Leveraging the “Long Tail” of Community Organizing

By now, we are all familiar with the business models of Amazon, Netflix, Google and others.  They aggregate all of the many small requests for information, products and creative content into a single portal from which the user can easily query and find the commodity they are seeking.  From that portal, users can literally access almost anything their heart desires, whether it be a rare album released overseas or the latest Spike Lee joint. In academic circles, the name given this type of business model that is so well suited to the Internet, is the “long tail” (popularly coined by Chris Anderson).

 In many ways, the Obama campaign, against all odds has figured out a way to adapt the “long tail” business model to political campaigning specifically.  He has combined the power of the Internet, to costlessly form groups and connect geographically distant groups and individuals with the traditional methods of community organizing to create a truly transformational new model for political campaigning.

His campaign bears both the hallmark of his community organizing background in that it leverages strong ties in the offline world.  However it also uses the power of the Internet to exploit weak ties and massively scale up the political organizing model. 

The final piece of Obama’s campaign-community organizing model was to abandon sampling and embrace big data and the experimental possibilities it introduced.  A very simple but very important paradigm shift occurred in 2012 when top strategists stopped asking how to design the best sampling method and started asking, why sample at all when we have access to individual data about each voter?

The “long tail” model is about more than offering a myriad of personalized options however; it’s also about targeting and [seamlessly] connecting the customer to their desired offering.  The use of big data and major advances in analytics allowed the Obama campaign team to adapt that model to an election campaign.  The connecting of personalized data from all over the digital landscape into a single narrative about a single voter allowed microtargeting of information and get-out-the-vote information to a level never before seen in political campaigning. 

 That piece completed the technical aspect of the success of the Obama campaign.  But, for the many Obama supporters and voters out there, I suspect when you ask them why they support Obama, it won’t be because they got the accurate information and in-depth volunteer training; it will also be because of the real connection they felt with Barack Obama himself and with other Obama supporters.

Great campaigns are said to engage the HEAD, the HEART, and the HANDS…. Even the way a “leader” is defined within the Obama campaign hints at this desire to engage all three elements for action.  A leader in an Obama campaign cannot simply have good ideas or strong managerial qualities, they need to be able to train others effectively and remain in constant contact with their trainees.  In many ways, a leader looks exactly like an effective mentor. Training is in-depth (the head); there is a clear escalation of commitment or ladder of engagement (the heart); and eventually, the goal is to have volunteers train even more volunteers and reach exponentially larger audiences (the hands).

 I’m fascinated with this characterization/definition of leadership. Barack Obama himself acknowledges that the most important lessons in leadership he received were not at Harvard Law, but on the streets of Chicago as a community organizer and as an advocate on behalf of powerless residents.  He remarked that this job was “the best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School”.

Leadership then, is essentially about creating, nurturing and then leveraging the power of relationships.  Leadership is about harnessing the power of the networked rather than the individual (as in Reed’s law).  Leadership is about building social capital (both bridging and binding) to borrow from Bob Putnam’s framework.  In other words, Obama defines leadership as the ability to build potential rather than actualize potential.  Anybody can take a nicely built infrastructure and direct it, but not everybody can actually build, from the ground up, the infrastructure for change.  That is true leadership, and true transformation.  And that is where the Obama campaign succeeded in an unprecedented fashion.

The Washington Post Enters Act II

Growing up in the Washington DC area, the Washington Post was an integral part of my life. Once a week my grandmother would browse the Obituaries section to make sure a lost friend hadn’t passed away. My parents left scattered papers stained with coffee every morning on their way to work. And I saved the clippings when the local University of Maryland women’s basketball team won a national championship.

