rasmuskleisnielsen.net

This was a very interesting session–I have often marveled at how little qualitative evaluation there seems to be going on in politics–lo and behold, the New Organizing Institute paid a company called Webitects to do usability research on how front-end users experienced new tools for augmented organizing and field work in battleground states.

Paul Baker and Billy Belchev runs through their presentation. They are still in the process of analyzing their data, but they presented some initial findings today on how people actually used the VAN, MyBO, and other tools in campaign offices.

They mainly focus on gap analysis, i.e., identifying what organizers are supposed to do, what they actually do, and what tools they use to get there.

Most of the presentation focus on volunteer recruitment and coordination, and they provide many examples of how organizers use extra tools beyond the systems campaigns provide–they use spreadsheets, stick-it notes, and what not to keep track of things. These tools have advantages that lead organizers to them (they are easy and accessible), but also problems for the organization they work in (they make data sharing harder, increase risk of dissonance).

In addition, even with the tools at hand, many forms of annotation that are important to the organizers and volunteers in their daily work has no place in the databases, or require time-consuming work to store–all that tends to remain on paper or in the head of a particular organizer. Again, data-sharing is a problem, and without data-sharing people get multiple calls, conflicting messages, etc.

Paul and Billy point out that training can solve many of these problems, but that it may not be as practical and cost/effective a solution as technical features, since there are so many people involved in campaigns, and so little time.

Paul gives as an example data entry into the VAN–he has seen volunteers enter page after page of information, and never save. One solution is to train all volunteers better. Another is a technical design solution, have a little box ask the volunteer after each page, “do you want to save the data you entered?”

In the discussion, people ask a lot of questions about security and control, suggesting that many remain suspicious of distributed and open systems in politics.

I hope NOI will make at least parts of the final findings publicly available. This is very, very interesting work.

Mark Sullivan, Jim St. George, and the rest of the crew from Voter Activation Network, the company that provides VoteBuilder and many other interfaces and front-end tools for data analysis for Democrats and progressives, hosted a session on their products.

Sullivan started by pointing out that a lot of the development this cycle was driven by demand from the Obama campaign, and through interaction with their tech people, and people from Blue State Digital and the micro tools they developed for the MyBarackObama site. Now the question is what the VAN should work on in the future: “what would you like to see?”

One thing several people comment on is the proliferation of different databases and tools, and how much easier everyday work would be with integration into one common platform, what someone calls “the holy grail of only one big database”.

Others request more campaign-control, more fields that can be customized with locally relevant information, or whatever else the campaign think is important.

(The two ideas are both reasonable enough, but seems to draw in two different directions, one is for more centralization and streamlining, the other, more decentralization and customization.)

People would also like better tools for volunteer management.

Sullivan underlined that the data available in 2008 was much better than before, that through collaboration with Catalist and various progressive groups, the VAN included often rich data on most of the voting age population, not only registered voters. When people asked for more data and more access, he pointed out that there are not only technical challenges to overcome, but also political problems about data-sharing etc to deal with. That discussion really went nowhere, though it seems to me one of the most interesting. VAN is driving a technical democratization of data access (within the progressive network), whereas many other organizations still hold onto what they have and are reluctant to share (for a variety of reasons stretching from reasonable over understandable to more parochial).

A final discussion was of what technical devices the VAN and its tools should work on, so far, palm pilots and personal computers have been the main, but will there in the future be, say, smart phone applications. Sullivan was skeptical, he didn’t think there’d be enough such phones around for the forseeable future, and pointed out that they are too expensive for campaigns and organizations to provide canvassers with them.

People from the Analyst Institute, AFL-CIO, and Rock the Vote present some of their evaluations of various campaign initiatives in the 2008 cycle, and stress the importance of actual, data-based testing of various theories of what work and what doesn’t.

We are reminded of some old findings: robocalls don’t work, rushed calls don’t work, email doesn’t work for GOTV.

The general lessons are: the more personal, the better, always emphasize local affiliation and personal affinity when making voter contacts.

Some bits from the discussion:

People talk about ‘spill-over’ effects. Apparently, most forms of GOTV voter contact has a spill-over effect of about 60% on other members of a given household. So a campaign may not want to target one supporter living with four people who support the opponent.

There is some discussion of a mail piece that was used in Michigan, where targeted voters got a piece of mail before the election listing their own voting history and the voting history of 12 neighbors, a mention that voting histories are public information, and a line about a similar and updated letter being send out after the election. Obviously, the point is to shame people into voting. The results are mixed–the letter had a lot of impact, but also generated a backlash in the press, via mail and phone complaints, and the like.

