Recently I attended a presentation on the online infrastructure used by Obama's campaign and transition. (I wrote about an earlier presentation from a Republican operative a few weeks ago on my my own blog.)

One idea I took away from the session was the tension between two social forces that campaigns try to harness. The first is one-on-one interaction. This includes phonebanking, canvassing, and donor matching, the objective being authenticity and a personal connection. The second force is collective, the sense of being part of a movement, the bandwagon effect, the power of history. Most of the discussion around online engagement involves the latter force, such as with "crowdsourcing" models. But the Obama campaign made some impressive efforts to harness 1-1 interaction. They made donor matching real for the first time: whereas previous campaigns would split their donations ex post facto and pretend one half matched the other, the Obama campaign got individuals to communicate with each other. "Hi, I'm only able to give X amount, it's so nice to be part of this," and an actual matcher could reply in kind. Even if only a fraction of these virtual interactions progressed to authentic correspondence, those were connections that would not have otherwise been made, that presumably benefitted the movement.

The forces of individuals and the movement can collide, however. At one point the campaign tried an experiment of opening up the budget to full transparency. A donor could see that her $25 donation would pay for much-needed paper in a Kansas field office, the idea went, and would be motivated to participate. But the experiment failed and was abandoned very quickly. My explanation for this was the collective social force: I want to contribute to something big, not to a small field office's office supplies. It doesn't feel as important when you know what you're paying for. But what if the budget database were limited to particularly important items, like staff salaries or telephones? Then maybe the 1-1 interaction of knowing that my donation helped an actual person do an actual task would motivate me to donate. How is the balance struck?

Some other conclusions, in bullet point for brevity:

• The goal (voting, legislation, policymaking) is still offline. Online is useless if it doesn't engage people offline. Don't expect the technology to save trees anytime soon: at the end of all the fancy tech (as I witnessed in NH), there are still tens of thousands of sheets of paper. Don't expect the president's weekly "radio address" to lose its official name anytime soon, either, even if the majority of viewers are streaming from youtube.

• Any improvement in outcome will be marginal. The campaign's entire canvassing operation might have swung the popular vote a few percentage points. Mobilizing every mobilizable voter online won't create a miracle, just an old-fashioned narrow victory. Therefore, the focus has to be on principles that are effective at slightly increasing margins. These include:

  1. Openness. A phonebanking database API, for example, would have made the iPhone app for Obama much more powerful. It was lacking, so the developers weren't empowered to utilize the available data. This didn't doom the campaign, but remember, it's all about the margins. (Also noteworthy: there is an inherent tension between this kind of openness and the proprietary corporate interests of firms like BSD; this is worthy of much further thought.)

  2. All the obvious principles of running any effective organization apply here: efficiency, communication, reliability, etc. The Obama campaign was a model of a well-oiled machine, a rarity in politics.

• Public financing is dead. Online fundraising will never be abandoned, and there's no way to adequately regulate it to keep out all foreign, over-the-limit, or otherwise illegal contributons. The FEC will have to come up with new rules, but they won't cover all contingencies. Individuals as well as "special interests" will find ways to get through the cracks, just as before.

• Because of the last, a key principle has to be transparency. We can't keep dirty money out, but we can make sure we know where every dollar comes from and goes to. Keeping track of all this data will require dedicated watchdog groups and an engaged citizenry. A database reporting probable bribes is useless if no one logs into it.

• Don't expect any miracles in online social engagement from the Obama administration. BSD didn't seem eager to work on WhiteHouse.gov at all (they built Change.gov and apparently plan to leave it at that), and I can see why: It's a heckuva lot harder to run an effective campaign from the White House than from the campaign trail. Expect legal challenges and conflict-of-interest allegations from Republicans over any exotic use of online tech from the new president. (A super-empowered executive branch is also no panacea for anything, as the last eight years of Unitary Executive philosophy proved. We're confident now about Obama, but what about the next guy?) Finally, grassroots-empowering tech gave the insurgent the advantage this time, but what happens when the establishment has it too?

Bottom line: no one really knows where this is going. Online politics is going to be at least as messy as offline. Engaging everyone won't necessarily make the debates more rational. There are excellent principles being developed and implemented that have proven to be positively effective at the margins, but expecting fundamentally different trends is unrealistic.