There has been a lot of meta back-and-forth recently about campaign comments. One source of frustration for many people is that good diaries about canvassing and useful information get buried by vent diaries and meta diaries. Many people also have all kinds of suggestions, for message frames, ads etc.
Is it possible to channel all this (positive and negative) energy in a way that creates useful feedback instead of clutter?
Can we use the community to organize the excellent material that get mentioned here into resource banks for canvassing?
This diary presents a possible solution: mothership diaries for evaluating and collating resources and for organizing comments and suggestions.
The needs:
Many people are anxious about the outcome and want to vent frustrations / rant to get rid of negative energy. This is a useful community function that should be facilitated.
Many others want to send messages to the campaign about how they would like to do it. It might actually be useful to the campaign to know the distribution of opinions and perceptions in this community, if there were a sensible way to distill the feedback.
Some people have useful suggestions for messaging frames, attack ads etc. This could again be useful if there were a way to sort through the suggestions to find the best.
Many great links, pictures, videos and other resources are posted here that could be very useful in canvassing. These need to be collected, evaluated and made readily available to everyone.
The suggested solution to the above needs is to have two mothership diaries that would both be kept up on the reclist until the election, one for comments and the other for canvassing resources.
Here is how the canvassing resources mothership would work:
The body of the mothership would contain links to useful canvassing material. This would include
Handout materials.
Pictures/images that summarize an issue e.g. the tax policy center comparison, the "fiscal conservative" picture etc.
Videos
Links to excellent articles. These could be organized by issue.
Links to canvassing reports, organized by area.
There would be several top-level comments posted as part of the mothership, as shown below in this diary. Each would organize a section: people could post replies of a particular category in that section. Highly recommended replies would indicate high-quality materials that should be linked to from the mothership. Each day, a volunteer (I would be willing to do it) could update the mothership with these links. Actually, to avoid cluttering up the mothership, each group of resource links could be posted in a separate diary that is updated by the volunteer (those diaries don't need to be on the reclist) and linked from the mothership body text.
A Canvassing Reports section would be the first top-level comment (section). Anyone who posted a canvassing report diary could post a reply with a link. Instead of rec'ing the canvassing report itself, people could rec up the reply - this would actually provide higher visibility to good canvassing reports, since some of them may never make the reclist. Highly recommended reports would be listed on the mothership for a while, then these links would be moved into a diary linked from the mothership, so people could find good canvassing reports easily.
Other top-level comments (sections) would include Images, Videos, Articles, Handouts, Message Frames, Other Materials, each posted as a top-level comment. People could post links to resources with descriptions, and highly recommended resources would get added to the mothership.
This essentially provides a wikipedia-like mechanism for sharing, evaluating and collating good resources.
Here is how the comments mothership would work.
The body of the mothership diary would explain the rules of engagement - the different sections and what they were for. It would link to the current diary. The title would include a "README FIRST" tag, so that newbies would know to check it out. The body could also include links to good suggestions.
It would include a poll such as the one below. The purpose of the poll is to get a snapshot of community opinion each day (it would need to be reset each day to be really useful - not sure how that could be done. Perhaps each child diary linked from the mothership could carry the poll). That should also help to avoid having all other diaries cluttered up with comments on "how I am feeling about the campaign today".
A Suggestions section would be posted as the first comment. Those with constructive suggestions on what the campaign should focus on, what they should do or should not do could reply to this comment. This would only be for detailed suggestions - the poll itself should take care of one-liners. Really detailed suggestions could be posted as a separate diary, and a link to them posted in this section. Highly recommended suggestions could be summarized in a diary and a link to these could be included in the mothership.
Other sections would include an Attack Ads section comment for attack ad concepts, Issue Ads section, Message Frames section for suggestions on what the message should be and how it should be framed, a Concerns section for warnings on things for the campaign to watch out for and a Rants section on why the campaign is doing it wrong. Highly recommended replies would be collated, moved into diaries and linked from the mothership.
A meta section comment would be posted for suggestions on modifying the mothership concept itself.
The hope is that all this will redirect the community energy into providing useful feedback and creating a resource bank.
Here is a sample of the poll that could be included on the mothership. Of course, it would be great to be able to check multiple options.