Campaign Review: John Edwards' One Corps

This is the second in a series of reviews of democratic presidential campaign websites dedicated to young voters. As I previously outlined, my purpose in writing these is to provide a useful critique that our presidential contenders can use to improve their outreach to younger voters. The first review in this series examined YouthRoots, a project of Mark Warner’s now-defunct presidential campaign.

This second review will focus on John Edwards and the One America Committee. Currently, the One American Committee does not have a youth-specific program, making this a somewhat akward and out-of-bound review for my chosen topic. However, what One America does have is One Corps - an interesting program that I think overlaps philosophically and technologically with elements that can make for a solid campaign to engage voters under 30.

Still in Beta, One Corps is an attempt to build a social network for local activism. A facile yet easily graspable description might be to say that it attempts to mashup the social networking of Friendster with the online-to-offline movement of MeetUp in the service of a sizable number of ambitious electoral and social justice goals:

• Fight poverty in their local communities; addressing important local needs through community organizing and service projects.
• Help elect local, state and federal candidates who support One America ideals, and who are fighting for all Americans.
• Register new voters for this November's election.
• Assist with important statewide ballot initiatives, like those seeking to raise the minimum wage in AZ, CO, MO, MT, NV, and OH.
• And, spread the message of One America by writing letters to the editor, calling local radio stations, talking with other members of their communities at events and meetings, and recruiting new members to the One Corps community.

It is by now a matter of conventional wisdom that, more so than our parents’ generation, Millenials are a community-oriented generation of volunteers. More and more, we are producers of information as much as we are consumers, and we are looking to participate in the lives of our communities. As Robert Putnam has reported (pdf), we are the only generation whose level of community service and participation has maintained an increase since 9/11. So while I don’t consider One Corps to be a replacement for a dedicated youth outreach, its focus on giving back to the community and working locally on a range of issues that cross the line between strict electoral politics and opportunities with a more social justice flavor is clearly something that could attract younger voters.

If constructed properly, One Corps could accommodate the coordination needs of the youth arm of a presidential campaign. In both form and content it has the potential to attract a large pool of Millenial voters. It doesn’t hurt that the One America Committee already promotes One Corps on MySpace. To emphasize the point, though, when Senator Edwards begins to ramp up a dedicated youth outreach program, he will need to create a broader strategy that taps multiple social networks – including niche networks targeting more specific subcultures – and devise a way to integrate that work with One Corps. This coordinated strategy will need to give young supporters their own networked community with within the larger realm of Edwards supporters and One Corps chapters.

That said, let’s dig in and see what One Corps is all about. As in my last review, I’ll tackle One Corps section by section noting what is good, what’s bad, and what is missing.

Home/Landing Page

What’s Good: The general concept is strong. Linking people together and helping them form local communities of conscience that take action is really smart. Not only is it a fantastic idea with the potential to revitalize community life and civic participation, it can also provide a strong foundation for a decentralized presidential campaign.

What’s Bad: It’s not at all engaging beyond a theoretical level. I love talking about community building and reinvigorating our civic life. I like talking about how technology can help us do that even more. But beyond a (relatively) small, motivated circle, where is the excitement here? What’s going to drive me to become a part of One Corps? How will One Corps break through and achieve exponential growth if it can’t engage people more viscerally? I break this down into a couple of categories:

Content:
Too much information: A good web page would take all the textual information contained in the main column (and there’s a lot of it here) and, through good design, convey much of this information to the user visually and intuitively. It’s cliché, but the motto here should be “show, don’t tell.” At the very least, much of the information here can and should be relegated to an “About” page included as an extra tab on the navigation interface.

Information of Questionable Utility. The home page should serve to suck in the user and induce them to sign up and start participating, but some information on the One Corps’s home page distracts the user from that very purpose. I’m speaking specifically about the “Newest Chapter” and “Biggest Chapters” boxes on the home sidebar.

If a new user is interested in creating a chapter in Boise, Idaho, knowing that a new chapter just started in Hoboken, NJ isn’t going to be all that helpful to them. Ditto for the “biggest” chapters. It’s nice if they have a lot of folks joining One Corps in Florida, but that’s not all that relevant to me if I’m in the Twin Cities. All politics is local - especially when you are trying to form geographic communities. Currently, these lists seem intended to provide the user with a sense of the scope of One Corps and make the visitor feel part of a growing national movement. That’s a lot of weight to put on 10 text links. Too much weight, I’d argue. These links will never provide anything more than the loosest of connections to the greater One Corps movement. Knowing what’s going on – or isn’t yet happening – in your own locality is a greater motivator of action than a vague sense of a national “movement.”

