Disrupting the Rule of Money in Politics: Reinventing Campaigns from the Ground Up
Monday, December 7, 2015
2 p.m., ICSI Lecture Hall
A tsunami of money has flooded the American political landscape in recent years. Many have discussed its corrosive effect, which has worsened since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Despite some recent local victories, such as in Seattle, we have a long way to go. Some have proposed to reduce the supply of campaign funds (for example, by passing a constitutional amendment) or focus on transparency in the hope that revealing connections between donors and politicians will shame those who are giving and accepting huge quantities of cash.
Our approach is different. We aim to reduce the demand for large contributions by using new technology to empower an existing but greatly undervalued resource in political campaigns: volunteers. By creating tools for the skilled workforce underlying modern campaigns, we will simultaneously lower costs and increase the effectiveness of these campaigns. In short, we aim to make a low-cost campaign more effective than a big-money campaign, obviating big-money donors and thereby minimizing their influence. There would be significant long-term impact from a generation of leaders who would serve the needs of their community and their country.
To work toward these goals, we developed a project at ICSI for the core research and development, and spun off a social purpose corporation (similar to a B-corp) to ultimately work directly with campaigns. We will be developing matching algorithms, scoring approaches for political message utility, and sentiment analysis of speech from person-to-person interviews with mobile devices, all focused on serving the functions described above.
In this presentation, we will provide a brief overview, followed by a panel session to allow for an active Q&A session with the audience: for instance, to discuss the role of volunteers in campaigns, our approach, or how to get one of those t-shirts.
The Panel:
Nelson Morgan: Former ICSI director, researcher in machine learning and signal processing, emeritus professor in residence UC Berkeley, PI for the overall project.
Madelaine Plauché: Experienced manager of innovative User Experience (UX) research, with a focus on equitable participation in IT; expert in spoken language technology; project manager for this effort.
Barath Raghavan: Computer scientist specializing in systems for sustainable computing and social, economic, and political empowerment. Leading technologist for the project.
Antonia Scatton: Political consultant specializing in communication strategy and messaging with over 20 years of experience working with political campaigns, party committees, and advocacy organizations.