NationBuilder - And you thought CIMS was scary

Ten years ago the Cons bought CIMS, their Constituent Information Management System, and began stuffing it with our phone numbers and adding smiley/frowny faces beside our names and whatever other info they could glean about us. The other parties had their own lesser versions. Most of us first took notice of CIMS when we learned it had been used to perpetrate election fiddling in the last election. 

Now all the parties, although perhaps not all the members, use the newer and snazzier US import NationBuilder instead. Touted as more peer-to-peer grassroots organizing than traditional top-down voter ID programs, NationBuilder "builds social-media matching into voter files so that simply knowing an email address will let the software connect a voter’s picture, bio, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn."

Perhaps we should have paid more attention to its actual name.

Here Mike Moschella, a VP at the US company, explains the five keys for its success :

• Full social media integration means going beyond adding a Facebook icon next to a voter’s name in the file. Field staff need to be alerted when voters engage on their websites or social media platforms

• Campaigns need to share more than address and phone data with their grassroots leaders. Precinct captains need bios, photos and other information gained from online interactions.

• Training is needed to understand this shift in how campaigns talk with voters. A neighborhood leader will need to do more than cut a walk list - we’re moving from riding horses to driving cars.

• Campaigns must shift focus toward capturing mobile numbers. Having an event? Text to RSVP. Petition? Text to sign. Survey? Text to reply.

• The party infrastructure and campaign need to be in sync and must engage in the same efforts year round. Finding this data won’t occur overnight.

In March 2014, Moschella spoke at the Manning Centre. Here's a story he told [37 minute mark of podcast - transcribed]:

"For the last five years before coming to NationBuilder I worked in foreign policy in National Security so I worked with efforts around the world...You do a whole lot of work on that global police thing ... So I did a lot of work on re-imagining what an American foreign policy - a really pro-democratic, pro-democracy platform - would look like in a changing world because all these things with social media started to, despite people not wanting them, seep into what other countries were doing.  ... 

In Venezuela we ran an opposition race for a guy named Capriles against Hugo Chavez's hand-picked dictator, and they took 8-million twitter records, targeted 2-million of those people, directly talked to them on twitter with their friends -people, one friend connected to another person - and asked them to consider the pro-democracy candidate and 500,000 of those people got involved in that campaign. They probably won but the dictatorship called it 49%. But now there's a real opposition movement that's fighting for freedom in a major country called Venezuela.

In Malaysia for the first time ever, people used geo-targeting from social media to figure out where supporters of an opposition movement were and hold rallies in those slums to ask people to fight for their freedom and they created actually the first field campaign ever using a thing called NationBuilder."

It's a very interesting lecture from a believer in "social media as the personal touch of community on a grand scale" because as he insisted : "people do what their friends do".

I can't do it justice because it reminded me of Amway and the first year people sell insurance : You sell it to your friends and it only works if they in turn sell it to their friends and the product is always you. So listen to it for yourself.

After his presentation, he took questions from the floor.
Con MP Stella Ambler wanted to know how she could find out how many of her 1389 Facebook followers were actually in her small suburban riding - "Is there a way to do that?" - while noting that "our privacy laws are different in this country". 

Moschella : 

"So here's the thing about Facebook. Any time anyone takes an action, FB has three types of actions - you can share something, you can comment on something, or you can like something. And actually the terms of service of FB dictates that when you take an action on FB, that's actually a public thing. Cool, huh? 

What that allows us to do is connect those actions into your NationBuilder database. So if your FB page is connected to your site which is connected to your backend database, then we can show you how to do this - it's like a two, three minute process to get going - literally all you need is a password. Then anytime somebody shares, comments, or likes a post, it will either a)create a profile for that person in your NationBuilder database so now you own that relationship, or b) find their existing profile if they're already in there and record that they have taken that action. 

When you know all the actions that people take, then you can do the next thing which is really key to your engagement which is actually quantifying that engagement. So what you would do in your campaign, is say, sharing something on FB is worth one point, commenting is worth two points, making a donation is worth 10 points. And when you have all this together, then you'll actually see that Edward is worth 20 points and Mike is worth 50 points. So then you can sort how valuable people are in your community and really smartly target them."

                                                                                     [snip] 

Ambler : 

"So .. texting. How do you ... you don't have their cell phone numbers. Their addresses aren't on there on their FB profiles. Sorry to get into the weeds like this..."

Answer from either Moschella or Mike Martens, director of the Manning Centre’s School of Practical Politics - I couldn't tell : 

"You create a data capture system that grabs their cell phones. It's not that hard to do. You have to get organizing to get more data and it's like a cycle - it's like a snowball effect - you have to start somewhere but if you do data capture well, you'll be able to get their cellphone. Mike is going to shut me up."

"Stella, you're a member of Parliament? So you use CIMS. CIMS has all the phone numbers. So the question is whether or not CIMS and NationBuilder can integrate and once the Party starts working with the Manning Centre, and we're working with them to do that, Manning Centre is working with NationBuilder to do training and we can start training on how CIMS and NationBuilder work in a legal way regarding the privacy thing. So somebody needs to figure that out. There are legal ways - I know some of them - but we're getting into some really fine- some of these things were answered in the morning. My point is not that we can't talk about them here except-"

Ambler :  "No, I'm just so pleased to know somebody is having that conversation."

