Can a volunteer think, make decisions, and lead?
For the Obama campaign, the answer was yes.
Their philosophy ushered in a profound change in the use of campaign volunteers.
According to writers like Zack Exley, the strict hierarchical structure where a few people make every decision for a mass of minions disappeared. Instead, volunteers were given latitude to make their own decisions on how best to find and motivate potential supporters in their areas.
Obama Campaign Manager David Plouffe spoke to our Digital Media class at the Harvard Kennedy School and said that in letting volunteers lead the campaign often broke the rules of conventional wisdom. One example that he named was the decision to allow supporters to download voter lists, which was previously unheard of. Voter lists are the compiled and detailed information on individuals, which indicate whether or not they are someone who can still be persuaded one way or the other. Identifying and targeting persuadable voters is probably the most important job of a campaign, which is why it was so unique to freely release the information. Yet, Plouffe says they gambled that the pros would outweigh the cons. Their idea was to empower and trust local leaders. If a volunteer could download a voter list for his neighborhood and identify undecided voters, then that volunteer could specifically target the undecided voter and not waste time on folks who had already made up their minds.
Here’s the thing that’s exciting to me about this campaign. All semester in our Digital Media class, we’ve been studying the concept of Web 2.0, which basically espouses an open and collective approach to solving problems. In a sense, it seems that the Obama campaign tapped into the energy of the mass collective by trusting the group to make key decisions on its own. By empowering local leaders, the campaign seems to have harnessed more energy than they could have had they not granted some autonomy to volunteers.
The question that pops into my mind is what lessons are to be learned from the success of the Obama campaign? Is there a recipe that has been written for allowing people to gather, discuss and decide issues dealing with their local government? Can a few ingredients be added to this recipe to create Government 2.0, where motivated volunteers really do play a role in self-governance?
Obama’s campaign didn’t go that far. Plouffe clearly told our class that the professionals handled the big policy and campaign decisions, not the volunteers. But I wonder whether the energy Obama tapped couldn’t be mined for more potential in the future. The collective brain is far greater than any single brain. The trick is harnessing and focusing its power in the chase of truly great ideas.
Paul Adrian 