Stand Up for Liberty! Table of Contents
Stand Up for Liberty!
Chapter Fourteen
Information Management
Information management might sound like the dullest topic known to man. It doesn't energize activists. It doesn't support candidates. It doesn't do anything, not directly. Nonetheless, information is the lamp that leads us from the political darkness. We may be lost. Through information we find ourselves.
Information management is a critical operation for Libertarian groups on every level. If information is our lamp, lack of information is the blinding shadow.
WHAT DO WE DO?
How does a "central" group support local activity? We're Libertarians. Telling a fellow Libertarian exactly what they should do is just not a promising line of approach. Giving a fellow Libertarian suggestions -- and the reasons you are making them -- is more promising. Helping people do the work that they want to do, even if it is not what you want them to do, is yet more likely to lead to success, because it builds a favor bond that can be called at a later time, when you want them to work on something that interests you but not them.
Information management is a support activity that any Libertarian group can provide to the Libertarians around it. I'll discuss three sorts of support in this chapter, namely information systems, information distribution, and the communal memory.
INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Libertarians are not in the habit of invading other peoples' privacy. The Libertarian Party is not a spy agency. However, ignoring the cloak-and-dagger stuff largely found in spy novels, the information issues of a political party, a large company, and of a government are basically the same. We are each in a competitive environment. Knowledge is an aspect of power, a way to advance against competition.
An information system actually has four major components, namely collection, analysis, retention, and distribution. These are the equal legs of a square table. If any leg is faulty, the table falls over. Readers of technical spy novels -- in which the heroine succeeds via massaging data bases, not by violence -- will find these four components entirely familiar.
National and state organizations have a major useful role in getting information and propaganda to activists, specialists, and members. Many discussions of information talk only about information distribution, often focusing only on internet and web-based technologies. Collecting, analysing, and retaining information are just as important as distributing information to people. You have to find information before you can distribute it. You have to figure out what you have learned, and you have to store that knowledge in such a way that it can be found when someone wants it.
Information Collection: To collect information, you can try to identify what information is wanted, find that information, and recognize the serendipidous aspects of apparently useless facts. You can also collect information that looks as though it might be useful, warehouse it, and hope that it can be found when wanted. Part of information collection is collecting lists of the information that people need. A systematic process for identifying wanted facts is required. The group that says "we need more sites for a politically homeless booth" has specified a problem. The feedback 'the Gun Owner Action League monthly magazine has an events listing, running two months in advance' is part of a solution. To be a solution, the apparent solution has to be linked back to the people who made the original inquiry. Correspondingly, the person who finds an events list needs to recognize that the list could be useful for people who want to run booths.
If your state has Voter Registration by Party, it is easy to recognize that voter lists are useful. If you are a candidate, getting the Voter Registration lists requires -- at least in my state -- writing or visiting each of the 351 town and city halls across the Commonwealth. Those lists will be helpful in many future campaigns. By getting those lists, the current campaign goes beyond supporting its candidate to support the party that birthed it. Conversely, a campaign that skips getting the lists when it can, because it does not expect to need the lists, is being run in a totally shortsighted manner.
Effective organizations actually go out and get information rather than hoping it will come to them if they sit and wait. Sometimes one must work out a strategy for recovering information. A Massachusetts group looking for a list of registered Libertarian voters may need to run people for office, which could be a good thing in itself, to provide the legal justification for writing all those cities and towns.
Serendipity demands attention to detail. Page 11 of the local paper may note that Senator Bullbleep has been appointed as State Conservation Commissioner. To focus information collection, you need to see the implications of that statement: Soon there will be a special election to fill the vacant Bullbleep seat. The time start looking for the Libertarian candidate is *yesterday*.
Information Analysis: Raw information is like dried rice -- indigestible. The task of the analyst is to transform raw information into something usable. Analysis can also be effective at finding the gaps in what you know. Sometimes analysis is straightforward. "Could we have a map of the state senate districts?" demands that the analyst do some mapping. "How did we do around the state this year" is answered with color-coded maps. "How did we do relative to two years ago?" needs some arithmetic, and more maps.
