At 12:30 Jerome Armstrong, Nancy Scola, and other former staffers of Mark Warner's Forward Together PAC led a recap of Warner's short-lived candidacy for President called "The Campaign That Could Have Been: Warner's Forward Together PAC."

A major theme of the talk was about the problems of disparate data sources and how to merge them. According Armstrong, Howard Dean's campaign failed in Iowa because there wasn't enough coordination and sharing of information among his supporters. Information databases are like silos, he said; they are too self-contained. The goal is to integrate them so that all activists have access to the information. This is a common theme among Democratic activists, as is the lamenting that Republicans do it better.

Warner thought of himself as a tech-savvy candidate, and it was the job of his tech team to convey this to the public. This led to Warner's appearance on Second Life and other forward-thinking projects. His team's use of social networking struck me as unique. They described MySpace and Friendster as the first generation of social networking -- they are sites we consciously log on to and use. But their goal was to integrate social networking apps into Warner's main page, intertwining them so that when users land on a login page or donation page, they would not even realize they're using a social networking site. Social networking will become part of the everyday Internet experience (if it hasn't already).

As for Warner's press conference in Second Life, there was hardly any chatter in the blogosphere, and the Washington press corps were completely confused by it. However G4 TV, Channel One, NPR, and even Katie Couric picked it up, which taught Warner's team that they could reach voters by using games and virtual worlds.

In this way Warner's PAC was a venture capital environment -- tech-savvy staffers understood the software and the investment needed for it, and pushed for it.

At the base of all of this is the need to lower the barrier to technology; how can a grandmother upload her event list? These issues aren't as sexy as Secondlife but are essential to campaigns.

At this point frustration set in again about the lack of integrated data. The Democratic party takes data away from activist groups the day after election; thousands of email addresses are lost. There were more questions about who should own the data, how can Democrats compete with the GOP's microtargeting operations, etc.

The ideas about integrating social networking into candidate's websites. To be sure, the frustration about voter lists and data sharing are real, but it obscured some exciting new concepts.

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[Update]

After lunch (vegan!) I attended a session with a title that had piqued my interest, "Why Technology Sucks." Run by Clay Johnson of Blue State Digital, the session was a chance for software vendors and their users to discuss the shortcomings of their customer relationship management and data-mining and sharing software.

It took about 10 seconds for peoples' complaints about their chosen vendor to emerge (Clay made it a rule that no vendors were to be named). The biggest gripes -- a lack of across-the-board integration. Voter files, donor lists, and email addresses are typically not integrated, meaning that campaigns often must rely on one vendor for email, another to manage voter files, and so on.

Another issue is proprietary databases -- it's often difficult or impossible for campaigns to take transfer data from one application to another. In a world where campaigns must make use of multiple services using the same data sets, this is a huge problem. Ben Rahn of ActBlue stated the clear solution: campaigns should have total control over their information and be able to flexibly import or export their data.

The problem is exacerbated by campaigns' heavy reliance on lists. Campaigners are constantly adding to existing databases, inching toward the unattainable: a complete, accurate list of voters. That there are so many technological hurdles in the way of achieving this is the cause of more than a little grumbling.

One solution that was proposed: we need a New Organizing Institute for technology to teach campaigners how to discover technological solutions, and to perhaps build their own solutions if none are available.

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A lively session on Second Life was led by Ruby Sinreich of Netcentric Campaigns and Andrew Hoppin of Draft Clark and CivicSpaceLabs. RootsCampSL actually took place in Second Life a week after the elections, and the session was a debrief on that event and on the uses of Second Life for political organizing.

To set up RootsCampSL, Ruby and Andrew worked with Better World Island, a progressive space on SL that is home to Camp Darfur and the Peace and Justice Center. They set up an amphitheater there and, for two hours a day, seven days a week, progressives involved in the mid-terms were encouraged to create avatars and hang out, as was anyone else who was on Better World Island. There will continue to be meetings every Wednesday at 4pm EST (1pm Second Life time).

Aldon Hynes, who worked on the Ned Lamont campaign in Connecticut, took pictures and video of the event which he posted on blip.tv, and many people who couldn't physically attend the conferences were able to attend this one.

For Ruby and Andrew, this last point underscores one of the biggest strengths of Second Life for organizers -- the ability for people to meet in real time, and to experience something more akin to real life that was previously possible. While blogs, discussions boards, and social networking sites help people create and sustain networks and conversations, they are all asynchronous modes of communication. Second Life, on the other hand, is like an embodied IRC chat room: people speak to each other in real time. The use of avatars gives this conversation a spatial dimension as well, as participants can indicate who they are listening or speaking to and can indicate a broader range of emotions.

This means SL could be an importance aspect of political work. Already groups have held meetups for people, like Doctors for Clark, who don't reside in the same physical area. IBM has been placing teams within Second Life, Harvard offersr classes taught there, Edelman has initiated a presence there, and even the Nationall Atmospheric Administration has posted a tsunami training guide there.

Tags: rootscamp, rootscampDC

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