The “Featured Chapters” section at the bottom of the page isn’t much better. While these ostensibly provide information on exciting things happening in One Corps chapters, the actual information they provide is of dubious quality. This needs to be filled out to highlight best practices and case studies, and the technology needs to be tweaked so that information filling this section trickles upwards from successful city, county, state campaigns. More on this later when I discuss scalability issues.

Design. The picture of Sen. Edwards is not the best image to convey the mission of One Corps. It makes the Senator seem aloof and isolated. It conveys little emotion and no sense of community. It’s a Star shot. While on some level this is about a presidential campaign and the Senator, it’s only going to work if people believe that it will create community and build a network of participation. Any “official” photo posted on the One Corps site should emphasize those values. This may seem like nitpicking, but these small things make unconscious impressions. They matter.

Interface: This is really where I see the most problems on this page, and gets to the heart of my criticism: the site lacks any gut connection and doesn’t sell itself the way it should. The initial user experience is One Corps’s first and best chance to sign up and involve a new member. The site should do everything possible to capture that member as effortlessly as possible. Right now that is not the case.

New users currently landing on the site are greeted with two significant hurdles to participation – they need to read a mountain of text to understand where they are, and they must enter their zipcode or click-through a directory to attain any immediately relevant information. Both function as unnecessary barriers to entry.

What’s Missing:

I’ve offered a lot of criticism, the natural response to which should be “how would you do it differently?” Fair enough.

The interface problem is really at the heart of it. To make One Corps work (read: expand beyond the base of people you’d get no matter what you post on the website), the site needs pull the person away from their computer and out of the theoretical. Make One Corps as real as possible to them as soon as they arrive by graphically showing them how easy it is to participate in their area. Don’t leave them sitting around staring at an empty blog or an inactive chapter page, and don’t start them off by asking them to read the fine print.

Instead of requesting zip codes – an unnecessary step - One Corps should geolocate visitors based on their IP address and present them with immediately relevant content as soon as they hit the site – local chapters, recent events, testimonials from clearly identified veteran and novice volunteers, the next three volunteer opportunities in that zip code, etc.

Instead of a text description of One Corps occupying the main column, this information should display as an interactive (Google?) map of the person’s zip code or city or county, and mark up the map with the locations of nearby chapters and/or local volunteer opportunities. That map, combined with a simple banner asking people to “explore the opportunities in their area” or “join their local chapter and become an agent of change” would immediately immerse the visitor and alert them to the active community literally outside their doorstep.

Inherent in this formulation is a chicken and egg problem. No one wants to join a club with no members, and you don’t want to throw a blank wall at people looking to volunteer their time and energy.

I think the solution is to prepopulate the One Corps events database with already existing volunteer options and progressive community organizations. One Corps doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and while we may all lament the decline of community and civic participation, the fact is that organizations do exist that are trying – and succeeding – at creating progressive community. These organizations can be a font of resources to build the social capital and create the calendar of activities needed to jumpstart a One Corps chapter. Organizations that I would check out include Drinking Liberally, Do More Than Vote, MoveOn (House Parties), Progressive Book Clubs, etc.

These are all very political organizations in nature, but One Corps shouldn’t limit itself to these organizations. I’m sure there are many community groups that would love the additional exposure, some technological resources to accomplish their goals. These local efforts could be promoted through One Corps, allowing existing efforts to expand while still moving towards One Corps’s overall goals.

Chapter Pages/Membership

What’s Good: As above, the idea is good, but the execution is lacking. This may, again, be a function of the fact that this is still a beta site, but I’ve been coming to One Corps for about 3 weeks now and no changes have been made.

What’s Bad: Again, I’ll break this down into sections as I think the fundamental execution is flawed and could limit the scope of One Corps. (Caveat – Dean Space and Dean Link weren’t all that snazzy when you got down to it. In a presidential campaign, the idea itself can be enough to produce a seemingly impressive number of users. This is a question of how far outside your natural, politicized base you can grow, and how sustainable this project is w/o the support of a presidential campaign cycle. With One Corps, Edwards is, in effect, making a bid to create his own DFA.)

Design: Many of the same considerations as above apply here. Nothing in the design speaks to the mission of the organization – building community and increasing civic participation. The page is text-heavy and lifeless. Ideally, this page should be filled with pictures of the group members – from their profiles and from previous events. There are a lot of lessons that could be learned by examining just about any social networking site. Pictures, videos, and member comments are the glue that will make this online community seem real to newcomers, and there are design considerations in including all of these features.

Content: Content is sparse at the moment, but from the current page layout I think it will again be text heavy and unnecessarily require more action from the user than One Corps should assume they will give. Group Blogs and “Other Chapter Events” also seem like potentially bad ideas to me. A group blog is, after all, a performance for your peers, and casual or new users may not have the time or the interest to write a blog and may feel guilty for not contributing. A group message board or a “comments wall” makes more sense as a facilitator of group communication. Comments require less effort from the user and allow for more casual, off-hand communication, and forum posts can be archived and provide for threaded discussion among members.

Another option – which I will explore more thoroughly when I examine user pages – is in-network email. Just as on Friendster, MySpace, and other social networks, users should have their own “inbox” and be able to send private messages to each other in-network.

The “Other Chapters” (rss feed?) on the side bar also seems problematic to me. I’ll reiterate what I said above – if One Corps wants to keep this item, they need to make sure that it remains relevant and adds to the user experience. That means that items in this feed must convey geographically relevant information. Ideally, this feed will function to keep neighboring chapters aware of each others’ activities and promote cooperation. By creating these dense, local webs of activities (and spinning them out to the city, county, state level when appropriate) One Corps will be better positioned to leverage local activity toward creating national change.

Another option to consider for this feed is to move it beyond text. If this could be rigged so that it pulled in not only text data about upcoming events in nearby chapters, but also pictures of members or items from a chapter photo stream, it might create more tangible connections between groups and potentially increase collaboration.

Scalability: A quick note on the bigger picture. As One Corps grows, I think that scalability and the signal to noise ratio will become a real problem for the site. As it stands, One Corps is trying to take make a coherent movement and create ties between geographically disparate communities. You can see this in a variety of the features, some of which I’ve already discussed:

• Featured Chapters (home page)
• Newest Chapters (home page)
• Biggest Chapters (home page)
• Group Blog (chapter page, user page)
• OAC Blog (One America Committee Site)

Featured Chapters are a great idea. It’s good to spotlight the work of volunteers and highlight best practices or even new and creative practices, but I don’t see a coherent system for finding and moving this information among chapters and users. Right now, the system in place is extremely hierarchical, with One Corps administrators decide what goes on the home page. For this to really work, best practices and spotlighted chapters will need to rise up from the grass roots through a decentralized decision making/information sharing process. This will require much more ability on the part of chapters to communicate with each other directly, as well as tools to collectively decide what information “bubbles up” to the level.

I think that this will require a broader definition of what a “chapter” looks like technologically, and potentially the creation of regional “hubs” to aggregate information from individual chapters – essentially creating a series of mini-sites that feed up to state sites, which feed regional sites, which feed the national site.

Similar problems are likely to plague the One Corps blogosphere. Without a proper vetting process to direct the flow of information from the lowest parts of the community (user pages) to the highest (One American Committee Blog), information overload will rapidly overtake the national blog, with new items pushing each other off the page faster than they can be read. One need only to look at the Diaries on Daily Kos to know that a decentralized recommendation/rescue process will be necessary to ensure that information gets to those who can most immediately use it (local posts to local chapters), and that the most important information needs a way to move up to the top (OAC Blog) where it can be viewed nationally.

If One Corps decides to continue incorporating blogs (something I’m not 100% certain is a good idea), it will require a more scalable blog infrastructure that incorporates group concensus-making practices and technologies.

What’s Missing:
Photos, photos, more photos, and a place to display YouTube videos. If you want to attract and retain users, you need to be ahead of the curve not behind it.

A way to recognize new or exemplary members, build community, and incentivize participation.

A comments wall to allow members to quickly and informally join the conversation, stay in touch, and fill the page with testimonials about the most recent events or upcoming events.

Local information - and not just events information - is also a glaring omission. Who are the groups’ elected officials? Where can you register to vote? What local organizations are potential partners and might group members like to know about? What local campaigns or initiatives are currently ongoing and looking for volunteers? There is a wealth of information specific to the locality of each chapter that can be of use to members, but no good way to aggregate that informatin built into the site. Give users a set of tools to build that database of local knowledge.

Tools – Wiki, File Cabinet, Message Capability, Archives. Chapter pages should provide local activists with all of the online the tools they need to connect and effectively take action on a project or campaign. What tools activists will need, and how they will use them are largely unknown to One Corps.

