I finally had time this morning to think about my experiences at PDF this year. The highlights for me were Tracy Russo’s explosion and the ideamarket session on next generation GOTV tools. In general, the plenary sessions while sometimes thought provoking were not nearly as interesting as the hallway conversations.  A few years ago, they had an unconference component attached to PDF - it would be great if that came back for next year.

PDF also reminded me that there is not a conference for software developers working in the progressive advocacy space. I think there is a missing niche there for a place to talk about best practices, learn how to use APIs from places like ActBlue and Catalist, and maybe hold a hackfest to build something cool.

my alma mater censors art. great.

I launched TurnoutMachine a few days ago. It is a tool that allows you to dare your friends to vote - those that accept your dare receive a txt message or automated phone call from you reminding them to vote on election day.

For a while now I have been fascinated by how peer-to-peer connections might be leveraged to create action. The power of a friend asking you to vote is much more powerful than a faceless campaign doing so because of the social connection between you and a friend and the peer pressure that can be brought into focus through that relationship. TurnoutMachine is an experiment to see if I am right.

How it Works

The application was written using Ruby on Rails and is hosted on a Joyent Accelerator. The interesting bits from a technical perspective are the txt messaging and telephony support. To send out txt messages I am using Clickatell - an SMS aggregator and service provider. I had never interfaced with their service before, but it turns out there is a gem for Ruby that made it insanely simple. To send out phone calls I had considered using Asterisk, but instead decided on using Voxeo’s hosted VoiceXML platform. This made it easy to get the service up and running quickly without having to think very much about telephony infrastructure. It will also let me do speech recognition if the need ever arises.

So, head on over, and ask your friends to promise to vote.

Michael Connery over at Future Majority tells us that the DNC is still working on the new version of Party Builder with VAN integration. I first heard about the effort last summer during a presentation by the developers at YearlyKos. Michael talks about why the tool might not be useful for student and youth organizing (because the data in the VAN is often out of date for people who move frequently), but is generally quite enthusiastic about the tool. I’m not as optimistic - I think that it will be useful, but misses an incredible opportunity.

On Friday I went to a presentation for bloggers on the DNC’s new field tools - Party Builder. Still in beta, Party Builder is essentially a neighbor-to-neighbor decentralized field tool that lets local activists access and use the Voter Activation Network (VAN) to canvass people within a few hundred yards of their house. Party Builder will also let users download and customize select, approved pieces of campaign literature. Eventually, this customizable content and distributed model will allow the DNC to deploy micro-targeted field campaigns at the national and local level. You can see an older demo of Party Builder here, but the stuff they showed us on Friday still isn’t online.

My impression of the tool when I saw a presentation about it was that it would allow the party to create a distributed field organization by allowing centralized organizers to deploy thousands of volunteers with a centrally controlled message. That was 6 months ago, and I might be mistaken - chime in if you know better.

The problem with that plan is that it views the volunteers as merely foot soldiers in a campaign managed from DC. The DNC is still (understandably) unwilling to give over too much control over local organizing to their membership. At first this seems like a good idea - it prevents fringe members of the party from going too far off the reservation, and allows for a coherent messaging strategy. It also keeps the nexus of power right where staffers tend to think it should be, inside the party apparatus. But it is the wrong approach - it misses out on a truly disruptive opportunity to change local field organizing. Rather than trying to orchestrate a command and control operation that mobilizes volunteers in a centrally planned effort, the party should provide open ended tools to empower local organizers.

An Alternative Approach

What if every local activist had all of the targeting, mapping and voter contact tools that Catalist and the VAN provide for their neighborhood? Democrats running for school board would have the access to the same set of tools as presidential campaigns. Local activists could invent innovative contact programs tailored to the particular identity of their community. Most of all, you wouldn’t need anyone’s permission to engage in meaningful field work. People would feel empowered to take ownership of doing whatever it takes to win their precincts, rather than waiting for the next set of instructions from HQ.

You can’t run a 50 state strategy in every precinct in the country without giving up some of the control and letting local people take the lead. Trust us, you’ll be pleasantly surprised with what we come up with.