Shuuks Jed, you're giving it all away... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_vs._Spy
http://www.dccomics.com/mad/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_magazine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Its_a_mad_mad_mad_world Neuman for president! (Or Mills or Searl) -----Original Message----- From: Jed Rothwell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 27 October 2008 14:47 To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Subject: [Vo]:More notes on the Obama campaign techniques and technology This is somewhat off topic but we are living through historic events and I thought people would be interested in hearing some first-hand reports of them. Here are some more notes on my impressions of the Obama campaign, relevant to their ability to deal with technical problems. The Obama people seem to be good at solving difficult, intractable problems. They are skillful and decisive. They make decisions in minutes that would take other campaigns hours or days. I saw a pile of donated junked computer parts at the campaign headquarters, and I said to the 20-something kid in charge: "let me assemble some of those for you." He said: "go for it, we really need more computers," so I did. (I brought some of my own cyber-junk.) He didn't even know my name. No authorization, BS phone calls or waiting: just "go for it." They are frugal, clever with technology and psychology, resourceful and young, like a startup tech company circa 1980. They keep track of people. As one commentator put it, "they never lose your phone number." They are using clunky and unreliable web-based software to keep track of their Get Out The Vote (GOTV) campaign, but the advantage is that the software is dirt cheap and it works with any computer anywhere, including the cyber-junk (spare-parts) computer I assembled. Here is an example of their psychology. My daughter described a meeting she attended. They asked for volunteers and maybe 60 new people showed up. All young people, who always carry cell phones these days. The first thing the Obama people did was to hand out sheets of paper with four telephone numbers on each sheet. They said to the potential volunteers: "Here are the numbers of four people who registered to vote with our campaign. Please call these four numbers and urge them to vote. The paragraph on the bottom tells you what to say, 'Hello, I am with the Obama campaign . . .'" The thing is, when people first volunteer they may feel inhibited or embarrassed about calling strangers. But after you call three or four people, you realize it is not difficult and you are more inclined to continue. Plus when you are with a large group of people who are all doing it for the first time you feel some pressure to go along with the others, and you see that other people may feel awkward but they are capable of doing it. The campaign does many things that never would have occurred to me, such as advertising Obama in on-line adventure games and other cyberspace gathering places, which my daughter calls "the new public space." Here is a cute illustration of that: http://www.npr.org/templates/common/image_enlargement.php?imageResId=9603096 3 Caption: "In this image provided by Kathryn Grim, two furry avatars wearing Barack Obama shirts attend a meeting at the SecondLife Obama campaign headquarters." That sentence would have been meaningless 10 years ago, and incomprehensible 30 years ago. I cannot imagine trying to explain to my grandmother what a "furry avatar" is, or what it has to do with winning a presidential campaign. By the way, I have left-over cyber-junk free for anyone who needs it: a 16 X read-write internal DVD drive with cables, and an external USB read-wright DVD drive. If anyone has a use for either one, contact me directly. You pay shipping only. - Jed
