetup.com to organize meetings and his web site to gather donations in his 2004 campaign. Many other politicians have since used their web sites to gather donations. Some, such as Mitt Romney, have even employed tools such as salesforce.com to manage the donation process. Almost all campaigns also started blogs in 2004. The Obama campaign has gone a step further and uses web 2.0 tools to help train and organize their volunteer supporters, allow volunteers to rapidly update information and, in some cases, provide web 2.0 tools to help manage their volunteer efforts. The core staff has also used these tools within the campaign.
Central Desktop is an on demand collaboration platform that is wiki-based and designed for the business user. A political campaign is also a business, as well as a movement, and is really a rapidly growing startup that has huge collaboration and communication needs. I will write about the details of Central Desktop in a follow on post but want to focus on its use within the Obama campaign in this piece.
The use of Central Desktop started in the California campaign where the Obama people faced the task of developing and managing a field operation in a geographically massive and diverse state. According to Issac, the conventional wisdom was that you could really only campaign in California effectively through TV and direct mail. No one had tried to build a field operation from the grass roots up in California since Bobby Kennedy. Several volunteers started using Central Desktop to coordinate their internal efforts. It worked well so they decided to open it up to more volunteers as they hired and then organized a field operation that enlisted 6,000 precinct captain volunteers.
They set up MyPrecinct pubic workspaces for selected precinct captains. This allowed them to manage their efforts with task assignment, calendaring, documents, lists of key information, and other workspace tools. These spaces were separate form the main web site. They allowed the precinct captains to manage and organize themselves, reducing the burden on the central staff and on the central web site staff. It also reflected the more decentralized operational mode of the campaign. One of the main themes is increased participation in the political process, and this allowed for increased participation in the workings of the campaign. While Obama did not win in California, he did manage to close the gap and gain significant delegates.
As the Obama campaign moved on to Texas, Central Desktop came with them. Since this campaign was still current at the time of the interview with Issac, I was able to see much more about what was going on. Here the main focus was to the use the tool to quickly train precinct captains on their job and provide the information they need. The wiki based tool allowed for rapid content development in the few weeks leading up to the Texas campaign and then maintenance and updates by volunteers. Central Desktop has many permission levels so the content could not be spammed or trashed as sometimes happens in public wikis.
New or prospective precinct captains can go the Precinct Captain Learning Center, a separate application from the main web site. I put the link in but I am not sure how long it will be up. You are first greeted by these choices on the home page:
1. “Apply to be a Precinct captain – not yet a Precinct captain – click here to sign up”
2. “Get Started – First time visiting the site – Start here” – the page starts with – “From the entire Obama for America community in Texas– staff, volunteers, and supporters — we sincerely thank you for stepping up and taking responsibility for a piece of this movement… (then it goes on after more welcoming) – Time is precious — click here to get started now!” You go to a clear and detailed list of steps to take. – Step One – learn your role, Step Two – Call 20 voters using MyPrecinct (with many quick guides on effective calls), Step Three: Recruit Help (with more guidance).
3. “New Features in the MyPrecinct calling tool” – this section has screen shots and explanations. It showed you how to do data entry. The precinct voters are already entered and when you want to update the results of a call – you click on edit data giving you wiki editing rights. You also get rolled up data on your efforts. In addition, there was also a My Precinct Team feature where you can meet other precinct captains through their contact information for further collaboration.
4. “Find Your Early Voting Location” – here the wiki format is useful in up dating information
There are also many links in the side bars under training & tutorials, help (FAQs, contact your organizer), and resource center (issues, fact check, office locator, etc.). Underneath the four main sections above were three links with graphics:
Share Your Story – people can write about how they got involved in the campaign in a blog format
Office locator – with maps – the wiki tool helped with the updates
The Texas Two-Step – clearly written explanation of the hybrid primary voting and caucus process that explained in a way that I had not heard in the media.
This was all done in a few weeks and allowed for more effective participation but a campaign that is attempting to bring new people into the process and make them effective. The campaign sates on its main web site, “I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring real change in Washington… I’m asking you to believe in yours.” It is nice to see the campaign use participatory web 2.0 tools to further enable people in this process. I hope that whoever gets elected will try to engage more people in the political process through tools such as these.
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