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Hi! I've been an organizer for twenty years. I've worked more than a dozen political campaigns and scores of union campaigns in that time. This app is NOT ORGANIZING. Let me explain. 1/
To be fair, there is a key part of this app that _is_ like organizing, and can make people uncomfortable: assessment. Organizing requires assessing where people stand and recording that data. Many people don't love that. 2/
People especially don't love it when they don't know it's happening. And that's what's deeply wrong with the app. It's ONLY about assessment, not organizing. Because organizing requires engagement, and this app doesn't. 3/
When someone knocks on your door and asks you if you support a candidate, you know that they're keeping track of that information. Or, at minimum, you probably ought to know. That's because they engaged you. 4/
The best organizing doesn't even do an assessment until deep in the engagement process. Admittedly, political campaigns don't do as much of this, but a good union organizer will tell you that you should talk with someone for at least 15 minute or so before you take the chance 5/
of calling the question and making the assessment. And, let's be clear, an assessment is NOT a miniature opinion poll. It's not just about, or primarily about, what they say. It's how they act. A good assessment requires some kind of TEST. 6/
At its most simplistic, an assessment test could be something like, "can we put you down as a supporter?" You can see that even such a basic question is way more determinative than just asking who they support. 7/
In union drives, a gold standard assessment is the public petition, asking someone to voluntarily add their name to a public list of union supporters. If they're willing to put their name out there in public, then you can feel confident they're with you. 8/
This app doesn't require engagement. It doesn't even require a conversation. Or an email, or text, or anything. It simply allows people to make guesses. The political value of those guesses is zero without real organizing and assessment. 9/
And without engagement, then I am entirely sympathetic to folks who feel like this is an intrusion into their private space. 10/
I've also read reports that people can enroll in this app with a fake name and yet be able to access to people's personal (public it not easy to find) information. If true, then this app will be overrun with garbage in days. 11/
If the app can't tell the difference between data entered by someone making conscientious efforts at engagement, and someone trying to track down old high school crushes, it's worse than useless. 12/
Before you accuse me of being some kind of top-down organizer, I want to point out that I've been pushing the idea of democratizing campaign data to activist-leaders for many years. I absolutely want the folks on the ground... 13/
...to have access to all relevant information, and should be trusted to enter data, too. But only if they are, in fact, organizing. That means conversation, engagement, and active assessment. That's not what this app does. End/
@politicoroger wrote a fantastic analysis of the Dean/Kerry Iowa matchup in 2004. The Dean campaign had huge numbers of energetic, untrained, and unstructured volunteers. Their assessments were wholly useless and set the campaign way back. Can't find it online or I'd post.
UPDATE: So, I registered for the app to see what it was all about.
First, note that in the terms of service, you give up your right to civil litigation and are forced to accept arbitration. This is Bernie. Sanders. #FeelTheBern ???
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First, note that in the terms of service, you give up your right to civil litigation and are forced to accept arbitration. This is Bernie. Sanders. #FeelTheBern ???
1/
At the start of the app, you can either add friends ("everyone in your network" feels a little... something to me) or "talk to people around you everyday."
Little weird, but not truly problematic.
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Little weird, but not truly problematic.
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This is the friends and family page. Highly problematic. There is no place here to record HOW you know these things about the person, how you came up with your information, or whether you've actually spoken to them. Any data entered here is worthless. 3/
I looked up myself, and this is what popped out. From what I hear, this is an improvement on what the app first showed, which had more personal information. This has no address: good. It won't let you search just with a partial name, too, which is good. 4/
The community canvass one is pretty hilarious - "Ask the voter these questions, or you can HAND THE VOTER YOUR PHONE AND LET THEM FILL IT OUT ON THEIR OWN" [emphasis added]. This. Is. Not. Organizing.
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Also love the varied specificity of the issues. Taxes gets "Making the wealthy, large corporation, and Wall Street pay their fair share in taxes" but then it's just "Racial justice", "Women's rights", or "Improving rural economies". Tells you what Bernie's priorities are. 6/
I want to repeat my earlier point - this method will rapidly result in a database full of garbage data. People are prone to think those close to them share their beliefs, so there will be huge biases in the data. Indeed, the weakness of the data this app will collect... 7/
...tells me that, however much the Bernie campaign says this is about democratizing organizing, it is NOT. Let me count the ways. First, a truly democratic database is two-way: you can enter AND PULL data. Can I find out if my neightbor has already been assessed? Nope. 8/
Can I pull a list of people at my college who are leaning Bernie but not all the way there, so I can follow up with them? Nope. Can I see how I have been assessed by the campaign? Nope. Can I run a walk list for a neighborhood so I can go door-to-door? Nope. 9/
That, folks, despite what @theintercept says, is what a truly democratic database would look like. And, for reasons that should be obvious, no campaign would ever give that data out to anyone who registered on a website. 10/
A campaign would only give it to someone who had shown themselves through actions to be a committed supporter, and they would only give it to someone who knew how to use it to do good organizing and assessments. (Campaigns SHOULD DO THIS, btw, and they don't.) 11/
This BERN app is absolutely not about bringing people into the campaign. It's about trying to amass large amounts of data. And, as such, it is fundamentally dishonest of the Sanders campaign to act like this is some great way for people to have ownership of the campaign. 12/
I can think of three reasons, which I will list in order of increasing nefariousness, why the Sanders campaign would put out this app and falsely claim it's a real organizing app. First, could just be incompetence. Maybe they just don't know what they're doing. Happens. 13/
Second, this is primarily a way to build "sweat equity" in the campaign. If you do work for a cause, however minor the work is, you are more likely to stay committed to it. People who take the time to download this app and enter data are demonstrating commitment. 14/
This is pretty normal campaign practice, and not a bad one, but it is nefarious to me because you're misleading these folks - your core supporters - by pretending it has an importance that it does not. 15/
Third, and worst, this could be an attempt to mine social networking data by having people reveal their friends and allowing the campaign to build maps that connect people. Think about how similar this is to Facebook selling you access to people's friend's profiles. 16/
There is very little difference. The Sanders campaign may be planning to use this data to target messages to particular subgroups. Again, what makes this bad is the dishonesty. If they were just open about it being their primary goal, then fine. 17/
But, instead, and with the high-and-mighty righteous indignation the campaign is so good at, Bernie tells his supporters that this is about building an "historic grassroots campaign." theintercept.com/2019/04/29/ber… 18/
This app is not about organizing. It offers rank-and-file folks no real access to or ability to participate in campaign decisionmaking. It will not yield useful data, at least in the way it claims. The more I look at this, the more outraged I am. 19/
Look at this ridiculous "survey" question from the Klobuchar campaign. Does anyone honestly believe that the Klobuchar campaign is analyzing the responses from this question to learn about the electorate? Of course not. 20/
It's a transparent attempt to get people to click on a website and connect to the campaign. The Bernie app is exactly the same thing. And yet he promises a different kind of politics. End/
Broke my thread here - added a whole update with new info based on looking over the app myself:
