by Adam Richards
This week marked a big step forward for Labour in London and Ken Livingstone’s campaign to win back City Hall, with the launch of his campaign volunteer website, YourKen.org.
YourKen.org is clearly inspired by the success of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, my.barackobama.com which did so much of the mobilising of his support during the Democrat primary contest, and to a lesser extent the SNP’s campaign during the recent Scottish elections.
The website is built on the same technology from the US-based company, NationBuilder. The founder, Jim Gilliam, talking about his tools said ‘too often, online efforts are seen as a sideline to the offline efforts of a campaign’.
The success of NationBuilder is bringing online and offline communities’ together, empowering volunteers and energising campaigns. And it works. One example makes the point. Thanks to an ingenious system 50 SNP party supporters instantaneously signalled on Facebook their “like” for a speech by Alex Salmond during the buildup to the Scottish elections; simultaneously a video of the speech appeared on their Facebook news feeds. That clever device meant that 60,000 people instantly became aware of the speech and had the opportunity to view it. Pretty powerful stuff.
The key theme that runs through YourKen.org is community which is important to consider in light of recent events in London. Outside of the micro-community of the [extended] family the key next two obvious communities are those of interest and those of place- both in quite obviously in decline. Fewer people know their neighbours names now than in decades past, especially in London with its high levels of residential churn and population mobility.
In my view there is a third kind of community though, the most important- that of time-based, or temporal communities. These are communities that come together either intentionally or serendipitously, often as a one-off and to make a formal decision or declaration to take action at a moment in time. Like an election. (more…)
