When Obama referred repeatedly during the campaign to his candidacy and his issues as "coming from the people," part of what he meant was the way he and his advisors used MyBarackObama.com, change.org and other social networking channels to collect ideas, respond to questions, identify and solicit potential supporters, and urge action on the campaign's behalf. Reportedly these Internet-based components of the campaign generated a major share of his unprecedented financial and organizational support, including an estimated $700 million raised and spent — and over 13 million contacts identified and added to the files. Now, through his change.gov Web site, he has been soliciting ideas for government initiatives and having people vote on the ones they find most compelling. This activity was coordinated with meetings in people's houses the weekend of Dec. 13-14, 2008, and was aimed at generating ideas and assessing how many people support them.

One traditional print publication that has noticed this initiative is the Washington Post. In the lead article in the "Style" section in the Dec. 31 issue, reporter Jose Antonio Vargas wrote, "It has been only a decade since an American president first used the Internet. In the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration created WhiteHouse.gov and ordered all Federal agencies to get online. For the first time, the government used the Web to describe what it was doing in its own terms, bypassing media middlemen. George W. Bush's two terms brought podcasting, online chats and videos to the presidency's online presence."

He continued, " 'Clinton was the first Web president, Bush is the first digital president,' says David Almacy, who served as Bush's Internet director from 2005 to 2007. 'Obama is the first online social networking president.' "

Vargas went on, "Online social networking is designed to foster a community. For that approach to be effective, WhiteHouse.gov can't just push information out — it has to pull content in, too. And once it does so, the administration will have to decide whether, when and how to incorporate those voices into its decision-making process."

Blogs and Suggestions


Both change.org and change.gov offer many opportunities for people to add their opinions, ideas, suggestions and comments. There are active blogs, threaded discussions and moderated online forums. People can vote for which ideas they like. On change.gov, contributions were collected into a "Citizens' Briefing Book" to be presented to the president, with the information about how many votes each had received. The change.org site held a competition for ideas for change, with the winner getting two free tickets to an inaugural ball.

Of course, as in any blog or online forum site, the quality and tone of contributions varies. Moderators are carefully chosen to try to keep discussions reasonable, balanced and free of personal attacks and other inappropriate material, but that leaves plenty of room for oddball points of view backed by shoddy logic and weak evidence. This reporter's exploration of several of the discussion areas left the impression of conscientious but not overbearing efforts at moderating, with predictable results. Someone who surfs the site as this reporter did will notice the wide variety of causes espoused and the difficulty of distinguishing worthwhile comments from others without considerable prior background in the subject area in question. A recurring theme is that one person's established and, in his or her view, well-supported position may look to the next person like a nonsensical rant or a hopelessly biased piece of propaganda. The voting process, like the system of having people rate reviews on Amazon, helps to impose some structure on the information, but it is still a non-trivial effort to form a good overall appreciation of any of the livelier discussions.

Nevertheless, the sites do appear to be attracting a diversity of viewpoints that will occasionally enable new ideas to get noticed, considered and possibly adopted. It remains to be seen how long the enthusiastic response to date will continue, and, in a closely related issue, what will happen to the contributions. This reporter observed first hand the outpouring of volunteer effort for the Clinton administration at its inception and the remark by a White House staffer, "We have so many people who want to help us, we could actually charge them for the privilege and we'd still have plenty." That was true, but not for long.

Rallying Support


Beyond the ideas exchange aspects, there is more to this setup than meets the eye. Whoever goes onto these sites immediately sees numerous links to information the Obama team wants to disseminate. Some of these include appeals for advocacy. The in-home meetings in December were also structured to provide information to people and encourage them to support the administration's programs and proposals, not just to offer their own views. The administration clearly intends to maintain the organization from the campaign and use these social networks to generate action on its behalf — and, in due course, to help congressional, state and local candidates friendly to the administration defeat its adversaries.

This is not a new idea, of course, but the size and extent of it, and the technology by which it is being implemented, are noteworthy. It is not a coincidence that Obama counts Eric Schmidt, the head of Google, among his advisors. As Vargas quoted him, Schmidt said, "This is part of our Internet culture, and it's an emerging part of our political culture — you, as a citizen, get to talk back to your government." He adds, "The new set of tools online allow government to open itself up and post a series of questions to its citizens. What should we do with health care? By asking that question, not only does the government become more porous, there becomes a much more dynamic dialogue between the government and its citizens. Change.gov hints as to how this works. We'll see if it transfers to WhiteHouse.gov."

Targeting Activities


The capabilities of this system go beyond soliciting people's views, pushing information out to them and rallying support. People who submit ideas and comments provide their e-mail addresses, which then become part of the fund-raising and issue-activist databases. The sites' managers can apply market-segmentation methods, similar to those in use at sites like Amazon and eBay, to help them determine which appeals should go to whom. Everyone on the change.org site has a public profile, which they can edit but not delete, showing their interests and other information. Each profile also shows how many other people the person has recruited, how much they have raised in donations and what actions they have taken on behalf of causes listed on the site. This pushes people to do more and also facilitates assessing what issues and causes are of greatest importance to each person in the overall social network.

