How the Obama 2012 campaign harnessed tech to win votes

Last night, at the Royal Automobile Club on London’s Pall Mall, Zeitgeist was fortunate enough to hear Harper Reed, the Chief Technology Officer of the Obama 2012 US presidential campaign speak candidly about how he helped get out the vote and keep the Democrats in the White House. Harper is ex-Threadless, the famous T-shirt company that lets users contribute their own designs, with the most popular becoming actual products sold the world over. It’s a democratic philosophy, one that understandably caught the attention of the campaign committee. It is also the kind of thinking that cities like New York and Chicago are starting to employ; actively gathering, analysing and distributing data to inform policy implications and help citizens. What follows is a brief summary of his thoughts and points that Zeitgeist found interesting.

Harper began the talk with the fundamentals, discussing how, when he arrived, the campaign seemingly already had much of the data gathering resources needed to achieve what he wanted. The trouble was it as all siloed. Putting all the data together was a major step in the right direction, toward cohesive data analysis. He elaborated, saying they went from having fifteen different numbers for doors that needed to be knocked on, to one. On hiring the right people for the task at hand, Harper was explicit in noting that they had hired tech people and taught them about politics, rather than the other way around. He riffed on the state of journalism, saying it was similarly important when hiring journalists that know about tech.

One of the more interesting insights Harper talked about involved the target demographics. Those most likely to vote are male or female 18-28, and women perhaps in her 50s. The younger group is adept and comfortable with all digital platforms, but still uses paper a fair amount. Paper, by contrast, is an essential medium for that middle-aged female voter. So the insight was about making paper use more efficient, given these groups’ use of it. Understandably this was a hard decision for a group of very tech-minded people to arrive at, but the acknowledgement showed they were willing to park their own pre-conceptions on how things ought to be done.

Like many startups, they were constantly trying to fail in order to create redundancies. This involved hosting hackathons where code was obsessively broken and then reconstructed, “ensuring things would break in ways we understood”, as Harper put it. They had the same approach with the content they published, aggressively testing every piece to make sure it was relevant and engaging for the intended audiences. What they failed to foresee was the Internet activist group Anonymous launching a DDOS attack the day before the election to coincide with Guy Fawkes day, which helped trigger a meltdown over at Amazon’s cloud servers, AWS. Harper made it sound like not too much trouble to switch the servers from the East Coast where they had been affected, to the West Coast, but the experience must have been a stressful one.

Lastly, he offered an opinion increasingly shared by many in the industry, which was a reluctance to talk of mobile device use as “second-screening”. Mobile devices, Harper pointed out quite rightly and obviously, are the first thing you look at when you wake up, the last thing you look at when you go to bed, and the thing you’re actually looking at when you’re supposed to be watching TV. Mobile first should always be the initial mindset.

In questions, Ruth Porter asked whether there were any pearls of wisdom that could be applied to those in UK politics and how they go about with their own strategy of getting out the vote. Harper conceded he had met that day with a party “whose name starts with ‘L'”, and believed that what was key was investment, commitment and belief from the very top in what social and data could do for the campaign. Without that, such efforts would amount to nothing. The lessons of the Obama 2012 campaign – and the pitfalls of Romney’s campaign – offer valuable lessons for political parties, but it seems any efforts at cherrypicking ideas or going in half-hearted would doom any prospect of leveraging what the Obama team were able to do.

Any success in Harper’s tech strategy must be qualified against the sheer unpopularity of Obama’s rival candidate

Olympic Winners and Losers – Empty Seats and Byzantine Ticketing

What a fantastic ad from Channel 4 advertising their showcasing of the Paralympic Games, beginning soon. Meanwhile, what of the Olympics? Though there have been tales of Tube and travel chaos, Zeitgeist has not personally experienced problems with public transport, either for commuting or for travelling to the Games themselves. And while our mayor may have been left dangling like a pinata the other day, he certainly seems not to have left London in the lurch in its preparedness for the Games.

LOCOG, however, have had to face two severe lines of questioning since the Games opened last Friday. The first, which became immediately apparent to anyone watching the first few days of events, was that thousands of seats were unoccupied, including for events LOCOG had deemed sold out. The fault, it seemed, lay mainly with the Olympic Family, who weren’t turning up to events. Seb Coe tried to shrug off the incident, saying it was normal for the few first events of an Olympic Games. It must be particularly galling for him though after the same thing happened in the 2008 Games in Beijing and he pledged to avoid such an occurrence in London. It is unfortunate then for all concerned then that, despite releasing more tickets, the problem is still not resolved as of today.