A more challenging part of analysis is figuring out what questions to ask. In 1994, the Massachusetts Libertarian Party got over 3% of the vote in one statewide race. Why? To find the apparent answer, you have to find the right questions. One possible answer is that the candidate advertised. Only if you look at town-by-town data do you notice that the good vote totals did not occur where advertisements ran. With some care, it may be recalled that the Republicans had a bitter primary for the same office, and the strong LP vote totals are concentrated where the loser's partisans were centered.
Information Preservation and Retention: The purpose of retention is to take the analyst's output, put it into an easy-to-understand form, and store it so other people can find it. In general, this means setting up an index so data can be found when wanted. A good index includes the descriptors of the data. It also includes descriptors pertaining to people who might come in later and want the information. For example, someone running for State Rep might not think to look for a list of gun shows. However, under 'running for office' a good index will include 'booth locations', with pointers to types of places where people have put booths in the past.
How do preservation and retention work? Suppose you would like a map of Massachusetts' State Senate Districts. The information is in the Mass General Laws, and (down to the ward/town level) is implicitly stored in Public Document 43. However, Public Document 43 is only easily used in one direction. You can work from the name of the District to the list of towns that are in it. To work in the reverse direction, to learn which districts a town is in, you need to hunt through the book for each town. Alternatively, you need a very different list, or a map. That map is a chore to construct (I did it 4 years ago). Once one analyst has made the map, you shouldn't need to make it again until the statehouse is redistricted. I said shouldn't, not don't, because that map is only useful if people remember it is there. Remembering is retention. Indexing the memories is also retention.
Information is only helpful if people can find it when they need it. So long as a state group is small, an EMail to the state's activists "does anyone have a map of all state senate districts" will work. Eventually the bandwidth consumption of these messages swamps the channel, and your requests cease to be heard. At this point, *information retention* becomes key to progress.
Analysis is work. If analysis gets done, you have useful information. No analysis means that you are running an unsorted information warehouse. If analysis is not both done and retained, the same work must be repeated time after time after time.
Information distribution: First-rate information distribution requires getting information out to people before they realize that they will need it. That requires people who know what information is available, who realize when there is a chance to deploy that information to advance liberty, and who actively push information out to the right people, together with an explanation of why that information is going to be important. Individual initiative plays a key role. The people with the right information need to get their information and put it to to use, or the information might as well not exist.
For example, suppose you have people who will make phone calls to mobilize activists for special elections. You need someone who will find out about special elections as early as possible-- that's information collection. You need to know the election district borders. You need to know who are the activists in the district, their phone numbers and addresses. That's three distinct sorts of information. Then you need someone -- spy agencies call these people 'senior analysts' -- who combine those pieces of information into a single useful package, and get that package to the telephone callers. Without every one of those pieces: election date, district map, activist list, identified task for senior analyst, names and addresses of the specialist telephone volunteers, and transmission of suitably tagged data, the whole effort goes to pieces.
We know come to the last piece of information analysis. It's called the "after-action study". Physicians call them "post-mortems", except you even do them if the Libertarian candidate wins. You do an after-action study to figure out what you did right, and what you did wrong.
You don't do after-action analysis to pat yourself on the back or to tell your donors how brilliant they were. Yes, you do tell your volunteers and donors how great they are, and you give them some reasonable but positive analysis of the race. But that's not why you do the after-action analysis.
The purpose of the after-action study (the educational buzzword is "outcomes assessment") is not to congratulate yourself. The objective is to see what did not work (and find out why) and how well the rest worked (to make it better next time). For example, if a special election is called, and your party did not have a candidate on the ballot, you need to recognize that this is a catastrophic systems failure, and you need find out why you failed. You then figure out what you need to make things work better next time.
Implementation is getting those things in place for the next time. In my opinion, the people running a campaign shouldn't do their own after-action analyses, assuming there is a good alternative. Most people just find it too difficult to be critical of themselves.
INFORMATION DISTRIBUTION
Recognize that activists and specialists need one sort of information, while members have very different needs. One distribution does not serve everyone. Recognize that most Americans do not use the Internet or Web. An organization based on the net will reach many Americans, but it won't automatically reach most Americans.
