Obama's secret weapon: Internet, databases, psychology

It turns out that Barack Obama uses modern technology very effectively in his election campaign. Thanks to a cleverly organized social network on the Internet, he only in a few key states was able to attract one and a half million free volunteers who, on their own initiative, draw homemade posters and take to the streets agitating for their favorite candidate. The social network is the center of self-organization of volunteers. It works as a powerful and efficient machine capable of initiating unprecedented actions nationwide. This has never happened before. The Obama campaign has become the most technologically advanced in the entire history of the presidential election, writes Wired .

A system for training volunteers and organizing spontaneous actions was developed on the basis of the scientific model of Marshall Ganz, a professor of psychology at Harvard University. The professor focused on the stimulation of the emotional, right hemisphere of the brain by activists, inspired by the speeches of the brilliant orator Obama. As practice has shown, the effectiveness of the model was brilliantly confirmed in practice.

The development of the web project itself was led by 24-year-old Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook . He left Facebook last year, having received an invitation from a candidate of the Democratic Party.

Professor Marshall Ganz also helped develop an 80-page volunteer manual that can be downloaded from the site. The manual describes in detail how to create teams of activists and assign the roles of the team coordinator, information coordinator (all information about contacts with individual voters went to the national Internet database, see below for details), coordinator for voter registration and coordinator for contacts with voters . The mechanism of the propaganda team is painted in the smallest detail. There are separate guides for individualistic volunteers and other types of campaigning.
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The cornerstone of the Obama Internet platform is the my.BarackObama.com social network, where potential volunteers are registered. Especially for them, Obama programmers have created several effective web tools that are extremely useful in their work. For example, the Neighbor-to-Neighbor system, through which you can find the addresses and phone numbers of registered voters in your district, as well as up-to-date information on each voter (when and how they contacted him, what materials were sent and when, how he was configured during the last conversation and etc.). The program marks voters as "supporters" or "hesitant", on which further actions of volunteers depend. The collection and processing of information is perfectly adjusted.

On these lists of telephone numbers there is a telephone call. Imagine, neighbors come to you and remind you not to forget to come to the polls. If a voter is marked as a “supporter”, then he doesn’t even need to be agitated, but just to make sure that he knows where the polling station is, and he will definitely come to the polls.

For example, one of the key states is Florida. Only in this state alone, there were 19,000 "local brigades", each of which was engaged in agitating their neighbors in the community (they disassembled 1,400 state districts among themselves and processed them in an organized manner). According to preliminary estimates, 230,000 volunteers took part in the action in Florida alone. One of them - 43-year-old Janette Scanlon, a manager from Tampa - is depicted in the photo along with the poster painted by her. For two and a half hours, she said hello to all passing cars at one of the busy intersections near Plant City at rush hour.



The entire volunteer army had only 500 full-time coordinators who work full-time for Obama. They helped and directed volunteers, mostly coordinating their activities again via the Internet.