These information-gathering features of the Obama administration's "e-democracy" seem not to have attracted much concern so far, but that could easily change and probably will. Just as the Bush administration's loosening of some privacy protections in the name of security drew little criticism at first but eventually became a major cause for civil liberties advocates, the targeting activities of the current administration could become much more controversial when the president's popularity declines. (If past experience applies, his popularity will decline, no matter how good he is. Every decision on matters of consequence disappoints somebody.) Now, everyone participating in these sites can be regarded as an Obama supporter. Certainly they have participated voluntarily and may therefore be viewed legally as having given informed consent. Keeping the same amount and detail of information about opponents, however, is more likely to cause concern — and sometimes supporters become opponents.

Turning again to previous experience as a guide, political campaigning generally enjoys a more favorable legal and regulatory climate than other activities, such as commercial marketing. Thus, for example, unsolicited telephone calls from political campaigns are exempt from many of the restrictions imposed on other such calls. Congress and the courts, regardless of party of ideology, have been very protective of candidates' right to make their views known. They seem to agree that this right is so fundamental to democracy that they are reluctant to limit it. Still, one can imagine some future abuse, by someone, that could impel closer examination of what should be permitted.

Assessing the Effects


In the week leading up to the inauguration, Tom Daschle, the designated Secretary of Health and Human Services, had already responded, via the change.gov Web site, to some of the more popular proposals from the "Citizens' Briefing Book," and other Cabinet members seem likely to try to maintain a dialogue with the online public, as well. Vargas quoted Andrew Rasiej, an advocate of more open government, as viewing the placement of the chief technology officer, a newly created position in this administration, as a leading indicator of the importance information technology will have: "Every issue group is looking for a czar — an energy czar, a drug czar — but this is different because technology is not a slice of the pie, it's the pan."

Other indications to watch are whether the WhiteHouse.gov site keeps the change.gov structure, the responses various high-level administration officials continue to enter into the site, the extent to which congressional leaders adopt some of the same approaches, and, as a result, how broadly and enthusiastically people continue to participate.

The sites are somewhat harder to navigate than commercial sites like Amazon; in particular, it is harder to navigate back to discussion threads, find one's own submissions and the reactions to them, and find related postings. Internet-savvy people are likely to grow impatient with these inconveniences. Also, although both change.org and change.gov have "press room" sites, this reporter was unable to get any additional information directly from the site managers, even so much as an e-mail response or a pointer to a standard press release, in nearly a week of trying. In short, it is too early to tell how well this new system will actually work.

Even harder to predict but more important are the effects Internet-centric communications and decision-making have on the overall structure of society. As Marshall McLuhan argued more than 40 years ago, any new communications medium, just by its existence, changes society, institution and customs more than whatever content it carries. That's what he meant by his well-known phrase, "the medium is the message." His prediction that TV would break down traditional national political structures and bring about a resurgence of tribalism on a worldwide scale seemed odd, at best, in 1964, but recent events, from global terrorism to various "ethnic cleansings," seem to support his view. His prediction that TV would change the characteristics of candidates who generate broad appeal ("Anybody whose appearance strongly declares his role and status in life is wrong for TV") also looks correct.

And here's where the O.R. comes in. President Obama stated in his inaugural address that he intends to elevate science to greater prominence in the national interest, and indications are that he means applying science not just to technology development, but to the whole policy process. How can the information processing and decision-making be structured to consider more input, do a better job of distinguishing good ideas from bad, improve communications and end up with better decisions? Recent O.R. research and applications on decision science, information and knowledge management and organizational structure appear to be relevant here. Can we do a better job of assessing which policies and procedures really work? O.R. work on defining metrics should be helpful. And what effects will this new medium have on the organization of the government and society as a whole? Organization science should prove useful. O.R. analysts with strong policy backgrounds should find exciting opportunities with this administration.





Douglas A. Samuelson (samuelsondoug@yahoo.com) is principal decision scientist for Serco in Reston, Va., and president of InfoLogix, Inc. in Annandale, Va.

References

1. www.change.gov
2. www.change.org
3. www.myBarackObama.com
4. Marshall McLuhan, 1964, "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man," McGraw-Hill.
5. Douglas A. Samuelson, 2008, "Big Brother's Campaign," Analytics, Winter 2008, p. 4-5, available at www.analyticsmagazine.com.
6. Douglas A. Samuelson, 2008, "Marshall McLuhan's Parable," OR/MS Today, December 2008.
7. Jose Antonio Vargas, 2008, "e-Hail to the Chief: Obama Won With Web's Help. Now, How to Govern Using That Community?", Washington Post, Dec. 31, 2008, p. C1.

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