For example, a group may want to collaboratively create documents for distribution about a specific issue. The Wiki is a good tool to accomplish that. Once a final document is decided upon, the group will want to store a downloadable copy of the final product for people to print on their home computers or at a local copy mart. The filing cabinet can serve that storage function, freeing up the wiki for new projects. An announcement, or group discussion area/archive will allow the group to maintain a history, resolve potential disputes or disagreements, and contextualize the growth of the chapter. To this day I still have access to all of the Dean Yahoo groups that I belonged to, which are a treasure trove of archival information (and best practices) about that campaign and the discussions that forged the campaign in hundreds of local areas.

Successful demonstrations of these tools can be found on this Drupal Screencast, and on this collaborative workspace site.

Leadership Training: Currently, One Corps sets new leaders – people who start new chapters – adrift to fend for themselves. With no pre-populated events, no connections to local groups, and no guidelines for administering a successful chapter, it will take a very special person to successfully get a One Corps chapter up and running. One Corps should provide new chapter leaders with a document and short video outlining best practices, tips on reaching out to community leaders and groups (the “navigators,” “influentials,” “mavens,” and “schmoozers” that Putnam, Gladwell, and Dowd all identify in their books) and advice to get their nascent chapter off the ground.

User Pages:

What’s Good: Once again, the overall concept is strong, execution is weak. I like giving people a blog to express themselves and talk to the members who view their profile (even if I think running those blog posts into a group blog that itself feeds into a larger group blog is probably a bad idea without some serious work).

What’s Bad: There’s nothing particularly bad here. The one thing that I might get rid of is the “Blogroll.” I imagine that’s going to get pretty repetitive pretty fast, as a vast majority of users link to similar blogs. Conversely, if One Corps is truly successful in reaching a broad audience, many participants may not even read blogs.

What’s Missing: Again, One Corps could learn a lot by spending some time on other social networks:

Inboxes: Give users a way to communicate with each other through the One Corps site. All users should have their own inboxes for sending and receiving messages from other One Corps members. Giving members inboxes will also allow captains to send announcements about upcoming events directly to their group members.
Tagged Interests: It’s a practice that never made it from Friendster to other social networks, but one of Friendster’s great innovations was its cataloging of users’ hobbies, favorite books, movies, music, etc. as folksonomy tags that allowed members to find other members with similar cultural tastes.

Communities are about shared interests. On one level, a progressive political view and a desire to volunteer does create a shared interest, but common cultural likes and dislikes can create even stronger bonds. As One Corps is building a new social network from scratch, they should try to create a system that will allow members to find each other based not just on geographic location, but also using these cultural commonalities. As the network scales, this will allow for the creation of more focused, niche groups within areas with a high traffic of local volunteers. (i.e. NYC McSweeney’s fans for local literacy, or Columbus progressive churchgoers for community gardens, or Detroit Treehuggers and Moms for sustainable urban development). People will seek each other out and form affinity groups that are stronger working in concert than a single organization that tries to lump everyone together based purely on geography.

Testimonial Wall: Let users drop each other a line and help build online reputations. It will build trust and community. Just as importantly, it is an activity with an extremely low bar for entry. It’s something that just about anyone will feel comfortable doing. Something that is not necessarily true about composing a blog, proposing an event, or starting a new chapter.

Personal Photo Galleries: Let people chronicle their own local experience (of work with One Corps or otherwise). Use this as a source to draw photos for the main group pages.

Summary
In general, I think that problems with the site can be grouped into three basic categories: Audience assumptions, interface, and scalability.

The site makes a lot of unconscious assumptions about its user base. In general, the One Corps seems designed for an average “netroot” person – hyper engaged, interested in online community, and with an above average familiarity with technology. Take that person and envision their opposite. That is who the site should be designed to entice. This feeds into the second problem:

The interface is uninviting and many of the actions require too large an “ask.” I think that in many cases, this creates artificial barriers to entry that will drive away potential users. The site should be effortless to use and engage new members with a minimum number of clicks.

Last, the site does not seem built to scale as chapters grow and more people utilize One Corps’ toolset. How information flows between geographically close chapters (or chapters with similar “lifestyle” or “cultural” tastes), and how best practices filter up to the state, regional and national level need a lot more work. Right now, I don’t see anything to suggest a strategy for scaling the organization and coherently sharing information.

Finally, I’d like to reiterate that this was written purely in the spirit of helpful, honest critique. I’ve produced this in good faith with the hope that the Edwards campaign – and any other campaign that reads this – will find it useful in making their site and their programs even better. At the end of the day, it’s not about any one campaign or candidate; it’s about creating new and effective strategies that create a strong progressive movement. In that sense, I hope people find this document to be useful.