 

However, as I grew, so did the rapid decline of this staple local icon. The paper has seen a precipitous decline from its glory days covering the Watergate scandal, to the Graham family hammering the final nail in the coffin of what was once a great local institution with the sale of the paper to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

 

However, although sales of the paper may be on the decline, it’s content hasn’t simply disappeared. Columnists E.J. Dionne, Dana Milbank & George Will remain incredibly popular and influential. The free version of the paper, The Express is ubiquitous on the DC metro transit trains, and students still regularly read and search the online paper for credible and reliable information. The problem is that much of its former readership (my family included) has abandoned the paid paper in favor of more convenient and significantly cheaper [online] sources of the same information.

 

So, the business hasn’t collapsed insomuch as the business MODEL has imploded. Clay Shirky points this out in his blog post Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. He writes that the newspaper industry never thought that exactly what did happen could ever happen. That the internet would make it ever easier to share, that given the architecture and culture of the Internet, paywalls would be extremely unpopular and perhaps more damaging than helpful, and that digital advertising would be difficult to monetize. But he then comes to the conclusion that the institutions themselves are inherently without value, and that you can separate good news from good newspapers.

 

This is where I disagree.  Although I agree with the claim that good journalists will remain good journalists regardless of the institution they are connected with, I also believe that good journalists still need institutions with tried and true reputations to market that brand of professionalism to consumers of news.  What is lost between the decline of long-storied institutions like the Post, and the rise of individual talking heads is that consumers have fewer and fewer tools to distinguish between actual news that has been properly vetted and verified and rampant opinion masquerading as news.  Even myself, as an avid consumer of news worldwide find it difficult without certain gatekeepers such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, etc. to distinguish between B.S. and verifiable news.  Journalism still needs gatekeepers who clearly label their news as news and their opinion as opinion, with a large reputation at stake, who will then make the proper investments in quality.

 

That’s what’s lost when you abandon the infrastructure that has taken decades to build.  Watergate would not have happened without the strong support of the entire Washington Post all the way up to the owners themselves.  Katharine Graham cared that they Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein published actual facts, and were willing to go to bat (with all of their resources) against an aggressive and very powerful Presidential administration.  Nixon then, would have crushed two young freelance reporters quicker than the story could ever have gained traction or credibility without the support of a strong institution like the Washington Post.

 

I largely agree with Dean Starkman when he says in his blog post, Confidence Game that, “a fundamental tenet of my Neo-Institutional school is that it doesn’t care about the institution for its own sake, only for the kind of reporting it produces”.  Starkman’s Neo-Institutional model speaks more to the evolution of these newspaper institutions rather than the destruction of them, because contrary to some claims, there is societal value in having robust journalist institutions.  It’s my hope that Jeff Bezos feels the same about the Washington Post because it is more than a collection of good journalists and advertising revenue, it is a fundamental democratic tool to keep those in power accountable, and citizens informed (rather than manipulated).

Frederick D. Patterson – A Forgotten Hero

I chose to write my blog post about a largely forgotten but incredibly important African American educational pioneer Dr. Frederick D. Patterson.

As a Gates scholar myself, and through internships and consultant jobs with the United Negro College Fund (which he founded), my life has largely been shaped by the legacy of this man who fought for a lifetime to expand collegiate access and opportunities for talented African American youth.

Dr. Patterson founded the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), which administers Bill Gates’ $1.5 billion scholarship endowment.  This fund helped to pay for my undergraduate degree at the George Washington University and has supported over 7,000 college graduates from disadvantaged backgrounds.

During my undergraduate education I began working with the research division of UNCF, which is called the Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute.  There I gained invaluable experience researching and writing educational research reports.

However, throughout my time working there, I always wondered who was the man behind the name of the research institute.  When I looked him up online, I found biographies, but curiously his Wikipedia page had only a paragraph of very skeletal information.

This is odd because when you look at the long list of accomplishments of this man even before the iconic Civil Rights movement gained any momentum, it’s hard to believe there’s not a ton of information on him out there.  So, given how my own life has been so strongly influenced by this man’s professional accomplishments and personal aspirations for African American youth just like me, I naturally wanted to correct this criminal deficit of information.

