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CHAOS AND CONFLICT
Much as a military campaign can suffer from "the fog of war," a national political campaign is inherently chaotic. With so much going on, some things are bound to go wrong, and the decentralized structure of the Obama campaign is potentially risky in that it allows so many people to make independent decisions.
Last year, the campaign clashed with a volunteer who had set up what looked like an official campaign page on MySpace. After trying to partner with the owner of that page, or perhaps hire him to work for Obama, the campaign wound up forcing the issue by having MySpace shut down the page and replace it with one that really would be official.
Overall, though, the chaos factor hasn't been as big as many involved with the campaign feared it might be.
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Foley, the New Media Director for the New York and New Hampshire primaries, says he was always alert for the possibility that the campaign's online openness would backfire, but it rarely did. "I never had to use my administrative access to delete any comment on any blog post," he says. "Sometimes they would go off-topic, sometimes spectacularly off-topic, and the comments may not have anything to do with the rally you're trying to organize, but they never strayed far from the general topic of the campaign."
When the campaign effort in New Hampshire was first getting organized in 2007, Foley did run into a few instances where people would post notices saying Obama would be at a certain event when in fact he was not. "I guess the organizer was thinking 'If I just get enough RSVPs, they'll have to send him,'" Foley says. Other times, Foley simply found himself wishing for a little more organization. "You might have [a] fantastic event, really trying to drive people toward, and then someone creates a competing event close by at the same time." In most cases, once contacted, the other organizer would be willing to combine the two events.
"If that's the biggest problem you have with decentralizing, that more people want to work on your campaign, and they're all trying to do everything at once, that's a good problem to have," Foley says.
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For all its virtues, the technology platform behind the Obama campaign certainly is not perfect. One day, someone sent me a link to a video of volunteers in my area working on voter registration that had been posted to the Web site, and when I clicked all I saw was screen full of PHP error messages, apparently related to an overloaded MySQL database connection. I got the same error message from every my.barackobama.com page, including the fundraising page, although judging from the fact that it didn't seem to generate a lot of complaints from the user community (and Rospars didn't seem to know about it), this was probably a transitory glitch that only affected a subset of Web site users. A few weeks earlier, a security flaw allowed some prankster to inject a little bit of JavaScript into a blog post and redirect visitors to hillaryclinton.com.
But Barbara Frantonius, a volunteer coordinator in California who works as a software testing and quality assurance professional, said she sees flaws in the campaign systems that make her wonder how prepared the campaign is for the general election in the Fall. While Obama's marketing and branding has been "absolutely stellar," she says, "I haven't liked the behind-the-scenes systems those of us in the trenches are supposed to be using."
Most distressing to her was the way the campaign switched back and forth between two or three different systems for tracking voter contact as it moved from state-to-state, making her wonder about issues of data integrity. She started out with one called Torchlight, then found herself being told to alternate between VoteBuilder and Build a Hope, both of which are based on a system from Voter Activation Network, a Democrat-friendly campaign data vendor. "Each of them was tracking an obscurely different piece of the pie," Frantonius says of the systems. And because she didn't get a chance to download information before her access to one system was cut off and she was told to start using the next, she was left with no record of the voter identification work her voters had done in their own area, she says. "The next day, it's gone, and you don't get it back again."
Rospars and Hughes insist the campaign is very much aware of its data management and integration challenges and is putting energy into addressing them.
"Data management is obviously a huge challenge," particularly given the need to "improvise around multiple vendors, multiple data sets." Rospars says. "We have smart, dedicated folks dealing with it. The proof is in the pudding end of the day - are you getting them out to vote?"
Technologists reading this should also remember that a presidential campaign isn't quite like any other kind of enterprise, Rospars says. It has to get very big very fast, "and then you go out of business," he says. "A lot of decisions are made with that in mind. It's not like you have 36 months to build the system and ramp it up."
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