Well, if it seemed bad enough that it seems Romney had Al Gore's developer on his aps, and Obama voters in his digital shops who may have not been that much into Romney, but it can and does get worse: Romney's digital director Zac Moffatt hired Obama's 2008 director of analytics Dan Siroker -- the dude that does the A/B tests. I'll bet there will be more coming out of that nature, and when we finally get the story of who really worked on Orca and how they worked on it, we may know more.
I will continue my operating hypothesis here: Democratic developers -- taken right from Obama's past campaign and Al Gore's past campaign -- plus Obama supporters -- did not have the requisite enthusiasm, follow-up and sustainability to benefit Romney's campaign and the Republican Party in the future.
I continue to ask whether they sabotaged Romney's digital work -- and by sabotage I mean some act on a continium from deliberately hacking to simply letting things fail through neglect or indifference or spite.
My pursuit of these questions does not in any way mean that I think Orca caused Romney's downfall -- not when the candidate himself doesn't mention anything remotely like technology as a problem, but makes the rather intolerant suggestion that he lost because he didn't have "stuff" to give away to certain constituencies, like Obama did.
But this is a larger issue to pursue for plurality in our country, and I think the Republican party, especially given the tremendous amount of money it did attract for this campaign, including even my little $28 for the first time in my life, has to get accountability on the tech here.
Any human resources person in any political campaign in the land will instantly grasp that the notion of hiring your political rivals' devs is not a good idea, after this debacle.
In fact, each and every one of the firms involved in this debacle should be working to make some persuasive PR statements that they are impartial and professional and work for any client or they cannot be trusted. Even if they make those statements -- and they aren't making them as they don't care or are afraid -- wouldn't take away the sting. Every single operative in every single Republican stronghold related to all things digital has to absorb the lesson of this campaign: keep it all in your own pew and play close attention to the geeks.
You know, that's what Obama did, and he won. He built everything inhouse. He used the top people from different firms, but they were ardent supporters who wanted him to win and gave it their all.
That didn't happen for Romney, and while you could cynically say that's because he's not attractive as a one percenter, dissing the 47% not his constituents, you do have to have a wider concern for how democracy will be achieved in our digital age.
I'm going to keep on commenting on this awful story of the failure of the tech side of Romney's campaign because it has lessons not only for Republican campaigns, but lessons about the larger issue of how we can get reliable, impartial and neutral tools for democracy via the Internet from an ethics-free and cynical geek class that feels no stake in political parties and their concerns.
If you don't think this is a fair characterization of geekdom, well, hear it from the Geek-in-Chief himself, Sergey Brin, who said on G+, on the eve of the elections, that he wishes there were no political parties at all, but just a lot of independents. Gosh, that sounded like a lovely fairy-tale until you saw Sergei's circle-friends offering to flesh out that dream by making Google run a platform for everybody to implement this lovely dream, oh, presumably by clicking up propositions that those nice geeks make up for you.
I should have thought to go to Pandodaily.com first with this because they are more independent than TechCrunch obviously, and bring some of that same thoughtfulness to reporting that TechCrunch used to have (when they were there).
A reporter discussed the tech of the campaign back in September, and naturally focused on Zac Moffatt, and discussed that eternal nerd gr8 deb8 as to whether inhouse/outsource or closed/open are better options,
Romney digital director Moffat defended this strategy, saying:
It’s hard to challenge the marketplace, because the marketplace is always innovating. The Obama campaign has a hubris based on the thinking that the only way to win is to build everything in house. They have a lot more engineers than us, yes. But they think that they have the only people that understand big data and social media. We leverage IBM who has the very best of the best. They [Obama] don’t dominate technology, but they dominate technology PR.
I have no idea what IBM, or Microsoft did on this job -- we'll keep looking.
My constant blogging and commenting about this situation has amounted to exactly the reverse of what Zac is saying here. He thinks Obama had the hubris because they put it all inhouse and thought they were the only ones who understood big data and social media.
But...it turned out Zac had the hubris (geeks always do) for thinking Obama was wrong to keep it house. As to which of them teams had better understanding of "big data" -- well, that remains to be seen. Looks like Obama does; he won. Winning is only about big data these days and it's not surprising that this concept breaks and that someday, it will be jettisoned, hopefully not violently by angry people with pitchforks and torches who feel disenfranchised by digital gurus.
Pando Daily further reported on Zac's thinking and it is here for the first time -- startlingly -- that I see Moffatt's own interior thinking as he tells us that he had to overcome reticence in himself about hiring from among Obama's old campaign people. Again, we see the "inhouse" versus "outsource" tension:
At the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, tech people I talked to approvingly described Obama’s digital team as a “startup within a startup.” Rather than outsource the building of various tools to other companies, it has developed everything in-house.
When I put that claim to Moffatt, however, he protests that the opposite is true. The Obama campaign, he asserts, is more like government. “They’ve pulled everything together and determined that they can do everything best,” he says. “We actually function like a startup. We are finding the best minds and best companies, but if something doesn’t work it’s easy for us to iterate and pivot into a new direction.” By relying on in-house tools, you can very quickly get lumped with cumbersome legacy items that becomes costly over time. “For me, it looks much more like central planning than it does anything else.”
