(2008-11-19) Mybo Details About Obama Campaigns Network Strategy

Michel Bauwens: MyBO details about Barack Obama campaign's network strategy. Larry Lessig warns that if Obama wins but doesn’t govern according to principles of openness and change, as promised, supporters may not be so interested in serving as MyBO foot soldiers in 2012.

Three items to illustrate the above.

*First, do check out the remarkable overview in the International Herald Tribune:

“The juxtaposition of a networked, open-source campaign and a historically imperial office will have profound implications and raise significant questions.*

his relationships are not the just traditional ties of Democrats – teachers’ unions, party faithful and Hollywood moneybags – but a network of supporters who used a distributed model of phone banking to organize and get out the vote, helped raise a record-breaking $600 million, and created all manner of media that was viewed millions of times

Next, check out a older case study in these email-forwarded excerpts, from the following article:

How Obama Really Did It. The social-networking strategy that took an obscure senator to the doors of the White House. By David Talbot. Technology Review, September/October 2008. (2008-08-19-HowObamaReallyDidIt)

The most interesting lesson is how action-oriented the use of the social networks was.

Trippi learned that 104,000 Texans had joined Obama’s social-­networking site, www.my.barackobama.com, known as MyBO. MyBO and the main Obama site had already logged their share of achievements, particularly in helping rake in cash.

In Texas, MyBO also gave the Obama team the instant capacity to wage fully networked campaign warfare. After seeing the volunteer numbers, Trippi says, “I remember saying, ‘Game, match–it’s over.'”

The MyBO databases could slice and dice lists of volunteers by geographic micro­region and pair people with appropriate tasks, including prepping nearby voters on caucus procedure

2. “The MyBO tools are, in essence, rebuilt and consolidated versions of those created for the Dean campaign. Dean’s website allowed supporters to donate money, organize meetings, and distribute media, says Zephyr Teachout, who was Dean’s Internet director

They [Blue State Digital] did a lot of nice work in taking this crude set of unrelated applications and making a complete suite.”

Blue State Digital had nine days to add its tools to Obama’s site before the senator announced his candidacy on February 10, 2007, in Springfield, IL. Among other preparations, the team braced for heavy traffic.

MyBO had logged more than a million user accounts and facilitated 75,000 local events, according to Blue State Digital.

MyBO and the main campaign site made it easy to give money

MyBO also made giving money a social event: supporters could set personal targets, run their own fund-raising efforts, and watch personal fund-­raising thermometers rise.

To bring people to the site in the first place, the campaign sought to make Obama a ubiquitous presence on as many new-media platforms as possible.

The viral Internet offered myriad ways to propagate unfiltered Obama messages. The campaign posted the candidate’s speeches and linked to multimedia material generated by supporters

A single YouTube posting of Obama’s March 18 speech on race has been viewed more than four million times.

The campaign even used the micro­blogging service Twitter, garnering about 50,000 Obama “followers” who track his short posts.

The campaign, consciously or unconsciously, became much more of a media operation than simply a presidential campaign, because they recognized that by putting their message out onto these various platforms, their supporters would spread it for them,” says Andrew Rasiej

able to use MyBO to organize and instruct caucus-goers. “They have done a great job in being precise in the use of the tools,” Teachout says. “In Iowa it was house parties, looking for a highly committed local network. In South Carolina, it was a massive get-out-the-vote effort.”

we provided the tools, remote training, and opportunity for supporters to build the campaign on their own,” the Obama campaign told Technology Review in a written statement. “When the campaign eventually did deploy staff to these states, they supplemented an already-built infrastructure and volunteer network.”

Yes, there are blogs and Listservs,” Franklin-Hodge says. “But the point of the campaign is to get someone to donate money, make calls, write letters, organize a house party. The core of the software is having those links to taking action–to doing something.”

Our third item is a commentary from the Canadian John Sobol, focusing on the use of the website itself, and how he reacted to criticism that was voiced on it:

offered easy-to-find and easy-to-use toolkits to promote local activism, and a platform for members to create and join action groups.

The Florida Veterans for Obama, for example, garnered 5157 members, hosted 521 events, made 19,598 calls and raised $27,982.59 during the campaign. There were over 35,000 of these self-organizing groups that cost the campaign nothing in terms of time or money, but that contributed energetically to its success.

Interestingly, the single largest group that formed on Obama’s community website during the campaign was created to attack him on a point of policy, including posts encouraging members to vote McCain unless Obama stopped supporting Bush’s controversial surveillance bill (FISA).