Hillary Clinton’s a bit of an enigma, technologically speaking: On one hand, she supports net neutrality, so yay for that. On the other hand, she uses a Blackberry, which is alarmingly old-fashioned. Unless she’s just doing it as some kind of hilarious hipster joke?
At any rate, Clinton’s lately been surrounding herself with nerds. Right before her announcement, she hired a Google exec as her chief technology officer, and the campaign’s been putting out an aggressive recruiting push for software developers.
But why? What are they up to? What could they possibly be building, other than a robotic Hillary Clinton that can save the candidate time by automatically kissing babies at campaign stops? Well, for starters, they’re going to need some new tools to process all of the secrets that they’ve collected about you.
There’s not much information out there about what Hillary’s new digital team might be building, but I can make a few guesses.
The first big clue: She hired Stephanie Hannon, a former Google product manager for civic innovation and social impact. She’s the first female CTO of a major presidential campaign, and she’ll be working with Teddy Goff, Obama’s digital director in 2012.
That means that at first, you can probably expect to see something similar to the Obama digital machine. They’ll have tools to automate phonebanking from home, and tools that let you target your friends on social media networks. They may also resurrect “Project Airwolf”—yes, that is actually its real name—a project that matched volunteers with precincts and tasks where they were needed most. (The extent of Ernest Borgnine’s involvement remains unknown to this day.)
But they’re also staffing up in a few other areas. Goff e-mailed some tech-industry contacts that he’s hiring “for every kind of tech and digital position you can think of.” He also wrote, “We are NYC-based, and obviously looking for candidates who are mission-driven and understand this won’t be the highest-paying or lowest-stress job they’ll ever have.” A tweet from the campaign says they’re going to “create the next big thing in digital campaigning.”
And an e-mail from Nathaniel Koloc, the campaign’s talent acquisition director, that’s been making the rounds in tech circles, indicates that they’re looking for these keywords on resumés:
Deputy CTO
Director of Frontend
Frontend Engineers
Product Managers
DevOps
Database Architect
UX
Backend Engineer (Python)
Project Managers
iOS
Android
And an online application form focuses on the basics: Python, Stata, SAS, SPSS, SQL, Ruby on Rails, GIS, Hadoop.
No big surprise there: These are technologies that would allow the campaign to process gigantic amounts of data, with an emphasis on geographical correlation and using data to make predictions. You know, exactly what a campaign would need to do.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see the campaign build something similar to Thunderclap, a tool that coordinates social-media messages from supporters. Hillary could potentially arrange to have her supporters act as a sort of distributed botnet, using her willing fans’ Twitter and Facebook accounts to flood social media with whatever talking points she wants.
We can probably expect to see even better targeting of voters. Since the last presidential election, the Democrats have opened up their outreach technology, known as “Project Ivy,” to local candidates. That doesn’t just mean that small-time Democrats now have access to the same tools that got Obama reelected; it means that they’re almost certainly reporting their engagement data back to the central hive. In other words, they know more about you than ever before. When you get a call from the campaign, they’re going to know your likes and dislikes, your political actions in the past, your income and hobbies, and possibly your favorite animal (I’m hoping the campaign will assign a tapir expert to call me).
You might also see something like a political version of Google Now, which pushes information to you exactly when you need it. (For example, knowing that you just left work and alerting you that your usual bus route is delayed, so you might want to coast down the hill on a bike-share bike instead.) The Clinton campaign might deploy a tool for volunteers that lets them know when they happen to be walking near a business that could use a Hillary sign in the window, or when a high-school friend who now happens to live in a swing state is visiting town. Yeah, it’s creepy. And yeah, it’s the future. The future is creepy. Don’t act surprised.
And there will probably be an emphasis on Patron-style small-donor outreach—like, a dollar a month, maybe five. Scaling these “long tail” donations is tricky, but recently there’s been some innovation in this area: a new tool called if.then.fund lets small-time donors give to causes, rather than politicians, by setting up conditions under which the donations are released. The Hillary campaign might launch a donation tool that makes small donors feel like they’re more engaged; for example, you pledge $5, but Hillary only gets the donation if she makes fun of Rand Paul’s hair during a debate.
And, of course, there’ll be the usual apps about finding your polling place and donating money the old-fashioned way (taking a photo of your credit card). Team Hillary will be building on a decade’s worth of the best campaign infrastructure on the planet, so they’ll have the basics covered. The real fun will be seeing what new stuff they invent for this campaign.
Hoverboards, please.