Yet the complaints I've heard from Romney volunteers and poll watchers are that they felt the Romney campaign was too centralized and chilly toward local leaders, and that when Orca failed, it was precisely because it was so centralized, and forcing serial processing and not parallel processing.
Certainly, Moffatt’s team has made strong use of startups. It works with Rally.org for fundraising, Tout for shortform video, Square for field donations, and Eventbrite for, well, guess. Moffatt says Facebook, Twitter, and Google have all been “amazing” partners, to the point where people from those companies are almost like embedded staff on the campaign. The hardest decision for Moffatt to make, however, was signing up to use Optimizely for “A/B” testing. Optimizely was started by former Google employee Dan Siroker, who was director of analytics for Obama’s 2008 campaign. “Once I got over myself, I was able to do that,” Moffatt says with a wry laugh.
Within the Romney campaign, digital’s importance has never been called into question. Two weeks ago, the campaign passed 20 million voter contacts – that’s eight times as many phone calls as were placed at the same time during the John McCain campaign in 2008. Digital, in other words, has proven its scale and flexibility beyond doubt. “Those two have married up to allow us to produce an 800 percent lift, which is really kind of the impressive point,” Moffatt says. “People are always like, ‘Oh does it work?’ I mean, yeah, it works – that’s about as tangible an example as you can see.”
But it didn't work. And Moffatt maybe shouldn't have gotten over himself. He might actually have done better to build it inhouse with very gung-ho reliable people who weren't mined from the opposition team.
This is both about a concept for software productions, and about how to win a campaign, and today they are merged.
Sure, Obama's plan sounds to me awfully socialist and Bolshevik, even, secretive and centralized with only the cadres. Romney's plan seemed more market-oriented and merit-driven rather than comrade-driven, the bazaar rather than the cathedral.
Yet in the end, that jumble of supposed merit-based market-delivered capacities broke badly, because they didn't have spirit.
Over at CNN, there was also this report earlier:
Romney uses startup hatched by Obama campaign
Former Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) employee Dan Siroker joined Obama's campaign in 2008 and became the director of analytics, coming up with the idea for the technology that would better target voters during the campaign.
TechCrunch also covered it.
In my many years living inside what may be the world's largest open source/proprietary combination software project involving ordinary people in the world -- Second Life -- I came to loathe the A/B test stuff. Not because I somehow don't accept "science" and "marketing principles". But because the principles were applied to small samples over short periods of time and didn't always make sense. The metrics were also artificially contrived. They were political, like everything in life.
Digital nerds often look for "conversion". How many sign-ups lead to how many hours on line lead to how many premium accounts with a monthly subscription. They pick things they can measure and care about such as revenue for their coffers or concurrency that they can show off to their fellow geek friends and don't look at other things. Like the virtual worlds GDP. Like the amount of money spent per hour, regardless of membership status. Like how many signups who bought content or made friends retained and their prospects for higher expenditures.
In any event, Romney's splash page probably got 100 times more scrutiny that secondlife.com which has been a subject of ENDLESS debate over the 10 years it has eternally been in beta -- and of course with real-life consequences.
But sometimes I find that the 20-somethings working in these digital agencies are really only finding out what their co-workers and friends think of things and serving up a big dollop of "Works On My Machine" along side it. I could endlessly describe why the websites and apps, which I signed up for, didn't work for me, but who cares? I'm the demographic they think is thrilled with the notion that maybe I could have dinner with George Clooney -- i.e. Paul Ryan lol -- if I donate only $3.
Huge money is at stake. Open Secrets site shows us a budget of $17 million for Targeted Victory. You know, that's a lot of social media work. And for that price tag, you should have apps that work and better repartees on Twitter. And I believe that was unavailable because Romney supporters were not on the job.
My hunch is that in these half dozen companies around the failed Romney campaign there is some morning-after soul-searching and some executives worried about how they look over this loss, especially because of Orca, which taints the whole thing in tech terms. And they are either going to double down and decide they will continue to serve Republican campaigns even with Democratic help, or they are looking around for how they can ensure better team spirit if the top CEOs themselves are Republicans. Maybe some employees are packing their bags -- who wants to work in a firm that serves Republicans when they've just lost? If it's a firm that serves beverage companies, lawn-mower manufacturers, universities and hospitals, AND political campaigns -- with a huge diverse menu like Amazon.com or IBM -- they can weather it.
But they're going to be thinking about this, I'm sure. And not because of my blog, but because the country has been deeply polarized by the Community-Organizer-in-Chief.
Moffatt spent the whole campaign saying why Obama was wrong, and his campaign techniques were right, as interviews like this tell us. Yet they didn't work. Somehow, when you have the idea that "I can't help it if people go to MittRomney.com and then go somewhere else" -- you havn't realized that your job is to make sure they do stay there.
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