Empowering Volunteers Through Data Portability

In the Huffington Post article "The New Organizers, What's really behind Obama's ground game," Zack Exley details:

... the field program's innovative "neighborhood team" structure 
and the philosophy of volunteer management underlying it that is best
summarized by the field campaign's ubiquitous motto: "Respect. Empower.
Include.

When I first started hearing about this new model, I immediately related to those 3 key principles, Respect, Empower, Include.  Having worked in many local campaigns run with the traditional top down approach that treats volunteers as simply more bodies to get work done rather than sources of valuable insight, the notion of empowering volunteers to do more in a campaign is very appealing.

I also quickly related the same concepts to another movement I believe in strongly: open source software.  The philosophy of open source software is also about empowerment of technology users to have the freedom to use and modify the technology they use.  Open source software is also heavily community based requiring effective organizing to create a sustainable project.  As I thought about it more, I realized there is one major challenge from the open source community that might provide some insight into how to empower volunteers in political campaigns.

Open Source and Data Portability

At the 2008 Plone Conference, the keynote address was by Bradley Kuhn and titled: When Software Is a Service, Will Only Network Luddites Be Free?  In addition to being the best walk through of the history and philosophical thrust of the open source movement I've ever seen, he provided an eye opening assessment of the new trend for software as a service.  As great as "free" services like GMail, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. are, they pose a significant threat to the underlying philosophy powering the open source movements:  Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.

The main problem of many of the new "in the cloud" web services springing up left and right is twofold.  First, as a user of a cloud service, can I easily get my data and bring it somewhere else.  This is what I refer to as data portability.  Second, can I run my own copy of the software powering the service using my data?

The first challenge is partially handled by most cloud services.  GMail, for example, allows you to export your email by downloading it through a mail client via POP3 or IMAP.  The problem with this partial implementation is that you have to give up some of the features of GMail to move your email to another service.  You can't just run your own copy of the GMail software with the same features using your data.  This is where the second problem comes into play.

Without going into too much detail about the open source side of this (check out the video linked above if you are interested in the detail), both data portability and open source software are essential to guaranteeing user freedom with cloud based services.

Progressive Campaigns and Data Portability

So, how does this relate to political campaigns?  The current thinking about data ownership in campaigns is that the campaign owns all the data produced by volunteers and most likely provides that data to the party for integration into the party's voter file.  What's missing in this approach is the recognition that the data is really owned at a lower level than that: by the volunteer who created it.  The volunteer effectively grants the campaign, and by proxy, the party, the right to use the product of their work.

If campaigns really respect the work of their volunteers and want to empower them to become sustainable forces for change long after the campaign is over, shouldn't the volunteers have the freedom to use their data in future campaigns?

By providing volunteers with their data, volunteers bring extra power to future campaigns and causes they work for.  When a volunteer comes to a campaign with a rich data set in hand, there is more likely to be an environment of mutual respect.

One objection to overcome is the concern that volunteers may use that data for an opponent's campaign down the road.  I think a better way to rephrase that is:  Do campaigns own the volunteers that work for them in one campaign cycle or does an environment of mutual respect mandate that campaigns continue to appeal to volunteers to keep them involved in the future?

For example, if a candidate recruits volunteers by promising a public option in health care reform but later caves to industry lobbying pressure, doesn't that candidate deserve a challenge based on the volunteers they recruited under false pretenses?  With the current model of data ownership, the information about who those volunteers contacted is owned by the campaign and the party.  Take the example of Georgia, where challengers to a Democratic incumbent are forbidden from purchasing access to the state's voter file.  If volunteers owned the data they created, they could mount an effective challenge in the next election cycle.

Next Steps

So, how would this work?  The solution advocated by Bradley Kuhn is to both allow users the ability to export their data AND to get the source code necessary to setup their own application to use their data with the same features they used during the campaign.

The solution doesn't work without both.  For example, allowing a volunteer to extract their data from a proprietary system used by the campaign would only be of use if that volunteer were willing to fork out the high recurring monthly costs to run their own proprietary service.  This is part of the reason we are passionate about creating open source software for political campaigns.

It is also important to come up with a standardized import/export format supported by all systems used by campaigns.  Organizers should put pressure on their vendors (including us) to provide user based data export and import using this standard format.  This would allow volunteers to effectively plug in their data to campaigns they are affiliated with.

At the moment, this concept is in the beginning stages.  It will take time to design and implement the technological and cultural changes necessary to make it a reality.  However, we believe the question of data ownership is the starting point of the discussion.  What are your thoughts?