Keya Dannenbaum

For any job that requires thought, creativity or problem-solving, there are three elements we must provide:

(1) Autonomy—”the desire to direct our own lives;”

(2) Mastery—”the urge to make progress and get better at something that matters; and”

(3) Purpose—”the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.”

ElectNext is a distributed team, across San Francisco, New York and Philadelphia. Almost all our interactions happen on Google+, which precludes much of the lore of startup culture: nerf gun battles, resident chefs, crushing empty cans of Redbull against our foreheads... So we often get asked about the distributed thing - How does it work? Can it be successful?

If I learned one useful thing in business school (and, yes, it probably was just this one), it was the importance of establishing positive company culture early, and the near impossibility of turning a pernicious one around later. So the challenge of remoteness is one to which I was highly attuned from the beginning.

Nine months into it, I'm totally sold, for one fundamental reason: remote teams enjoy the unique privilege of orienting the entire focus of company interactions around goals, progress and achievement. The result is deep trust, high efficiency, soaring standards, and a happiness derived from accomplishment rather than accouterment. Allow me to explain.

First, when you are remote there is no such thing as face time. It cannot possibly matter when you show up to the office, or how long you stay, because no one is there to acknowledge you for it. You can't alter perception of effort that way. The only measure of how hard you're working is whether at the end of the sprint you got everything done (and hopefully more than) you said you would at the beginning. And therein a deep trust cultivates.

Second, as easy at it is for remote teams to always be in touch - via phone, text or chat, but most often via Google Plus - there is still a deliberateness that presages any conversation. And therefore a built in exigency and efficiency. The result is that, for the most part, meetings happen for a reason, everyone knows that reason, and the meeting is productively spent on that reason. Gone are the dreaded vortexes of wasted, lethargic time that masquerade as 'meetings.'

Finally, if we're really going to get into it here and consider the stark differences between meaning and happiness (as were so well articulated in this Atlantic article), remoteness by its very nature emphasizes meaning over happiness. Tech culture is often geared towards happiness -- catered lunches, free flowing happy hours, fancy apple products; in other words, towards a good, but superficial, feeling. A remote team can't offer those same bells and whistles. Where would we send the keg?

I used the phrase "open public data" in a conversation this week and was stopped in my tracks. "Aren't those the same thing? What's the difference between public and open data?"

It's easy to see why those terms are easily conflated, but worth explaining, since opening up public data is a big part of what we do at ElectNext. And one way to conceptualize the difference is reflecting on your own experience interfacing with government. The last time you paid a tax bill, or a parking ticket, or registered to vote...did you fill out a form using a pen and a piece of paper? Did you notice lots of gray metal file cabinets used to house that paper? 

Much of the data stored in those file cabinets in a city or any other government building is public. Meaning you have a legal right to access it (provided it is neither personal nor sensitive). The open part is about the formatting. If you exercised your legal right and requested any of that information, what would you get back? A stack of photocopies, or maybe a PDF document. Not particularly useful.

Enter the open public data movement. Which aims to translate those archaic systems into ones that can return electronic, machine-readable files and, more importantly, limitless possibility.

With open data it becomes possible for government to revolutionize its own operations, as it can now run internal analysis on years of deep, rich datasets, and can decipher crucial insights on program efficacy and resource efficiency. With open data it becomes possible for outside organizations to tap into those same repositories and design new interfaces for unprecedented interactivity between our public institutions and individuals, business, and civil society.

Technology has opened the door to a shift in campaign strategy: now, you can win small. The problem is, you have to govern big.

As Alastair Croll wrote for the O’Reilly Radar in February: “After JFK, you couldn’t win an election without television. After Obama, you couldn’t win an election without social networking. I predict that in 2012, you won’t be able to win an election without big data.”

If Mr. Croll was right, then the irony - and in fact the real worry - is that big data has made our politics small.  Here’s how.

A campaign today, like any sophisticated marketer or advertiser, has unprecedented ability to collect every last piece of information about each of us, including our name, age, gender; what we ‘like’, what we buy, who our friends are; our home address, our email address, our IP address -- hundreds of data points on each of over 250 million registered voters, gleaned from both publicly available and purchased sources such as social graphs, census data, tax records, and commercial data. 

The power in this expanse of data is its ability to make person-level predictions about likely voting behavior, which in turn allows campaigns to market a unique political product to each individual, with the right message through the right medium at the right time. The power of big data is its ability to make the world small.

This power, in itself, is neither novel nor particularly concerning. We interact in small, individualized ways all the time thanks to big data. If we stream a film on Netflix or buy a book on Amazon, those companies are leveraging huge product-attribute datasets and the ratings of millions of users to help us make just the right purchase.  If we search a term on Google or check our Facebook newsfeed, those companies are similarly personalizing the millions of possible results to give us the most satisfying and engaging, experience. The world, through our own eyes, can look like a pretty great place.

And so it is with politics. A campaign volunteer today can knock on my door knowing that I am a small business owner with a college degree and speak earnestly to me about how national healthcare policy affects employers, and that same volunteer can then walk next door and explain to the real estate broker who lives there a plan to reset tax policy and recover the anemic housing sector. These pitches are focused, efficient, likely to be well-received, and overall seem like a pretty good thing. 

