Relational Organizing

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Example

The Bernie Sanders 2020 Primary Campaign

Common Knowledge:

""Using a strategy named “distributed organising”, a small team of full-time staff was supplemented by thousands of technical volunteers, contributing to open source code repositories and creating tools that tied together commercial technologies such as Google Sheets with specialist political software. Downstream, many many more volunteers worked on the ground. The Sanders campaign did not junk data entirely, but supplemented it with face-to-face interaction. The “big data’’ of the Obama era had given way to big organising. Niche targeting of specific demographics gave way to a social democratic, universalist message regarding issues such as healthcare. The techniques that evolved out of these campaigns have increasingly emphasised “relational organising”: placing relations, conversations and existing human networks at the centre of efforts, rather than data-based targeting. In 2020, the Sanders campaign’s Bern app is encouraging people to “have open, honest, and thorough conversations with our friends, family, and neighbours” and record their information, persuading them over the course of the campaign. This simple technique is a hallmark of traditional campaigning, but the communication power of digital technology helps it take place on a massive scale.

The key distinction between the Obama campaigns and the Sanders campaigns is the distinction between mobilising and organising. Obama’s campaign didn’t lack organising chops – Obama himself was a community organiser. But its tech functioned like a brand: it tried to mobilise people to do something. Sanders’ campaign, by contrast, is seeking to organise people, like a social movement, to do it themselves, and the tech follows this. The campaign relies heavily on supporters but, in distinction to the Obama era, makes them the centre of the campaign – they aren’t treated as volunteers who are less important than staffers, but as full participants and even experts, running whole chunks of the campaign.

The lesson is that organising tactics work best when they are enabled and supplemented, rather than replaced, by digital technology. The focus for any progressive campaign should be on building relationships, trust and power and using these to deliver political change. Yet there is something about the timescale of elections that makes this difficult.

Electoral campaigns create innovation in political technology, but they are finite and separate from most day-to-day political work. When they come to an end, the technology that enabled the campaign is quickly dropped, making it hard to develop it further, put it to other uses or build upon it.

Sanders has said that Obama’s “biggest mistake” was, after the election, saying: “Thank you very much for electing me, I’ll take it from here.” If Sanders succeeds in becoming president, the challenge for his campaign is to ensure that the movement he is attempting to build continues to have power. Seeing elections as just a tactic in a wider strategy of building power in workplaces and communities is part of the answer. If Sanders’ campaign slogan “Not me, us” is to become a reality, new and different political technologies will need to emerge, not tied to electoral cycles." (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/09/bernie-sanders-campaign-people-tech-obama-big-data)