A Participatory Political Platform

This past week Barack Obama proved that if any 2008 Presidential campaign has the potential to serve as the vehicle for a bottom-up people’s movement, his is by far the one. Reporting first quarter fundraising numbers that rallied right behind frontrunner Hillary Clinton, Obama’s staggering $25 million came from over 100,000 donors, half of whom made small online donations from their computers all across the nation. These numbers were more than double that of any other candidate in the race, and they clearly demonstrate a large and supportive base.

Obama has continued to frame his campaign as "a movement" and himself as a community organizer working on a national scale. “The movement for change begins with you!” he declared in advance of his first-of-a-kind Community Kickoff gatherings that took place on March 31st. This national call-to-action day titled “Hope. Action. Change.” set out to accomplish what Howard Dean’s campaign was unable to do in 2004: turning online support into offline action. More than 5,000 Community Kickoffs took place in homes, libraries, coffee shops, and community spaces throughout the country. Participants came together to network, fundraise, create local campaign projects, and to engage in community dialogues about pressing issues and the troubling state of our union.

While these community gatherings connecting Obama’s national movement with the local grassroots were an inspiring start, many were anxious to see Obama's campaign take its “participatory” potential to the next level.

In a post at the blog of the newly sprouted grassroots organization Barack the Youth Vote, Erin Kenzie asked:

“So what’s the next step for the participatory campaign? We have the cutting-edge online tools at my.barackobama.com; we have a network of people across the country who are willing to get their hands dirty in this campaign. How could he involve us in policy creation? Maybe, instead of just rolling out a plan developed by experts and tested with focus groups, he could engage us in a dialogue about the issues and take our recommendations to heart. Maybe a forum on the website could allow us to discuss and vote on specific policy ideas. The campaign could then use this input when fleshing out Obama’s plans for health care, education, campaign finance, foreign policy, etc, and the rest of us could keep the discussion going about how to affect these changes at the local level.”

Erin was posing a question that should be high on the political agenda of our Web 2.0 savvy generation: How can political campaigns create participatory platforms that allow for diverse voices to be heard and for all of us to engage in creating the policies that directly influence our lives? What would such a platform look like, how would it work, and how effective would it really be? In our connected age of technological revolutions that are giving way to a new participatory politics and culture, these are questions that every candidate and campaign should be asking.

While My.BarackObama.com currently hosts over 50, 000 members, 4,000 groups, and 9,000 blogs, there is no substantive way for the grassroots community and the national campaign leadership to directly interface. Mike Connery here at Future Majority pointed this out weeks ago when writing an initial review of Obama’s campaign website:

“Barack's new website, packed with social networking features in a clean interface, seems to back up the rhetoric about an inclusive, bottom-up campaign. It's probably one of the best campaign websites I've seen. After cruising it for about an hour, there was only one fault that I could find: there doesn't seem to be a way for content to filter up from the grassroots and appear before a national community (at least not without direct moderation from the campaign).

It's a subtle thing, and I almost missed it among the cornucopia of ways to participate on the site, but there is a sharp divide between the national campaign and the grassroots that I would expect to have disappeared in any campaign looking to be Dean 2.0.”

But what Mike so keenly perceived will soon no longer be the case, and what Erin so presciently proposed will soon be in place.

This past week Obama’s campaign website unveiled a preview of one of its newest and most innovative features: My Policy. While currently this open source policy development tool is not fully operational, when it’s finally up and running it promises to offer Obama’s supporters an unprecedented way to participate in the policy-making process. They'll be able to propose creative policy solutions, engage in ongoing community dialogues honing these solutions further, and help determine the overall agenda of his political platform. A short paragraph introducing My Policy reads:

“Across our country, everyday people like you have experiences and ideas that haven’t previously been heard. This is your chance to speak your mind and help set the policies that will shape this campaign and change the country.”

While the full extent of this new feature and all of its intricacies are still to be revealed, it’s clear that Obama’s campaign is leading the way in pioneering this emerging new era of participatory politics. As he continues to successfully integrate open source technology into the heart of his campaign, there is little doubt that other candidates on all sides of the political spectrum will follow suit.

So what are the broader implications of this? We are witnessing the continuing emergence of what a friend of mine, Sam Rosen, has called a User-Generated Democracy, a free and inclusive society in which, aided by our 21st century technological tools and user-generating citizenship, we are able to harness our collective intelligence and actively participate in direct and authentic democracy.

Just as an aside, I was curious to know how many others were already pioneering this notion of a “participatory political platform,” and when I ran a search I was not surprised to find that the revolution is already underway. While I didn’t come up with anything using this exact language, I did find something strikingly similar called Living Platform. The idea behind this project is to create an ever-evolving "participatory political platform" for an entire political party.

Let the revolution be known: Technology is flattening the game, transforming our political system, decentralizing the power structure, opening up the flow of information, churning out creativity and innovation, engaging and empowering the People, and while this is highly relevant to our society as a whole, no demographic should be more inspired by these trends than the Millennial generation. This ain’t no politics as usual. Quick. Tell the youth of America. The Politics of Old is crumbling, and the Politics of New is crashing the gates. It’s time for our generation to take back our government and to usher in this radically new era of participatory democracy.

(For those of you who are fired up and inspired by such implications, check out the Personal Democracy Forum 2007 Conference that will be taking place this next month in NYC.)