Use the source Barack use the source

The open source force behind the Obama campaign

A great post on Barack’s campaign for the presidency which compliments some posts I have written

Since the dawn of mass media, the most obvious activity of political campaigns — especially presidential ones — has been image-making. You paint a flattering portrait of your candidate and an unflattering one of his or her opponent. In the 2008 presidential campaign “cycle” (as the professionals call it), the candidate with the best paint job so far (as of mid-August, when I’m writing this) has been Barack Obama. In “What Obama Can Teach You About Millenial Marketing” Advertising Age says ,…the unabashed embrace of select brands by millennials, from technology to beverages to fashion, has made this decade a true golden era of marketing for those who know what they’re doing. And “…when it comes to marketing, the Barack Obama campaign knows what it’s doing. Mr. Obama’s brand management, unprecedented in presidential politics, shows pitch-perfect understanding of the keys to appealing to the youngest voters…His success, it seems, is a result of both product and the branding behind it.”

Reading this I am reminded of Isaac Asimov’s distinction (in Second Foundation) between “the answer that satisfied” and “the answer that was true”. Because much of the Obama campaign’s success so far isn’t about branding, demographics, or even politics as we’ve known it for too long. It’s about using technology to make democracy work.

Reflect on this sentiment “The 19th century co-operative movements had their roots in people pooling resources to make, buy or distribute physical goods. Modern online communities are the new co-operatives.” And as Woodrow Wilson famously said, “The highest and best form of efficiency is the spontaneous cooperation of free people.” A company called Blue State, is highlighted in the article which is well worth quoting at some length. This is as I have described over the years as a evolving socio-media ecology, or what as Manuel Castells describes as a Networked Society. Castells argument is this; our world is created within the “space of flows” – flows of people, capital, information, technology, images, sounds and symbols. And I argue that as a consequence we need a new logic and common sense to describe this world, because it is not built upon the same principals and logic of an industrial straight line world. We need a new philosophy and language, otherwise we keep making the same mistakes and will not build for the long view. For example…

Almost all of our tools put user interaction and user creation first. Take events management systems. In the past they were made so an organization could post its official calendar online. We said that’s great but not nearly as interesting as letting your supporters create their own calendars. So we created tools where the first priority was to make it easy for somebody coming onto the website to host a house party, or to arrange to pick up litter alongside a highway while wearing t-shirts for their organization: everything from the mundane to the innovative. We wanted to make it easy to create an event, schedule it, make it searchable, handle RSVPs, and for people to do their own fund-raising.

The two services we use most in the context of events are Google and Yahoo’s mapping and geocoding APIs. We’ll geocode your address with lon/lat, and use that to place nearby events.

We have lots of databases of other geographical information. For example, the lon/lat center of a Zip+4. Congressional districts for zip codes, census information, census tract, block numbers… If you’re just filling out a sign-up form, we don’t require you to put in everything. If you donate later, we can get your address then if you don’t want to give it at first.

The stack is LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. On the back end we use lots of open source libraries and tool kits. We use YUI, and Ext, which are javascript UI libraries. One of our developers is the creator of the Horde project, which is a big open source PHP framework.

We don’t like to re-invent wheels. So, for example, we don’t write our own database connection library. We’re using ADOdb, which is one of the more popular ones for PHP, and python as well. We use PEAR, which is PHP’s library of tools and utilities. We use PEAR modules for everything from sending email to doing caching… We use things like memcached. We use open source monitoring tools.

We use RSS all over the place: events, blogs… we use it to link parts of our own system internally, say to share information between two different client systems, or between two parts of our system. Wherever possible we try to build those interface points around accepted standards for interchange. If they need to be opened up, or if the client wants direct access to them, we say “go ahead and use whatever RSS library you have”.

If we’re working with a tool and add a significant feature to it, or fix a bug, we of course share that with developers and the project.

The front end, however, is all stuff that we’ve purpose — built for political and nonprofit organizations — or anybody that wants to engage membership with a bigger goal in mind.

And a recent post on Barack’s online activities

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Posted in: 7th Mass Media, Convergence, Culture, Darwin, Engagement Civil Society, Engagement Politics, Ethics, Generation C, Government & Politics, Law, Media, Participation, Philosophy, Politics, Quotes, Society, Strategy, Trends, Web/Tech, Weblogs

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