Over the Horizon: User-Centered Online Politics?

Esther Dyson, a longtime tech industry watcher and pioneer, has an interesting piece up on Huffington Post that I think has relevance for politics online. In "Don't Cry For Me, MicroHoogle," she looks at the current hullaballoo over the Microsoft-Yahoo! potential merger, and argues that "the long-term news is happening closer to home - where users interact among themselves through the Web and through online social networks."

On the one hand, she notes how behavioral targeting is getting more precise, as companies ranging from search giant Google to start-ups you've never heard of learn how to work with internet service providers to track users directly (albeit anonymized) and show them highly relevant ads. This approach, she predicts, will get more competitive and will tend to undercut traditional online publishers who use general content to pull in readers and then sell adjacent ads. The corollary to the political arena, I think, is the growing industry of micro-targetters, like TargetPoint Consulting and its ilk.

On the end of the spectrum, Dyson sees a new user-centric practice emerging, where individuals custom-make their own walled gardens and decide exactly what information they want their friends, acquaintances, and even commercial marketers to have about them. Orbitz, she notes, still doesn't know her preferred airlines after five years of her using that travel service, while Dopplr, a new platform that enables her to share her travel schedule with her friends, could conceivably market her and her travel preferences to an airline like British Airways--provided that she approves and shares in the arrangement.

Her conclusion: "new value is being created ... in users' own walled gardens, which they will cultivate for themselves in real estate owned by the social networks and by highly targeted, user-data-rich vertical communities. The new value creators are not efficient ad networks, but companies that know how to create platforms like Facebook and communities like Dopplr."

Now, what does this analysis mean for our brave new world of internet-powered politics? At a granular level, many political activists already self-determine online—they have built their ecology around personal sites they control (their blogs and/or their profiles on social networks) and thus controlled who they link to, what products (candidates) they plug, etc.

But the main holders of current political data about voters--those big firms known as campaigns and parties--still communicate with their consumer (voters) in just the same ways that Dyson describes as the old model, treating them as buckets of preferences to tailor a message to. Around them is the whole CRM software industry, which in this case means constituent relationship management, not customer relationship management.

But I think we are beginning to see a reversal or a chipping away at the edifice. First, using intermediary platforms like Meetup and Eventful, voters are connecting laterally outside the control of the campaigns to do their own thing on behalf of candidates, and in the case of Eventful, to actually collectivize their demand around something as basic as getting the candidate to come to their city. (Ron Paul, John Edwards and Mike Huckabee have all done events based on Eventful demand for them, which we can call "candidate relationship management.")

Unfortunately, most campaigns and political organizations don’t really want to give voters enough user-centric data to see themselves clearly as a collective. They fear that divulging this information will hurt their causes, because it can help their opponents and it may also empower supporters to go off the reservation. (And it’s definitely a double-edged sword, because if a campaign wants to project an image of strength while its internal data shows that no one is opening its emails, coming to its events, or giving it money, that will be immediately pounced on as proof of weakness).

Nevertheless, we are beginning to learn how to extract this data and share it collectively, and thus it is now possible to know how candidates are doing online with certain metrics that, while imperfect, tell us something about how much voter enthusiasm they’ve garnered (i.e. # of “friends” on Facebook or MySpace, # of views on YouTube, # of mentions in blogs via Technorati). As some campaigns experiment with giving their supporters social networking tools, it has also become possible to lift up the hood and see, for example, how many local events or house parties volunteers are organizing for a candidate in a particular zip code or geographic area.

But to date, only one campaign has taken the radical step of giving its supporters a perfectly clear mirror into their own collective efforts, and that is Ron Paul’s campaign. Unlike most of the other candidates, who invested in building elaborate web sites and social network platforms (such as mybarackobama.com), Paul’s campaign has let the internet be his platform. His most interesting move has been to share, in real time, detailed information on his campaign donors—name, address, zipcode, $$ amount. That has allowed his most zealous supporters to produce detailed and accurate tracking of their own efforts, and enabled them to organize several successful “money-bombs” – specific days where thousands of supporters pledged to contribute $100 or some other amount, resulting in several huge windfalls and the startling fact that Paul raised more money in the last quarter of 2007 than any of the Republican candidates running.

The same way start-ups like Dopplr are offering their users a service that is centered on the user controlling their personal data about travel, a few projects like OpenCongress.org, with its "MyOpenCongress" feature, are starting to experiment with giving activists highly personalizable tools. (Full disclosure: I am a consultant to the Sunlight Foundation, which funds OpenCongress.) But right now, most online political activists seem happy to either make do with a hodge-podge of discrete tools and sites to imperfectly conduct their politicking, or to let the campaigns and parties own their data. If Dyson is right, in the same way that sites like Facebook scratch people's social networking itch, there may be a new market opportunity for someone who can dream up a new kind of political networking platform that enables individuals to control their experiences and their actions online. Time will tell.