Generation Dean Redux

Michael, I was just thinking about this last week. We felt like we were pretty big shit running a ship with 24,000 members, and we were, but Obama has made that whole thing seem tiny in comparison. It really is inspirational. Of course it must be said that the group organizing tool that Ryan Beam created was OUR version of facebook back then - very innovative at the time.

I do not necessarily agree with you about myspace and facebook bulletins being more effective than an email (I think who each comes from is more important than the type of message). A real challenge I think for the current campaign groups is getting more information from people so they can effectively contact them and organize them around localities (or even regions) and get them working for the campaign beyond (but still including) the social networking sites. A major problem that I see is that with facebook, once your group gets over 1,000 you can’t message the entirety of your group at once. Similarly a myspace bulletin is very easily missed by most users. Instead - you could try to do individual messages or something but that seems entirely unrealstic. Additionally, I feel that a myspace or facebook membership is much more passive (but trust me when I say I’m not arguing it isn’t amazingly valuable) than they type we had - hell I’m in a group of facebook called “You know you’re from Arizona when …” with almost 10k members.

Additionally, the hierarchical (sp?) nature of Ryan’s membership management system was amazingly useful for our national, regional and state organizers. The fact that someone could logon to Ryan’s membership management page, see if there was a chapter, join one if it was there, or create a new one if it wasn’t was extremely valuable. Even more so - the ability for us to watch this all happen, contact everyone who created a group within the system (nationally, and statewide), and set tangible goals and monitor progress toward them was key. Not only did this help us become more effective - being able to see all the activity at the local level as it was happening (and not as it was being described for us), it allowed us to identify the organizers who were doing the best job and almost as valuably, the organizers who were PRETENDING to be doing a great job but were really just full of shit.

I think it goes without saying that the greatest work we had from GenDean members came from organized chapters at the campus and community level and I think the first campaign to effectiively convert the myspace and facebook crowds into something more structured (but still grassrootsy) like we had can really blow this thing away. It is mind boggling to think what could be done combining the type of efforts we had back in 03 with the numbers and exposure candidates are getting this early.

I remember drinking with you at the end of everything in DC in your dormroom and talking about how awesome it would be if we could have kept going - having learned so many hard lessons along the way. I hope that the current youth organizers for these various campaigns aren’t too caught up in the moment (like we often were) or too proud (like we often were) to seek help from those of us who had done the same thing, even to a smaller scale, before them.

Voter registration is the main reason a lot of people don’t vote. This is doubly true for young voters, as many have two addresses: one at home, and one at school. Campaigns are going to have to push early and hard to register young voters wherever they find them. School-based Facebook groups are going to provide and added advantage to organizing students to register and vote at their schools. Unfortunately, we at Generation Dean dropped the ball, in my opinion, when it came to voter registration. We were just too late to get serious efforts underway in the states that we targeted, instead having to rely on existing voter registration rolls rather than our own contacts.

Campaigns should foster the growth of these groups as early as possible - hopefully, with campaigns gearing up this early, there will be some real progress to get groups organized before the end of the school year. By the time students are back in August and September, the infrastructure is already in place to mount voter registration drives. That will go a long way to driving up the number of young people who vote in primaries.