There is much information, details and citations still missing from this article.  For instance, although I know during his tenure as President of Tuskegee University (then Tuskegee Institute), he established the Commercial Aviation Program, which trained the pilots that would eventually be popularly coined as the Tuskegee Airmen.  Again, this one man’s incredible vision facilitated the birth of a United States military legend, the exceptionally skilled, all African American pilots in a still severely segregated America.

I want to add a section specifically on the Tuskegee Airmen, but I need to find more reliable sources to flesh out the story and to better reference some of this information.  I know that he also had an autobiography, so I would like to add much more detail to the post after reading it.

In addition to a need for more robust citations, the formatting also took me a little while to master.  The article in its current state contains much more information than what I initially found, but going forward it will need additional citations and a more robust list of references. This will take more time and effort than I could dedicate in one assignment, but I hope to return to and improve this article going forward.

Transparency and the Net: A Double-Edged Sword

Politicians love to talk about how the Internet allows the powerful and powerless to have two-way conversations for the first time.  That we, as citizens can engage with our representatives in ways never before possible.  That we as consumers can influence the companies that produce for us in ways virtually unheard of in the past.  However, it is important to more closely examine the exact nature of this “two-way conversation”.  As Rachel Mackinnon points out in her book, Consent of the Networked, not only do most netizens engage in these conversations without any explicit recognition that they are indeed multi-party (rather than simply two-way) conversations, but even when we do, we don’t seem to have a good understanding of who those third-parties are, and what exactly they expect from these online conversations.

While the average user tends to assume that the information posted, searched and bought online is a simple two-way transaction or interaction between the user and their intended audience, in reality there is an entire network of outside actors watching and gathering information from these online interactions often under hazy terms and conditions of use.  Corporations watch in order to understand exactly what we want and at what price point.  Governments watch us for an entire host of reasons including: for national security reasons, political competition, and public opinion gauging.  The Internet platforms we use including social media and Google watch us in order to sell ever more personalized e-advertising to private companies.  Criminals watch in order to steal valuable information.  Essentially, there is an entire web of actors watching and trading some of our most personal information among themselves, largely without our knowledge or explicit consent. 

As Tim O’ Reilly points out in his blog post, The Architecture of Participation, the structure of the Internet is designed to be open source and transparent. There is great value in transparency, since it allows for frequent innovations in the structure and form of websites and virtual networks.  The Internet has given rise to websites like Wikipedia, eBay, Facebook and Google who fundamentally have changed the way ordinary individuals access and disseminate information.  All of these websites began with an idea premised on the idea that if the system were structured right, then users would fill the content. They were right, and their websites have grown exponentially and are unique to the Internet in the way they create virtual spaces for both big and small voices. 

Open source software is also a result of the transparent architecture of the Internet.  As Eric Steven Raymond writes about in his book The Cathedral and the Bazaar, an entirely new (and significantly cheaper) model of software development was created by harnessing the openness and connectivity of the Internet and the “long tail” of software developers.  Unfortunately, it’s like flipping a coin to see whether you’ll get the open-source innovations like Linux or the large and interlinked web of institutions that profit off of the constant sharing of our personal information.

In many ways, the Internet has changed the way we socialize, plan and generally live our lives.  The Internet has created an entirely new platform for us to engage in with an exponentially larger number of people around the world than we’ve ever been able to in the past.  We ought to resign ourselves that surveillance on the Internet will largely increase rather than decrease, but we also need to work hard to define legal boundaries for the large proliferation of personal data and information on the Internet.  We need to develop legal tools for individuals to fight back against the immoral exploitation of their e-information.  It might take a long time for these tools to be properly enforced, but that does not mean that we ought to work hard to devise them and come up with models that equalize some of the asymmetric power between (largely uninformed) individuals and institutions with armies of computer engineers and lawyers at their disposal to unfairly shape the ways we engage with websites.  In a way, we need to devise a new, updated 21^st century social contract between state, individual and corporation to govern our Internet lives.