Distributing information: For the electronically literate, Email lists and web sites provide different sorts of information distribution. Email is like a phone call to a very good answering machine. A web site is the electronic equivalent of an encyclopedia or filing cabinet. Users come to a web site, search, and leave with the facts they want, when they actually want those facts.
However, a web site does not push information at users. Users must actively go to a web site to get their files. In contrast, EMail mailing lists drop information on the desks of targeted users. Users may not check a web site very often, but most people who use electronic mail do read it frequently enough. The disadvantage of E-mail is that it arrives on the transmitter's schedule, not the reader's schedule. A busy user is relatively likely to delete EMail unread. In contrast, a web site is ready to deliver information when the activist wants to read.
Under modern conditions, every state organization should have its own EMail alias lists: a general list, an activist list, and a digest list for people who don't want a lot of messages. Email only reaches some people, but in a state with healthy local organization the E-mail users will inform many other Libertarians. It is probably the case that an active EMail list, and people who actively remember which of their neighboring activists do not read EMail, can get messages out reasonably effectively to most activists in most states.
After trimming spam and trolling, the bulk of mail messages should be archived. The purpose of the archive is to give people a reliable record of what has been said. The Libertarian Party is not supposed to be run by a secret elite. A state organization should not have higher categories of secret mailing list open only to a select few. How do you run a mailing list? There is list- management software available. Some ISPs will do this for a fee. There are groups that will run your list for you for free, often in exchange for attaching advertising.
Paper mailed newsletters are slower to travel than their electronic counterparts, but offer a variety of compensations. While only some people use the Internet, absolutely everyone has mail delivery. A newsletter -- especially if photographs are involved -- transmits much more information than could readily be downloaded by many computer users. Observe that paper newsletters last at least until the trash is taken out, so the chance that a paper newsletter will be read is higher than the chance that an electronic newsletter will reach its audience.
Two State Publications: If an state organization has the skills and human resources, it should publish two different newsletters. First, the organization should run the traditional monthly newsletter for activists. Second, the organization should run a tabloid to incite the voter base and their friends.
The purpose of the monthly newsletter is to support activists and specialists in their work. The activist newsletter thus discusses strategy, running local groups, campaigning opportunities, and lessons on how to run for office. The activist newsletter also provides appropriate information from the state organization to its members, such as financial and spending reports, so that he state organization's active supporters can see in detail how their money is being spent. The activist newsletter rarely runs feel-good news or general articles on Libertarian philosophy. For those sorts of articles, other venues are more appropriate.
The activist newsletter has similarities to a libertarian political convention. At a convention, it's worthwhile to have a few speeches berating the evil of government policies. In an election year, a good convention also generates television news footage. However, the core of a good convention should be party business and political nuts and bolts. You only bring your activists together once or twice a year. There's a lot of important networking to be done, but that networking is not advanced by two hour lectures on seriously obscure issues. Similarly, the newsletter only reaches activists once a month. The state organization needs that monthly moment to prime activists on their opportunities to Stand Up for Liberty!
The purpose of the Tabloid is to tell members what their party is doing: who is running for office, what issues there are, information on petitioning for initiatives, etc. The quarterly tabloid seeks to inspire its readers, so that when there is an election they will do their bit by voting for our candidates. With some luck, the quarterly tabloid will also encourage a few members to take the first tentative steps toward activism.
It's not hard to to put both newsletters on your Libertarian Party Web Site. The web posting is good at reaching students. Remember, a large fraction of Americans choose which party they are going to support when they start voting, and then only change once or twice in their entire life. If you convert a student to the Libertarian Party, you have just just generated hundreds of Libertarian votes over the next 40 years. If the state party can afford it and has a good quarterly tabloid, giving a subscription to every college and high school library in the state may eventually prove rewarding.
Conservative religious activists reportedly make very heavy use of fax and telephone trees to get information out rapidly to members. Fax/phone trees in which each person on the tree contacts several other people spread news exponentially quickly. A well-designed tree has crosslinks between people on the farthest branches, so that they contact other people on remote branches. If word has not yet reached them from above, they contact the person closer to the trunk on their branch of the tree. Crosslinks ensure that messages propagate into the tree from below as well as above, so loss of a single link does not isolate parts of the tree. Fax has the further technical advantage that it almost always leaves a paper trail, not just a readily-deleted electronic file.