The problem with this approach that is in the act of electing a candidate we don’t just ‘purchase’ her, like we would a dvd from Netflix or a novel from Amazon. Electing a candidate turns her into something else; specifically, into an official. An official who must now govern.

If you believe the purpose of government is in large part the provision and management of public goods - in other words, if you believe its function should reside in a place above any one individual or even a small coalition of individuals - then you immediately see the disconnect.  An administration who must repay its (not ‘the’, but ‘its’) electorate by keeping the specific promises it made to specific groups will have a very difficult time pushing forward big ideas or sweeping reforms or comprehensive agendas.  And thus the fundamental role of government, in the modern transaction, is lost. 

We can see some of the ramifications already, in unprecedented polarization and rock-bottom levels of confidence in Congress’s ability to find any common ground on which to solve any of the very large problems we currently face in this country. But if the quickest route to public office is via a sophisticated micro-targeting operation, why would you marshall support for initiatives that speak to us as a people and rise to the challenges that we experience as a nation? 

So, on this Election Day, if victory indeed turns on our newest technology, we should brace for a new political reality. Because an administration that wins with big data may well be doomed to governing small.

There is an effort under way by an organization that has historically operated on the technological frontier of its space to pool the currently disparate identities of its user profiles across properties into a single, unified, record. Its business is “conversions,” and it is through enhanced profiling and targeting that it hopes to generate a competitive conversion advantage.

No, I am not three days late in joining a chorus of commentary on the Google Privacy Policy change. I’m referring instead to the Obama campaign, which is in the midst of a full-scale execution of a project almost identical to that of the controversial Silicon Valley titan.

Google can now combine what they learn about you from across their different products, so they know as much about you when you’re on YouTube as when you’re on Gmail. And this matters from a business perspective. Rather than display advertising on the basis of your search term alone, for example, Google can now tailor those results to what they know about your likes, dislikes, psychographics and demographics, gleaned from watching you all around the web. More relevance equals more clicks equals more revenue, or “conversions.”

Never slow to early-adopt when it comes to technology, the Obama campaign is endeavoring to do the same thing in the political space. The president’s team is working to combine its records about you — as a fundraiser, a Facebook fan, the subject of a field canvass, etc. — so that every point of contact can be made with full information and more precisely targeted messaging. And this matters from a strategy perspective. Rather than blast generic emails based on blunt segmentation like zip code, for example, the Obama campaign can now send a pro-choice woman a note about the contraception mandate, and the graduating college senior next door a note about trending jobs numbers. More relevance equals more clicks equals more votes, or “conversions.”

There is obvious power in such a personalized approach, and one that, in Google’s case, has resulted in an outcry from privacy protectors, a frenzy to delete web history before the deadline, and a legal challenge from European “data authorities.” However, unlike Google, which had been conspicuously notifying its users of the upcoming change effective March 1, Obama’s project Narwhal, like the arctic creature for which it was code-named, has tried to lurk well below the surface of visible operations. The efforts at secrecy only underscore the tactic’s importance.

So, will winning the data game prove game-changing in 2012? I posed that question recently to a democratic strategist and political targeting guru. But in the same breath that he revealed frustration over the Narwhal “leak,” he shrugged the project off as minor. “It’s just combining a few files together, nothing more than that. It’s not like this will be decisive,” he said.

My favorite quote from election season 2012 would have to be this one from O’Reilly Radar big data columnist Alistair Croll:

“After Eisenhower, you couldn’t win an election without radio. After JFK, you couldn’t win an election without television. After Obama, you couldn’t win an election without social networking. I predict that in 2012, you won’t be able to win an election without big data.”

Croll rightly observes that major shifts, particularly in communications technology, leave an indelible impression on the execution of the American political campaign. As a former politico who lived through a searing defeat at the hands of social media, I’m both intrigued and nervous to watch, from the outside this time, as data makes the big difference.

Here’s how they’re going to do it: Political data companies are buying up scores of commercial data on each of you ( “over 120 data points on 90 percent of Internet users equaling 210+ million people” brags one such outlet). They collect political preference data on samples of their overall population to build predictive models. They then feed their larger set of commercial data into this model and reliably determine if, on what basis, and how you are likely to vote. And then they message the daylights out of you (though in my case, both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are following me around the Internet — I suppose this is a craft still in its infancy).

Kind of creepy, right? And especially so when you consider the situation in reverse.

What do you know about your candidates? About the guys at the top of the ticket — Obama and his opponent, be it Romney, Gingrich, Santorum or Paul — perhaps a reasonable amount. What about your senator? Or your representative? Or any other person or office that will comprise over 96 percent of the choices you’ll have to make when you enter a voting booth in November? While they know the details of your credit card history, voting history, and Internet browsing behavior, and all of the intimately personal information inherent within, you don’t even know their names.

If 2012 is the year of the big data, and data is power, and this power is wielded with such dramatic asymmetry, how is our electoral and governance process still one that can be legitimately described as by the people, of the people and for the people?