A more general, and perhaps more interesting discussion was of under what conditions the findings of these experiments hold up. People express their skepticism on various counts, does over-saturation make a difference, how quickly does the effect wear off, and the general response from the presenters was two-fold, (a) there are always numerous conditions, “we could discuss those all day”, and (b) there are a million things more that needs to be tested (effect of race on canvassing, whatnot).

Regina Schwartz, who was on the panel from the Analyst Institute, pointed out at the end that it is in the best interest of anyone who works in, say, field, to get their results tested and evaluated, so that they are better equipped for internal budgetary fights.

I arrived a bit late to the session, as Erik Brauner was opening it up to the audience with a question–“how can we improve your experience working with the data?”

Three main questions occupied most of the discussion, (1) the whether the new correlations in voting patters in ’08 implied causation or in other ways should be seen as probably long-term, stable trends (Latinos voting more Democratically, etc), (2) Catalist’s role as a repository for the kind of data that campaigns often gather, and then just throws away, and (3) where progressives stand vis-a-vis conservatives on data and tech.

(1) Brauner pointed out that Catalist are still in the process of breaking down their data on a media market level and campaign district level to better measure the impact of various initiatives. He slyly pointed out that many different players will always want to take credit for victories, and that data like Catalist’s can provide a reality-check on such claims.

(2) “For the good of the community, we view ourselves as a resevoir of all the data that campaigns generate and just throw away”. Clearly, there is much to be done here. For instance, if you want to move from registered voters to voting age population, most of Catalist’s data is from people’s commercial footprint, and when people move it is complicated and problematic to follow them. Brauner points out that there is a lot of room for improvement here, and that a lot of it has to do with channeling data that already exists and is gathered.

(3) On the progressive-vs-conservatives point, Brauner reminds the audience that one thing that conservatives still have in their favor is that they have been collecting this kind of data for years at a local level. Someone adds that things will become somewhat easier as there are now more sympathetic secretaries of state out there. Jim St. George from VAN argues that progressives have leapfrogged conservatives on the technology side, and are no longer behind.

OK, so various federal entities weren’t all that good at managing the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq.

And what’s more, they now officially know it, at least according to a 500+ page ‘federal history’, ‘Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience’, that has been leaked. Great, this is important.

Here is how the New York Times, who hosts the report linked to above, covered the story.

Interestingly enough, the report was leaked to ProPublica and the Times, here is ProPublica’s coverage.

This is good and important journalism (and largely fed by disgruntled federal employees).

I just want to note here that whereas ProPublica lists the institutional affiliation of both reporters, (by T. Christian Miller, ProPublica and James Glanz, The New York Times), the NYT does not list either (By JAMES GLANZ and T. CHRISTIAN MILLER).

Reading the Times article, it is only on the second page that the story mentions ProPublica… Go figure.

I’ll be at RootsCamp in DC for the weekend, which I’m really looking forward to.

It means, however, that I will miss out on the house meetings over the future of the Obama movement-network. If anyone picks up on any goodies or have any stories to tell from them, I’m all ears.

FCC chairman Martin is not pinned down on anything illegal, but the report still paints a pretty grim picture of his reign. Looking forward to seeing who will replace him.

Check out this email exchange, where an aide to the chairman is pressuring a staffer to come to specific pre-ordained conclusions.

Read the whole report here. It looks big, but it’s actually only about 20 pages.

I somehow missed the ruckus round Pasadena Now last year. They have had the nerve to outsource some of their work to Indian journalists and producers, who according to the publisher, who was on BBC Newshour yesterday, are providing stories for $5-$7 a pop, whereas local journalists come at at least $30,000/year plus benefits. As a small independent businessman trying to make a profit off his site, he explained that he had come to the conclusion that he couldn’t afford to have all his journalists on staff anymore, and would now try to cut cost by doing more of the work off-shore, especially back-office stuff like production of videos and the like, and also some content production. Hardly a novel idea in business, but in journalism, oh boy (of course, Reuters and others have done this for years now, as Robert Niles points out).

The case gives a complicated twist to the whole ‘future of the media’ discussion, because it shows how the future of actual journalism in a community may not be as narrowly tied to the future of traditionally employed journalists in the community as one would think. The professional role of the journalist as we have inherited it includes a wide range of tasks, and only some of those are acts of on-the-ground reporting, including the building of a network of trusted sources–others include writing up, editing, a lot of work over the phone and based on press releases and videos, and, increasingly, new media production work to put stories including video and pictures up on websites. News as a the reader/user/consumer meets the product is, as Dave Cohen always points out, the outcome of a process.

