Politics Rewired

Assemble

2021-04-13T00:00:00-04:00

We at Rewired are building a new tool that we think has the potential to fundamentally change the landscape of organizing technology, laying the foundation for the Left to have its own powerful and independent digital infrastructure. It’s called Assemble.

Assemble is a collaborative database that uses spreadsheets and other easy-to-use views to manage projects and organize workflows. Combining the power of a modern database with the simplicity of online collaborative spreadsheets means that Assemble can be used for just about any organizing project. It doesn’t matter if you’re organizing voters, volunteers, workers, or tenants – the flexible design of the platform will enable you to organize your contacts in a way that works best for you and your team.

Right now, the closest thing to this kind of software is Airtable, but three key features set Assemble apart: expanded data capacity, customizable permission settings, and native software extensions specifically tailored to grassroots political organizing.

Expanded Data Capacity

Your database needs to be able to handle the data you throw at it. Currently, Airtable’s three out-of-the-box plans limit the number of records (or rows) you can have per project to 1,200, 5,000, or 50,000. But what happens if you’re running a regional, statewide, or national campaign targeting hundreds of thousands or millions of voters? What happens if you’re a membership organization with over 50,000 members? Your options are to either arbitrarily break up your universe into many different projects to stay underneath the record limit or use a CRM that has strict limitations on what fields you can have, how they relate, and what workflows you can build on top of them.

Assemble will be able to handle hundreds of millions of rows, not tens of thousands. This enormous expansion in records per project is because, unlike Airtable, it’s backed by PostgreSQL. The implications are straightforward: your database will scale alongside the growth of your organization without overwhelming it. No row limits. No work arounds. Just all the data you need, organized the way you want.

Customizable Permissions Settings

Once your data is loaded and organized, you’ll need to determine which members of your team can access which records. Assemble’s customizable permission settings will ensure that your spreadsheets are tailor-made for your team.

Typically, permission settings are set ahead of time by the software you’re using, with predetermined user roles corresponding to different levels of permitted data access. These permission systems are fixed, linear, and vertical, meaning that you have a definite number of user roles, each with greater or lesser degrees of data access. For example, Airtable’s permission settings system includes Creators, who can create, edit, and comment on spreadsheets, Editors, who can edit and comment on spreadsheets but not create new ones, and Commenters, who can comment on spreadsheets but not create or edit them.

While simple and intuitive, this arrangement has severe limitations for more complex organizing projects. What happens if you want volunteers to be able to edit some spreadsheets, but only comment on others? What if you want a field organizer to be able to edit certain records and fields, but not others? What if you want a team lead to be able to create and edit spreadsheets for their team, but not for other teams? You’re forced to make a choice: you can organize your projects around your permission settings (rather than the other way around), risk data security by granting overly broad permissions, or create inefficiencies by granting overly restrictive permissions, thereby making some users dependent on others to access the data they need.

What’s needed—and what Assemble will provide—are permissions settings defined by the user, not the tool. Permission settings in Assemble will be malleable, dynamic, and multi-directional, meaning that you can create as many as you need, using a diverse range of criteria that allows you to define custom user roles that precisely meet the needs of your organization. What this means in practice is that any given database user—at any level, from any location, and in any specific team—will be able to access exactly the data they need to fulfill their role.

Native Software Extensions

Now we can imagine that you have all your data organized and all the members of your organization have the data access they need to get to work. The question then arises: What tools will you use to contact your target universe (voters, workers, etc.) and how will those tools connect to your database?

Most databases now either rely on manual .csv imports or API integrations to move data into and out of your digital outreach tools. Assemble will support both of these options, but over time, you may not need to use either of them. That’s because Assemble is going to be built as the centerpiece around which a new ecosystem of organizing technology gets developed: texting tools, dialers, canvassing apps, event management tools – they will all be built as native software extensions of Assemble.

Imagine logging into a single platform and having access to all your data and all of your organizing tools. Imagine being able to query and create a universe of contacts, target those contacts in an outreach tool, then have the results automatically updated in your database. Imagine then having workflows where different outreach results automatically define those contacts as the targets for another round of outreach via a different contact tool. Imagine spending most of your time as an organizer not cutting turfs, loading lists, or pulling reports, but building systems and supporting teams that are able to handle those tasks and many more as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Conclusion

The combination of these three features—expanded data capacity, customizable permission settings, and native software extensions—means that the possibilities for designing powerful organizing systems will be virtually endless. This design flexibility means that any organization will be able to use the platform to build systems that truly meet their needs and allow them to quickly respond and adapt to changing organizing conditions.

Beyond these technical features, Assemble will stand alone in that it will be a database designed specifically with Left grassroots organizations, unions, and campaigns in mind. Its purpose will not simply be to advance organizing technology for its own sake, but for the sake of growing and consolidating a genuinely social democratic, class-struggle oriented current in American politics that can win and wield power, so that all people in our society can live a decent and dignified life.

The Times They Are A-Changin’: Why The Left Needs Better Tools

2021-02-23T00:00:00-05:00

Imagine the world ten years ago: The final Harry Potter movie had arrived at last, the Tea Party was on the rise, almost no one had ever heard of Bernie Sanders, AOC, Black Lives Matter, Medicare for All, or a Green New Deal, and you had probably never been sent a political text message.

The world changes quickly, and the rate of that change is always increasing. Whereas previous generations of organizers could wait years or decades for political conditions to significantly shift, we routinely see new political possibilities emerge, expand, and contract in a matter of weeks or months before being subsumed by the next crisis, election, or media cycle.