Mike ... or perhaps Mike : 

"We're thinking about this, we're working on it. NationBuilder has some reallly neat - one thing that NationBuilder is really exciting is its text capability based on being in an event like this, telling everybody text me. Well as soon as they do that, guess what - you've got their cell phone number. So then you've got to think of creative events where then that kind of conversation can occur and that's a different kind of campaign than emailing. 

I guess my point is, Stella, that we are thinking that NationBuilder has solutions. We just need to figure out how the NationBuilder and CIMS systems, which currently the CIMS system is kind of closed, but you can export data out of CIMS, load it into NationBuilder, interact with people, and then load that data back into CIMS. So that's just very superficially how these things can work but there's probably even more open ways - things called APIs that interact two systems in a live manner that might be discovered but we'll have to work with NationBuilder to figure it out."

Mike Martens : "Folks, 30 seconds before Mark Steyn's session begins ..."

h/t to Port Moody/Coquitlam Election 2015, who wrote a post on Newclear's young Con contenders that I riffed on on Tuesday, and then he added a look at the NewClear/NationBuilder nexus to his post which has set me off again...

.

Time Magazine's 2010 Person of the Year

.
Oh sorry - that is just Time's readers' poll.

Here ya go .
.
BBC :

"A Time poll showed readers favoured naming WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange this year but the magazine's editors and correspondents chose Zuckerberg.
The conservative Tea Party political movement was Time's second choice, followed by Assange, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the 33 trapped Chilean miners."

So. Facebook, then the Tea Party, then WikiLeaks, then Afghan President Karzai. In that order. Please adjust your headsets accordingly.

.

Keeping score on Facebook

When Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament started up on Facebook last week, supporters of last year's Canadians Against a Liberal/NDP Coalition Gov't were all very dissy about it : We got 127,000 members in less than a week - crowed BloggingTory Stephen Taylor - the largest Canadian FB group evah!

Of course now that CAPP membership has reached 140,000 150,000, they've gone all 'well fuck facebook then', and the National Post is plumping for the 163 Canadians Who Don't Care if Harper is Proroguing Parliament Give a Rat's Ass About It
.
As CC points out, the prorogue FB support group are of course the real competition to CAPP and not the anti-coalition group, but Susan Delacourt points out an important difference between anti-prorogue group and the anti-coalition group for us anyway (h/t Dammit Janet) :

"This new Facebook group is counting on people to educate themselves about parliamentary tradition, practice and principle. The old Facebook group was organized around the notion of 'never mind parliamentary rules about majority/minority and confidence, this thing is wrong.'

In other words, you have to understand basic rules of Parliament to understand why this prorogation is unusual; you had to ignore parliamentary rules to argue the coalition was wrong."

And right there Susan nails the basic difference between progressives and the ReformaTories.
.

SPP : "We're getting better all the time."

Stockwell Day, the RCMP, Bell Canada and Microsoft will be partnering on "a national cyber-security strategy that will seek to protect key infrastructure as well as Canadians' identities".
"A high-level security conference being hosted by the Conference Board of Canada" will take place on Nov 5 and 6th.
The Conference Board of Canada, you may recall, partnered with the U.S. Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) to launch the North American Future 2025 Project , "to help guide the ongoing Security and Prosperity Partnership". At their conference in Calgary last April their agenda noted : "the overriding future goal of North America is to achieve joint optimum utilization of the available water."

So you'll excuse me if I cast a jaundiced eye on whatever new plan to protect my "Canadian identity" they might be hosting this time round. One of the original objectives of the SPP was "improving the coordination of intelligence-sharing, cross-border law enforcement".

At least Canada's Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, has been invited this time and will be addressing the conference on "Balancing Privacy with Cyber Security".
In May there was a "Server in the Sky" meet-up in San Francisco to discuss the FBI's proposed shared database of biometric information - our fingerprints, palm prints, and iris scan data to be exchanged among the International Information Consortium of US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and eventually the EU. Ms Stoddart first heard about the conference by reading about it in the British press.

As Ms Stoddart said on CBC in response to that meeting in May : "Canada has a very weak 25 year old Privacy Act with no human rights standards built in to our agreements with other countries." Additionally she was alarmed by "the conflating of criminals and suspected terrorists", the lack of oversight of the biometric info once it passes to other countries, and the rise of "a surveillance society".

One of our partners in the International Information Consortium is already well on the way to becoming a surveillance society:
The Daily Mail via Statism Watch :

"Every person in Britain could have their internet history, email records and telephone calls tracked under a proposed £12 billion plan by ministers.
The system would see hundreds of hidden devices planted to tap into communications on the internet and via mobile phone providers.
And a national database would be created to store the information which officials say would help in the fight against terrorism and organised crime."

I thought we already had Facebook for that.

From the blog of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada :

"In terms of Canadian participation [in Server in the Sky], our citizens rightfully expect that their personal information remains safeguarded and understandably, could be reluctant to see that information freely shared with two countries that were ranked near the bottom of Privacy International’s ratings of privacy protection around the world."

David Black, manager of the RCMP's cyber infrastructure protection section, says of the Bell/Microsoft/RCMP plan for "the protection of critical cyber infrastructure and the convergence of technological and physical security", presumably to be shared in due course with the other members of the FBI's International Information Consortium :

"We're getting better all the time."