FAX/EMail has a second distribution use, namely transmitting Libertarian news to third parties and the press. FAXed press releases are only effective if short and well-written: a couple of sharp paragraphs are the upper limit. Finding FAX numbers is a challenge. Several media encyclopedias, available in many college libraries, lists FAX and EMail numbers for more-or-less every press and broadcast outlet in the state. In general, it is worthwhile to improve the focus of a fax broadcast by directing the FAXes by personal name to the outlet's political reporter or political editor.
Based on public reports, various conservative/patriot organizations use short- wave radio to reach their membership. High-tech enthusiasts are beginning to use internet radio for the same purposes.
THE COMMUNAL MEMORY STORE
An extended group acts as a communal memory bank for the Libertarian Party. As time goes on, there are any number of opportunities for Libertarian groups to accumulate useful facts, addresses, and other bits of information that local organizers can use. Many of these facts and names would be challenging for each organizer to find for themselves. A well-run extended group will have facts in their files ready to be provided to local activists when the need arises. A really well-organized group will get those facts to local activists before the activists realize that they are needed.
Dangers of Centralized Databases: Note that I described the memory bank as "communal" rather than "central". There is safety and efficiency in sharing information. If you have an address data base listing activists, its content and corrections should be reasonably shared. When only one operator can manipulate the data, his approach will determinate how that data is organized, analyzed, and distributed. When many operators have the same information, different approaches to organizing, analyzing, and using information will flourish.
Data Security: A distributed communal memory is a secure memory. It's like a hologram. Scratching a hologram blurs the hologram very slightly, but does not erase part of it. In the early 1960s, the FBI tried to destroy one of our country's socialist parties via illegal break-ins and burglaries. Their approach was straightforward: wreck the membership and donor records, thus paralyzing the target group. We don't presently worry about FBI harassment. A fire or tornado at the main office could be as destructive as a criminal attack. Human failure is as damaging as physical destruction. If the donor data base is in a single pair of hands, and that pair of hands gets sick or loses interest in politics, the donor data base has effectively ceased to exist. When records are dispersed to many sites, no single-site event can paralyze survivors.
Furthermore, in a volunteer organization a single individual may always have a personal emergency, need to take a break, or morally disagree with some particular course of action. If many people have copies of the records, this possibility is less of an issue. If only one person has access to the database, that one person has a veto over the organization's possible activities. By running a communal memory store, in which activists share information and back each other up effectively, a state or local organization can keep information available for Local Organization.
Finally, a communal memory store prevents rent-seeking. If one group has a monopoly on a particular sort of information, even though that information was gathered by the efforts of many volunteers and fed to some one group that volunteered to preserve the information, that one group has an opportunity to levy high rates for its data, thereby diverting other groups' resources to its use. This activity is not generally in the interest of most libertarian groups in the same community. Those groups are well advised for the protection of their treasuries to ensure that information is shared rather than monopolized.
The notion of a communal memory bank is bit dry. A communal memory does not sound as if it will incite activists to run for office, support candidates, or deepen our voter base. The communal memory is a facilitator and an insurance policy. It makes difficult tasks easier and impossible tasks difficult. It shields the hard-gained resources of the party from adversity and accident.
SUMMARY
Information management -- as tedious as it sounds -- is a fundamental task for Libertarian groups at every level. If you question the importance of information management, look at corporate America or the Federal government. For every dollar we spend on defense, we spend ten cents on our spy agencies. Among MBAs, experts in Management Information Science command a large specialist premium.
Information management includes three major areas:
Under Political Intelligence, I group the collection, analysis, retention, and distribution of information, including after-action post-mortems. To be able to use information, you have to find it, figure out what it means, store it where you can find it later, and get it in front of the people who really do need to know it.
Under Information Distribution, I collect all efforts that put facts and propaganda in front of people. This includes electronic means, web pages, phone and fax trees, posters and signs, activist and voter newsletters, short-wave radio, public-access cable stations, and advanced internet media.
The communal memory store is a way to keep and protect information. A delocalized store of information is like a hologram. With a well-distributed communal memory, the destruction of a single node has no effect on what is known, only on the details of the list of storage locations.