Fast Change, Slow Tech

As the world constantly reshapes itself, new potent organizing opportunities for the Left are constantly arising and fading away, unrealized or underrealized. And as the rate of social change increases, our windows for intervention get smaller. What technology is available ends up playing a major role in whether or not we’re able to seize these moments, and to what effect.

Of course, there are countless variables that contribute to the relative success or failure of different movements and organizations; there are no silver bullets to overcoming entrenched structural power imbalances. But technology makes a big difference. When our organizing tools are mismatched for a project’s needs, it doesn’t have the chance to get off the ground, or if it somehow manages nonetheless, its existence is likely to be precarious, stunted, or brief.

We typically regard the overall pace of technological development as very fast, but within the context of political organizing, it can be halting and unresponsive. Software developers are expensive, hard to employ by temporary or unstable organizations, and hard to coordinate as volunteers. Even in a best case scenario, software development is much slower than the rate at which an organizing project needs to adapt its processes as it grows.

The basic quandary is this: If we attempt to build specific tools for specific organizing projects, we’ll miss our windows of opportunity, and if we don’t build anything at all, our capacity to organize will be constrained by the limitations of existing general-purpose data management solutions, like Airtable’s row limits or Google Sheets’ permission settings.

Neither of these are acceptable options if we want our political organizations to grow, respond to new threats and opportunities, and ultimately, win demands for a more just, free, and equal society. Our movements are already trying to build solidarity against the world’s most powerful forces – we shouldn’t have to also share spreadsheet logins, continually reformat CSVs, and debug broken syncs.

What the Left needs is a suite of general-purpose organizing technologies informed by distributed organizing principles that are both powerful enough to be the difference between an organizing project existing or not, succeeding or failing, and flexible enough to be applicable to a wide variety of project types over time, as our organizing conditions rapidly change.

Drawing from Distributed

Many of the organizing projects that are most in need of these general-purpose organizing technologies are the same kinds of complex and mass-scale projects that distributed organizing has succeeded in making viable in the first place. Such projects embrace ambitious goals; they pair together diverse scopes of specialized work and large-scale repetitive tasks; they require intensive data-tracking and management; and they depend on large numbers of volunteers with widely varying skills, interests, and availability.

Distributed organizing deploys a set of principles—applicable to both electoral and non-electoral work—to directly grapple with these project characteristics. These include:

breaking down work into discrete and standardized tasks that volunteers can easily pick up;
creating clear roles designed to accomplish those tasks while giving volunteers significant responsibilities;
utilizing widely accessible trainings and support materials to scale onboarding;
and systematically tracking the status and progress of tasks, contacts, volunteers, and teams over time and in relation to project goals.

Over the past decade, these distributed principles and the systems that they’ve shaped have revolutionized grassroots political organizing. It is impossible to imagine the Bernie 2016 and 2020 campaigns, the insurgent primary campaigns of Justice Democrats, or the mass youth mobilizations of the Sunrise Movement without the systems that allowed for a relatively small number of paid staff to unleash and channel the power of millions of volunteers and small-dollar donors. Those systems gave hundreds of thousands of people an onramp to get involved—people who agreed with our politics but would have otherwise had few meaningful opportunities to express their support. Instead of simply cheering from the sidelines, they were able to help build the progressive movement by making calls, sending texts, knocking doors, attending events, or participating in the countless leadership teams that make all of this possible.

Missing Technology

In other words, the way we think about and design many complex and mass-scale organizing projects has shifted to create new possibilities for the Left. But the organizing technologies we rely upon to implement those designs have too often lagged behind the concrete demands of our projects and the imaginations of our organizers, creating artificial upper limits to what we’re able to accomplish.

The intuitive response to this deficit between demand and supply of appropriate organizing technology is to build more special-purpose organizing tools that can address the specific need being identified. And of course, many high-functioning special-purpose organizing tools already exist to support various workflows: texting tools, dialers, event management tools, crowd canvassing tools, etc. But building these in response to new political and organizational developments is too slow and too cumbersome to be practical.

What’s needed instead are robust general-purpose organizing technologies that let organizers build new, custom systems on-demand and in response to emergent opportunities. We need databases that don’t run out of rows, workflows with flexible and precise permission settings, and software extensions that weave together texting, calling, canvassing, events, and more into one data-seamless meta-platform.

Organizers have already figured out how to work with general-purpose collaborative spreadsheets (e.g., Google Sheets and Airtable) to great effect in building powerful distributed systems. But developers and digital organizers have not yet figured out how to make spreadsheets work for organizers. Or put another way, we have not yet re-imagined what spreadsheets could be in order to serve the real needs of our organizers and organizations. The same could be said of organizing technology writ large. As a group of software engineers and distributed organizers who together built an unprecedented organizing program and its accompanying software on Bernie 2020, we at Rewired believe we’re up to the task.

What’s Next

In subsequent articles, we’ll detail what we are building, how we decided to build it, and how we think it will transform the work of Left organizers and the projects they are able to bring to life. In particular, we plan to share how we’ll re-architect data access permissions across the various tools used by organizers, as well as how we can overcome long-standing integration and data migration problems by using extensions to connect those tools back to an integrated central database. We’ll also explore what some of the political and coalition-building implications of this new technology could be.

Whether it’s at the ballot box, in the streets, or at the workplace, our movements will face tremendous challenges in the years ahead. Our goal is to eliminate unnecessary barriers raised by inadequate organizing tools and to empower organizers to build the systems they need to meet the moment.

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