SEIU's Internet-enabled election endorsements
Last Saturday the SEIU California State Council webcast a Governor's Town Hall where the two hopefuls for the Democratic bid, Phil Angelides and Steve Westly, answered questions from members watching the live videocast from at least 10 different cities. The townhall was also streamed live online. Questions were taken in English and Spanish with translation. At the end, members at the different sites and watching at home cast votes to endorse one of the candidates, the results of which were read on the webcast.
A good first step to using the Internet to promote member participation in the upcoming gubernatorial campaign, no? I hope this step is recognized as a good start by other unions and continued on, improving the rank-and-file's role in the political endorsement process. This would have been impossible to do without the Internet - and, many other innovative steps can yet be taken to utilize IT to strengthen organized labor.
- bonus note: The Governor's Town Hall site is running on Drupal. Check the code/nodes. Maybe all the pro-Drupal-ness on Communicate or Die did make it to a union webmaster's ear.
- Francisco Cendejas's blog
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Couple of quick comments
Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Interesting site. This is a very slick operation of course and could only be pulled off by a deep-pocketed union like SEIU. How many unions would have the political muscle be able to set up their own debate and have candidates come out and participate? And how many on top of that would have the funds to pay for videocasting it over the web? Not many.
But I think the lesson here is not the format of this particular debate and the web technologies employed, but the new frontier of do-it-yourself journalism that the web is opening up. Any local union can interview a candidate and put it up on their site using old-fashioned HTML. They don't need to videocast to be effective.
About using Drupal, SEIU has been used the company called EchoDitto to put together its first Drupal site, PurpleOcean. PO was around before the Communicate or Die community. So it's unlikely SEIU tooked their cue from here. They probably used EchoDitto to create the governor's candidate site.
Point Well Taken
Steve is right to point out that breadth of audience is more important than flash. I don't know what kind of money it takes to videocast but if SEIU in CA has it, I could think of worse ways to spend it. At least is sounds like it was interactive, that is, without knowing how the questions were selected. The devil is in the details.
The harder question is how you could expand something like this to a much broader audience than may come to some central place. I suspect the audience were mostly the local leaders which isn't bad but the temptation would be to stage manage the event. Will real questions and real criticism result? What will you learn about how your members really intend to vote when they pull the lever?
To be truly valuable this type of show needs to move beyond the spectacle.
Our Drupal site
Just wanted to drop a note to make sure you saw that on the Westly campaign, our blog site runs on Drupal: http://rallyCA.com.