answer 1: election volunteers & technology - lessons for others
06:59, 12 November 2008
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Per the request in my last blog entry for web sites, online discussion groups or blogs that talk about how computer and networking technology was used to manage, support or "mobilize" volunteers or activists in the recent USA elections, and with specific information about what the volunteers actually did as a result of the use of tech (not just that they were "mobilized" or "motivated"):
Gary Chapman of the LBJ School of Public Affairs, who once called me "the globe-trotting maven of online volunteerism" (which is very cool), submitted his own first-hand description of being a volunteer in North Carolina for GOTV (“Get Out the Vote”) for the Obama-Biden campaign in North Carolina.
In his account, he notes: "The Obama GOTV campaign was data-driven and used technology in impressive ways. Each canvassing team of one, two or three people was given a printout of 'sporadic' voters, but who were likely to be Obama supporters, in a specific neigborhood, and the data included not only names, addresses and phone numbers, but gender, age, and political affiliation. Each packet came with a printout from Google Maps that showed the location of each house or apartment building to be canvassed, and a set of directions from the field office to the neighborhood. In some cases we used Google Street View to look at the buildings before we left the field office, to see what kind of neighborhood we were headed to...
"The data and the maps came from a centralized database that was used by all the Obama field offices, via a Web site called VoteBuilder.com. The canvassing and field coordinators had authorized accounts and passwords, and opened up the database to data entry volunteers, who modified the records over and over and over again from the sheets brought back by door-to-door canvassers or phone bank volunteers. So as we got closer and closer to the hour of polls closing, the data sheets got thinner and thinner, as we narrowed our targets to people who still needed to vote."
An excellent example of how technology was used to support volunteers in their work. More?