Moreover, this brings us to the second big problem. The selling of tickets. The whole balloting system originally set up was pretty arcane and inefficient to begin with. But now with tickets being released on a rolling basis throughout the day, the chaos is all the more apparent. Yesterday, eConsultancy published an excellent article with a blow-by-blow account of just why “the Olympic ticketing website is so bad”. Worst, for Zeitgeist, was firstly not having a mobile version / mobile-optimised site. Secondly it was not having anything informing users of when certain tickets became available. Thankfully, as in any well-functioning democratic society, where there is a market failure, substitute products or competitors will come in to correct the situation. Such was the case at the weekend, when the completely unofficial @2012TicketAlert account was launched on Twitter, which used automated tweets to alert followers when any Olympic tickets became available. It was a fantastic idea, and seemed much in keeping with the ‘hack’ trend we see nowadays, when companies like Microsoft and Transport for London open up their APIs for users to develop their own programs. Such examples clearly had not occurred to LOCOG though, and earlier this evening, after amassing over 8,000 followers, LOCOG denied the @2012TicketAlert account further access. As the administrator of the account, Adam, wrote,

“[I]t seems someone at LOCOG has taken exception to our idea (or the publicity it is getting) and instead of reaching out to us or addressing the lack of a notification system, they have simply blocked our access to their server. This means we are unable to check or post any new ticket alerts… we would point out that the alert was not against the Terms of Use of the http://www.london2012.com website, nor have these terms been updated to make it so.”

It seems a poor PR move on LOCOG’s part, and more importantly a poor operational move because it makes it that much harder again to check for newly available tickets. Taking into account the immense budget that must have been allocated to the ticketing website, the result is severely lacking, and many thousands of people have been put off the Olympic experience because of it. Ticketmaster, which has branding on the website, has also come under fire. These acts, as we predicted in an earlier article, may well be the undoing of those involved, for, once lost, a good reputation is hard to recover.

Will the Olympics be derailed by public transport?

As the clock in Trafalgar Square ticks down, so the fearful anticipation of the impact 250,000 extra people will have on London’s already struggling transport network has risen to a level not seen since the prophecies of doom surrounding the Millennium Bug.

Thirteen years ago we were warned that planes would drop out of the sky and nuclear power plants would meltdown due to antiquated software, written when the memory used up by a couple of digits was a precious resource, being unable to cope with the new millennium. As it turns out, it was either a real false alarm or people got their houses in order well in advance.

This time we might not be so lucky. How can a service for who a perfect day is an annual event be expected to cope with so many additional passengers, many of whom will be using it for the first time?

In preparation, over the last couple of weeks, commuters have had messages announcing delays punctuated by a recording of Mayor of London Boris Johnson asking us to make alternative travel arrangements and to get ready for ‘The Big One’.

So, while transport workers will get bonuses to help them cope with the stress of having to do their jobs over the Olympics, ordinary commuters many of whom have paid thousands for annual travelcards in advance will get no compensation – maybe it’s time for a Passengers Union – for not being able to get to their workplace.

A conspiracy theorist might conclude that all the warnings and scaremongering are an attempt to create a sort of tipping point for working from home whereby employers and employees who are able to use this option do so, realise how convenient it is and begin to do so more often, thus reducing the strain on the network in the long run.

When ‘on-time’ is ‘late’ and ‘good’ is ‘not good’

The recent revelation that fewer than 70% of UK trains run on time will not have surprised many who travel by rail despite train companies usually reporting much higher punctuality rates (they give themselves a larger margin of ‘lateness’).

Such fanciful redefinitions of what is ‘on-time’ do little to win the trust of travellers who must feel persecuted that when so few trains are officially late, why is it always theirs that is?

While we are setting expectations, perhaps it is also time to redefine what is meant by a ‘good service’ on the Underground.

At the moment it is exclusively based on time and staff have discretion as to when to declare delays. For example, this article from the BBC highlights that a nine minute delay could still be deemed a good service.

But ask people to describe their journeys underground and as well as tardiness, they will complain about overheated and overcrowded trains.

Given the choice between getting somewhere ten minutes later in relative comfort or arriving earlier but having nearly melted on the way, many commuters would choose the former. Maybe we could be informed that ‘The Bakerloo line is running with a good but severely overcrowded service’ to help us pick how we want to get from A to B and to reduce the burden on overcrowded lines.

For all the fretting, there is little that can be done at this stage. We can only hope the ‘Big One’ is such an enjoyable experience that the abiding memory of the London Olympics is of athletes reaping the rewards of years of effort and not visitors suffering the consequences of years of underinvestment.