How To Tell Your VoteBuilders From Your MyBOs, Your Catalists From Your VANs

My inbox is full of press releases from technology entities claiming that they were responsible for giving the Obama campaign the critical edge in terms of software and data, replete with conflicting claims about who deserves credit for what.

The terms of art and trademarks can be confusing, so here's a guide to the basic Obama technology universe, including who did what.

This stuff is dense, and it gets confusing even to practitioners -- be warned. But it's also the first look at how the Democratic Party as in institution mastered the modern technology of politics.

I'll revise and expand this post as necessary.

The BIG advance for Democrats this cycle is NOT so much the data -- it's how the data was used and who used it.

First, a few definitions.

MyBarackObama.com -- the central online volunteer/social networking/mobilization hub of the campaign. Synonymous to many with the DNC's PartyBuilder, which preceded it. Created by BlueStateDigital, it helped the campaign expand dramatically:  2 million active users, 35,000 affinity groups, etc.

VAN -- a. k. a. "the Van," or just "VAN".  Voter Activation Network. A private Boston-based voter file software company responsible for creating VoteBuilder, the active interface used by field organizations doing door-to-door canvasses, event organizing and other volunteer management and mobilization activities.

VoteBuilder --  VoteBuilder is the DNC's voter file; the branded version of the VAN tool that the party gives for free to all the state parties and was also licensed to the presidential primary campaigns. The frontline interface for field organizers.

Catalist -- a private data company run by Harold Ickes and Laura Quinn that has detailed information on  280 million Americans -- just about every registered voter and eligible voter in the United States; how they vote (f they do); where they live; what motivates them. More than 90 groups subscribed to Catalist data in 2008, including the Obama campaign. For the general election, the Obama campaign used Catalist's data to  update and backstop the VAN Votebuilders, and to maanage the data flow into and out of their various organizing and fundraising tools.

Catalist appends a unique identifier to each name as it flows through its master national file -- and this allows the various data silos to be synced and in effect "talk to each other."  The Obama campaign liked Catalist's ability to rapidly update its data and used Catalist data to keep tabs on its early voting programs.  (Note: the RNC keeps its data in-house.)

Strategic Telemetry: Ken Strasma's firm used data from a variety of sources to set targets and create the likely voter model used by the Obama campaign. The exact composition of that model is among the biggest secrets in the political universe. But even more important: all the issue, persuasion and support models that Strasma's firm completed.
How It All Worked

Think of MyBo / Party Builder / VAN Votebuilders as being the tool sets and interface for volunteers, staff and field organizers, and Catalist as being the organizer and repository for the data as it flowed in and out of various OFA systems.

The Obama campaign took the DNC's toolset, tricked it out, and integrated into one database its donor data (managed by Synetech), its Facebook user data, the Blue State Digital (i.e, MyBarackObama.com) data, the VoteBuilder/state party/VAN data and Catalist's own data. Volunteer data flowed by MyBo into the VAN VoteBuilder systems, a translation made possible by Catalist.

Howard Dean's DNC brought the party in the 21st century. Under his direction, the party was able to create what the Republican Party already had -- a single national voter file interface. The DNC struck data-sharing agreements with state parties, got everything uniform (more or less.) It spent tens of millions of dollars in 2005 and 2006 building this, much to the consternation of the incoming chief of staff (Rahm Emanuel) of the man who benefited the most from that money (Barack Obama.)  The names behind this effort: technology director Ben Self, political director Dave Boundy, deputy political director Keith Goodman, and executive director Tom McMahon, among others, deserve credit.

VAN built the interface that field organizers now use; when field organizers talk about voter files and their related systems, they refer to them as "the VAN[s]."

The Obama campaign took the original DNC's toolset and ran away with it, building reams of functionality and adding new tools and data sources, creating a system with a high degree of interoperability . 

Credit for this belongs to campaign manager David Plouffe, Jon Carson, the campaign's unheralded field director, who understood both the technology and how it would best be applied; Chris Hughes, the online organizing lead,  Michael Slaby, the campaign's CTO, and Joe Rospars, its new media director.  And some unsung heros at OFA - Luke Peterson (the early vision for bringing systems and vendors together), and Dan Langer, Chris Wegrzyn and Uday Sreekanth the tech staffers who had the unglorious but critical job of managing all the parts and making the data trains run every day.