PoliticsWeb2.0: Rating Candidate Sites, Dealing with Communication Overload

I came in a few minutes late on Christian Vaccari's talk on candidate websites in the 2008 US presidential primaries. Vaccari is at the University of Bologna in Italy, and has been studying online politics for a while. He is explaining his research goals:
-to assess how US presidential candidates adopted online communication during the primaries, looking at information vs participation and Rs v Ds.
-and to test the "normalization of cyberspace" hypothesis that top-tier candidates will have better websites than lower-tier candidates.

His methodology: a longitudinal analysis of candidate websites starting in March 2007. He coded sites by 87 variables, relating to leveraging the internet for information and participation. He also looked at the professional level of the websites, how well designed they were, etc.

His results are an interesting confirmation of what we've been saying here at techPresident for months and months. But it's nice to get it from a Italian academic observer, nonetheless.

From March 2007 to January 2008, candidate websites overall improved in all three categories. The campaign mattered, Vaccari says, in that it forced them to improve their sites. His January 2008 snapshot rated the top sites in this order: Obama, Edwards, Clinton, McCain and Paul. At the bottom: Gravel, Hunter, Fred Thompson, Huckabee and Giuliani.

On average, Democratic candidate sites led Republican sites on Vaccari's measures, in terms of their delivery of information, encouragement of participation and professionalism of design.

Vaccari's conclusions: Different parties adapt differently to changing campaign environments. Socialists and Labor parties were the first to put in place the mass membership model, which spread to the others. Then when TV became the dominant mode for campaigning, rightwing parties like Thatcher's Conservatives adapted first and best, forcing the others to follow. It seems as though left, Democratic parties and candidates are adapting best to the new era of internet politics. Will this force the others to adapt, he asks? Um, is the Pope Catholic?

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is now talking on the "Labors of Internet-Assisted Activism." He's got an interesting blog called Participations where has also posted his paper.

"In a sense I've come a very long way to make a very simple and obvious point," he starts. Today's campaigns all want people to "get involved." They are very interested in attracting volunteers and channeling them in productive directions. There are some unintended consequences, however, of doing this in an internet-powered environment.

The internet has reduced the costs of communication, right? he asks. Perhaps only in part. More precisely, the front-end costs of communicating are lower for the sender of information. Well, the low cost may come with a high price. And he's not talking about dealing with spam. When there are no incentives not to communicate, we run into a collective action problem of over-communication.

This problem is relatively invisible, because it only appears at the receiving end, not on campaign websites. [Well, if you try to keep up with the comments on a campaign blog that gets hundreds of comments a day, you already have this problem too.]

Nielsen calls this the "labors of internet-assisted activism" because he sees several forms of new work required. First, there is overcommunication. "You can't repeat things too often," a campaign organizer told him in his field research. Indeed, when you consider that people don't always pay attention to incoming information via email, phone, flyers, etc, this is painfully obvious. The campaign Nielsen studied has about 700 groups on its site just for the city he focused on.

[I assume this is Obama in New York, by the way, which makes this a compelling but not necessarily universally generalizable example. That's because New York was a Super Tuesday state, and not a prime target for Obama's professional field team. At the same time, I'm sure hundreds of people came out of the woodwork and wanted to help, and there must have been a crazy proliferation of groups and individuals to manage, mostly at the last minute.]

There's a lot of miscommunication inherent in this process. "Oops, here it is again," is a comment one organizer gave to Nielsen. When the front-end costs of communicating are low, there is less deterrents against sloppiness. He also describes all the confusion that arises around the most mundane information, like not knowing for sure when an event is starting.

And then there is communication overload. "You mean to say you read all of that [xxxx]?" a campaign staffer said to him. Some of the people he interviewed got 70 or more emails in the last five days of the campaign, and these were volunteers, not professionals. That many emails requesting involvement, such as poll-watching or leafletting, are clearly too many. People starting referring to communication from the campaign itself as spam.

An organizer handed a huge pile of names and addresses on a sign-up list just before the election said, "I don't know what to do with all of this." Without guidance, he was overloaded.

Another problem that arose: people who thought there messages weren't getting through solved that issue by, yes, sending them again. Now you can see how volunteers might get so many discordant action emails near the end of the primary.

And then, ironies of ironies, in the last week before the election, the core people stopped using the web and largely went offline to be able to get things done and stop the information overload on themselves. Lots of people who wanted to volunteer told Nielsen afterwards that they felt abandoned in that last week.

One solution that organizations have tried to adapt to communication overload is to shift to distributive strategies, he notes. The problem with that is campaigns have deadlines, and they also need to stay on message to achieve their goals. A lot is now happening outside their control, on folk-driven websites or list-serves. So, inevitably, communication confusion will still be a problem.

It would be interesting to see what campaign field organizers have to say about this issue.

Last up is Damien Lanfrey, talking about "Web-born user-generated activism: capturing emerging forms, properties and opportunities in the social web." He starts out noting that this isn't about American web activism, and its part of a broader project looking at organizational change in the context of the sociology of technology.

He starts by rolling out some stats on the growth of the web, and especially of the user-generated web. Among the top ten sites across various countries, sites with UGC dominate. The web is shifting from a text-dominated, broadcast-like medium to one that is more multimedia and people-centric. And the web is increasingly asking for our data and rewarding us with the social side of information, ie, sharing/rating/mashing.

Now to a case study of how all this is playing out in the NGO arena. His case is Kiva.org, the microfinance site. It has 280,000 lenders and 41,000 loans funded so far. 90% of the money is reloaned, and the repayment rate is 99.89%. The average loan is $520.

[I had to step out for a few minutes and missed part of Lanfrey's presentation, especially when he cites Mike Turk's Personal Democracy Forum piece "The Citizen and His Browser, Volunteering Alone." Ironically Mike is in the room!]

Some key trends he is seeing: more transparency, no membership, you own your attention, the web is a collective brain for the NGO, we're moving from mass marketing to advocacy networks.

Finishing up, he talks about potential threats and pitfalls to this transition in social activism. He questions whether decentralizing control is dangerous. Does this emphasis on online activism produce less involvement (on the ground)? How do groups cope with technological innovation and change? Is a click online a less meaningful contribution?