Those who resist outsourcing and similar examples of commercial media enterprises catching up with practices that are by now commonplace in most of the private sector may inadvertently be taking the side of journalists versus the side of journalism that covers a given community. I don’t say this because I am a fan of people loosing their jobs due to outsourcing, but because I like the idea of all communities being served journalistically at least in some form. And the dominant model in the U.S. has, like it or not, for the last hundred years or so, been to leave newsgathering to private enterprise.

The BBC had found a grumpy old journalist to say the usual things about how Pasedana Now was fake journalism etc. Pasadena’s publisher counted with what I think was a pretty good, basic point, that as far as he was concerned, it was not a question of American workers vs. Indian workers, but of no workers and no site, or of Indian workers contributing to a Pasadena site. He still wants to maintain a presence on the ground, and agreed that community coverage is impossible without a journalistic presence in the community (it is unclear to me how many people doing on-the-ground reporting in the community we are talking about, does anybody know?), but also wanted to make a living. Fair point, really (does anyone out there now how profitable/not Pasadena Now is?).

Here is how Reuter’s explain it’s decision, made back in 2004, to run some of its Wall Street coverage out of a Banaglore bureau (from PBS/Mediashift)

“Back in 2004, media giant Reuters announced that it would be outsourcing Wall Street reporting work to a newly created bureau in Bangalore, India. At that time, Reuters Editor in Chief David Schlesinger assured the skeptical that these reporters would only be handling rudimentary tasks such as fact-checking and data filtering, leaving the real meat of the matter to American reporters. “Now we can send our New York journalists out to do more interesting stories,” he told the BBC last February. “This is good for our business and good for journalism.””

Jennifer Woodard Maderazo, who wrote the PBS/MediaShift story on this, gives both pros and cons, but goes on to argue that “local news reporting from abroad is an area of journalism where outsourcing is least likely to work”. Sure, for some parts of the journalistic process, such as the actual on-the-ground reporting, but I don’t really see why post-production stuff can’t be done at night in India? Is it important that the multi-media producer is in the community covered?

Look at the site: Pasadena Now is an online site that provides local coverage, mostly consumer and community-oriented stuff, nothing special, about Pasadena, an affluent LA suburb. Do you need to live there to format the photo feature of the Christman Musical?

The city is home to two newspapers, the chain-owned Pasadena Star-News and the (chain-owned) alt weekly Pasadena Weekly. OK, Pasadena Now does not look like it is aiming for a Pullitzer for its investigative reporting, fearless muckracking, and so on, but nor are the others really. The site provides a modicum of publicity for community events, largely friendly covereage, probably to a large extend based on press releases and pre-packaged content, but hey, who knows, maybe they will break an uncomfortable story one day too (anybody know of any cases?) or in some other way move into watch-dog territory too.

I don’t see that it is less likely to do this that the two local newspapers, who seems at least equally dependent on local advertisers and elites for content and business, and may be even less embedded in the local community than Pasadena Now, which at least only serves Pasadena, and does not seem to fill its site with canned content from a chain (Pasadena Star-News top stories right now include an AP story about an arrest in Las Vegas and a poll about whether Illinois Gov. Blagojevich should resign. Pasadena Weekly has a cover story about President-Elect Obama). Are they all collectively dragging down the standard of what qualifies as ‘journalism’? If so, they are hardly ahead of the curve, and I’d rather have three competing stenographers for power and commerce competing in a community than have only one or two–even if one of them is only able to maintain the business model that sustains its journalism by firing some of its journalists, and doing more back-office work in India.

With their permission, I have posted here the syllabis discussed at the December 2 event I summarized below. Michael Schudson’s two proseminar syllabi are here and here. Helga Tawil-Souri’s MA core syllabus is here. Shannon Mattern already has her courses posted on her site here and here.

Micah Sifry is doing great work at TechPresident following how the Obama movement-network is being transformed, and transforming itself. His article is a must-read. There are some good comments on the site, and I have, in all modesty, chipped in myself too…

Other links

http://www.realitywindow.com/archives/2008/12/whats-happening-to-cts-obama-n.html

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97722217

http://progressiveresourcecatalog.org/index.php/Obama/ArticleAa