Blog Post 11/19/2008

The single most important concept that the Obama campaign got right was the idea of ownership. Any campaign worth its salt will claim to be a campaign of the people, one which will hold forward the values (whatever they may be at any given place and time) that are most important to the voters. Barack Obama did a great job of this by staying on message, putting forth the ideas and issues that he felt played best with his constituency and suggesting that they were the true owners of his campaign. But what was different about his campaign was that the Digital World organizing actually was owned by the constituency. Anyone who wanted to could own his piece of the campaign and exploit it to fit their needs. Obama’s campaign placed radical trust in the individuals who chose to support it and through this trust they won big.

Collaboration and transparency are the cornerstones of the Digital World. The internet itself was born out of the desire to allow scientists to freely and openly share their findings and work together on projects that previously could not have been accomplished due to the physical limitations of humanity. In building his campaign, Barack Obama built an interface called My Barack Obama (or MyBO for short) where individuals were free to communicate both with the campaign staff and with each other. The people who chose to participate found that they were not being told what to do with the space; they were instead being asked to own the space and make it what they wanted. MyBO provided the necessary tools to activists to make their voice heard within the Obama campaign and to then take their voice, and their ideas out to their local neighborhoods and spread the word on a one-to-one and one-to-many basis.

Barack Obama used the tools of the Digital World as a way to draw people in. For example he announced his Vice Presidential pick via a broadcast txt message. Obama’s campaign included many of the illuminati of the Digital World such as the founders of Facebook and Google. Even fundraising efforts appealed to the online communities being built as a way of drawing on collectivism of the many to build the funds needed to win the election and the correct messaging went out to support this idea. Throughout all of my digital communities I saw Obama centric Voter Generated Content proliferating, icons, avatars, blog badges, etc. All with connections back to the Obama campaign, often directly to the fundraising website.

The campaign also understood that there exists a digital divide but that those on the other side of that equation would not actually lose out on information by not being connected. Barack Obama himself maintained traditional campaigning efforts while he allowed individual supporters to build the Digital World campaign. He connected the two through transferring the work being done by grassroots activists up to the top of his campaign and outward through more traditional methods. Similarly he maintained a more positive campaign than many recent election cycles by allowing his Digital World communities to fact check and then repudiate the negative claims being made by his opponent. This was a true two-way conversation which is how community is built and sustainable organization established. The command and control structure lost in this election; chalk up another victory for flat organizations and direct democracy.

Even as the Obama campaign celebrated its victory an email to supporters made it clear that this digital community was not going to disband. “We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next.”, read a line from the email. The most widely held assumption is that an Obama administration will use this community to build support for initiatives and legislation during his Presidency. While this would be a new twist on interactive democracy and a step towards direct democracy it certainly isn’t the most revolutionary.

Even though the current representative system is pointedly imperfect it is the best we have had under the circumstances. The Digital World has however offered a change to that dynamic and as I’ve been pointing out we’re seeing exploration into direct democracy as a possible alternative to the current systems. The nation of Estonia (which survived until recently under the vale of Communism and the reality of dictatorship) has actually adopted online balloting as a way of voting in their democratic elections. As the US struggles with electronic voting platforms prone to miscalculation and outright failure the small nation on the Baltic Sea is already taking much larger leaps forward. Beyond online voting Estonians are taking a real stab at direct democracy through the program Tana Otsustan Mina (TOM) or in English – Today, I Decide. Brought online in June of 2001 TOM allows internet users to view legislation discussions and decision making processes in real-time online. What makes it truly special though is that Estonian citizens can sign up for a site log-in which allows them to make suggestions to the legislation during the review and response period as if they were there, participating in the preceding themselves. While this is still a representative government there is such a level of direct, digital interaction that the population has a much stronger voice than in the past.

Much of the inadequacy of representative government came from the small level of representation and the overriding agenda setting by the few who held the ear of those representatives. At a local level representation is much more effective because of the smaller constituencies being represented and the greater shared knowledge about specific issues. Looking at the Estonian TOM program gives a glimpse at what open knowledge systems and transparency provide at citizens.