Debugging `Debug Politics`
I spent the week-end (Friday night to Sunday night) with 150+ civic hackers at the Casper headquarters on Park Avenue South (thank you Casper for hosting us) for the Debug Politics Hackathon (also check the Facebook page). I had some thoughts before the event. Here some personal thoughts after the event.
The event
I find very few activities worthy of binging. The only two instances I can recall are watching soccer over the summer (Euro 2016 + Copa America on the same week-end) and more recently watching The OA on Netflix.
Yet, like so many, probably inspired by President Obama's farewell speech, I chose to spend my long week-end with fellow "anxious, jealous guardians of democracy".
« So, you see, that’s what our democracy demands. It needs you. Not just when there’s an election, not just when your own narrow interest is at stake, but over the full span of a lifetime. If you’re tired of arguing with strangers on the Internet, try talking with one of them in real life. If something needs fixing, then lace up your shoes and do some organizing. If you’re disappointed by your elected officials, grab a clipboard, get some signatures, and run for office yourself. Show up. Dive in. Stay at it. » President Obama, 10-Jan-2017.
How did it go?
On Friday, participants were encouraged to pitch their ideas. I went to the stage and pitched Influenza, an idea for a tool to find “patterns of influence” in US politics. The plan was to use open data to create a graph of the US political system and query the graph to find “bugs”. Four fellow "guardians of democracy" agreed to join the effort and we spent the rest of the week-end hunting for datasets, curating them, thinking about "bugs" and how to translate them into queries and preparing a pitch deck (see below) to make these ideas understandable to fellow participants and judges.
To make a tongue-in-cheek analogy, I will say that team Influenza won the popular vote (based on the cheering and feedback from the crowd) but the electoral college (the judges) picked a different winner. I guess we did not do a good enough job convincing them.
A few things I would have done differently
Organizing a hackathon is hard. I have helped co-organize one for the last four years. I know. Doing it remotely (the brains behind the hackathon are from SF) and in such a short period of time is almost super human. Kudos to the organizers, all the helpers and the company sponsors.
New York is New York
There was such a huge demand to attend that organizers had to refuse people. During the event, more than 40 hacks were built and organizers had to filter them to select the best 20. What can we say? Welcome to New York City! We are different.
Seed the process with concrete and real problems
« Let’s use our talents as developers, designers, and technologists to find innovative ways to make a real difference. » http://www.debugpolitics.com/
The first thing we did on Friday night was to go and pitch an idea. Based on my personal experience (Google Civic Innovation team, NYU Governance Lab), a big problem in the civic tech space is that developers, designers, and technologists don't have a good idea of what the real problems are. I wish we had some domain experts (elected officials, campaign managers, lobbyists, law-makers, journalists, etc.) explain to us the problems they face as opposed to letting participants pitch their solutions right away.
Identify early duplicate hacks
Listening to the 20 selected pitches, I felt that lots of ideas had already been tried or that there were existing products out there. Also, some teams during the event realized they were working on very similar things.
Matt Stempeck, Director of Civic Technology for Microsoft, gave a very relevant presentation about the Civic Tech Field guide, a spreadsheet that tries to aggregate lots of civic tech effort by categories. Unfortunately, I doubt that participants looked at the sheet and did their due diligence. Also, I am not sure that the spreadsheet format is the best one. We probably need a user interface à la Product Hunt and a way to type the short description of the hack to find duplicates and already existing products.
Yet another app for X or "build it and they will come"
Most of the hacks (see list here) were clever, but unrealistic. And the judges were quick and clear to remind us of that.
- Building a website is great, but how do you drive traffic there?
- A call-to-action widget is great, but how do you convince and incentivize publishers to embed it on their website?
- A chat-roulette-like party-line is great, but how do you convince people to join or guarantee they will not abuse the system?
I think we collectively need to grow-up and understand that Google, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. are the few exceptions and that it is extremely hard to build something that people will want to use.
We should also stop waving our hands with buzzwords such as machine learning, sentiment analysis, etc. hoping to conjure a magic trick and solve all the problems of US politics, like matching people with different opinions or detecting fake news. These are hard problems. They require new algorithms and lots of data.
What happens next?
To plagiarize Julius Caesar (the emperor, not the salad inventor), we can say that We Came, We Saw, We Debugged. But this is just the beginning.
I hope that teams who got good feedback from the crowd and/or the judges will keep working on their hack, for a real and measurable impact on US politics.
My team and I agreed to write a more extensive blogpost about Influenza. We are very excited about Influenza, because – as far as we know – this is the first non-partisan tool to help debug patterns on influence in US politics.
One faculty member at Cornell Tech where I work just told me that 2 of his students have been looking at something similar and Influenza might be a great starting point for them.
To be continued …
Special thanks to DianeL and MikeB for comments on an early version of this post.
