Earlier this week, Chris Bowers fired up the 2008 Use It or Lose It campaign.  For those who are new to the campaign, the idea is simple but powerful: get Democratic Representatives and Senators who are in non-competitive races to pay all of their dues (which can be quite substantial) to the DCCC and DSCC, respectively.  These kinds of transfers are a legal, quick way to raise a lot of cash for the committees, and thereby to make a lot of new races competitive.  Chris estimates that we can raise as much as $6.5 million this way, and the campaign was very effective in 2006.

I think this is a brilliant idea, but I'm intrigued by the crowdsourcing (that is, distributed data collection) angle.  Distilled to the basics, this is a fairly straightforward crowdsourcing campaign, a couple of times over: get a group of volunteers to collect data about which Democratic Congresspeople are safe this year and how much money they have; then get volunteers to call those Congresspeople and ask them to pay their dues.  The key to success of the campaign is putting together a database which volunteers can use collaboratively to post updates and track progress in a systematic way.  Chris is using Google Spreadsheets for this purpose; that's a great tool and it's a great way to get the job done in a pinch.

However, it occurs to me that this kind of crowdsourcing task will only become more important in the future, and I think there's a way to streamline these kinds of campaigns and to make them even more powerful and robust.  Below, I propose the creation of a general-purpose crowdsourcing platform which can be used to fire up a distributed progressive pressure campaign on a variety of public institutions - Congress, the media, state legislatures.  The platform would make the lives of crowdsourcing organizers a little easier; it would enable our crowdsourcing campaigns to be more broadly distributed; and it would enable those campaigns to carry second-order effects which could help the progressive movement accrue and organize power over the long run.

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Originally posted at TechPresident.com

One thing to watch this presidential campaign cycle will be the usage of YouTube by presidential candidates. YouTube allows a presidential candidate yet another avenue to engage potential supporters and voters, and it does so for an incredibly low price tag. All one needs is a digital video camcorder, a computer and an internet connection. The YouTube community doesn't demand the high production values that a TV audience requires. Another important aspect of YouTube is the viral aspect of it, particularly among an increasingly active and growing demographic, young voters.

In the 2006 election we saw some usage of YouTube by politicians and political organizations, mostly to redistribute ads that originally aired on TV or were intended for TV. Ads were posted from both Democratic and Republican groups but I feel that there are two ads which without a doubt had a much larger impact on the electorate because they were uploaded to YouTube.

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