TurboVote Takes Tim's 2.0 Test

The same day we were assigned Tim O'Reilly's piece on Web 2.0, Tim O'Reilly tweeted about TurboVote. It seems like the right moment to test whether TurboVote passes Tim's Web 2.0 test.

He articulates the six core competencies of Web 2.0 companies:

First, these "companies offer services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability." In the Web 2.0 era “software is delivered as a service, not as a product”. Google began its “life as a native web application, never sold or packaged, but delivered as a service, with customers paying, directly or indirectly, for the use of that service. None of the trappings of the old software industry are present.”

TurboVote passes. TurboVote does not need to be downloaded or purchased as a product but can be accessed on the internet as a service immediately. Regarding scalability, TurboVote is launching nationwide, and once launched, can serve 100 Americans or 100 million.

Second, these companies have "control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them". O'Reilly writes, “the race is on to own certain classes of core data,” because whoever owns a certain class of data can beat out the competition, “the now hotly contested web mapping arena demonstrates how a failure to understand the importance of owning an application’s core data will eventually undercut its competitive position.”

TurboVote passes. What is the core information in our database? Election dates for the over 500,000 elections in the United States every year. These dates can only be found on local websites, the sites for a local school board, town clerk, county executive, etc. The data we collect cannot be copyrighted. It is just a collection of dates that anyone else could collect. TurboVote simply provides the architecture that makes it easy to collect and organize this information. It is closer to Amazon’s database than MapQuest or Google’s because we will be building a database and enriching a database rather than just building an application on top of an existing one. Map Quest and Google share the same database of information and compete by offering different interfaces. TurboVote has to first compile the database itself. Like Amazon, we will “relentlessly enhance” the data, “embracing and extending” it with information about the candidates and ballot initiatives.

Third, the company must trust "users as co-developers" and "operations must become a core competency…the software will cease to perform unless it is maintained on a daily basis.” Users now expect an online web business to constantly unveil new services and be in a nearly constant state of beta.

TurboVote certainly passes this test. We rolled out as soon as possible and have been adding and tweaking our services every single day as we get feedback from users about language and functionality.

Fourth, the company should "harness collective intelligence." By harnessing collective intelligence “the service automatically gets better the more people use it”, and will have an implicit “architecture of participation”. O'Reilly writes that “Network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era.”

TurboVote passes. The most important way that TurboVote accomplishes this feat is in the construction of the election calendar. There is no centralized database of elections in any state. For example, I cannot download a csv that tells me all the races in New York State with their corresponding dates. We ask TurboVote users if they would be willing to volunteer to help maintain the database for their region. We will crowd-source the collection of this information in order to build our database. Like Google, we will draw our power from building a useful interface on top of an exhaustive database. Unlike Google, we will ask our users to help build and maintain that database by looking up single election dates.

Our architecture is participatory, albeit not in the fundamentally intrinsic way that Google is participatory. Google is different than Yahoo! or Open Directory Project, which respectively paid or used volunteer labor to build their directory of sites, because it uses PageRank to harness the involuntary behavior of Internet users to deliver better search. TurboVote is following the ODP model. It will hopefully be more effective in our context than it was for Yahoo! because we are building a database of finite information.

Fifth, the company should “leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.”

TurboVote passes for one key reason: our focus on serving every election instead of just presidential elections.

I think we pass, but as our service evolves, it will be important to check back with with O'Reilly to make sure we're on the right path. That said, I'm looking forward to learning more about Web 3.0 because if I'm not planning for 3.0 TurboVote might get left behind.

BE BOLD

"Googled" is partly a book about how to successfully lead an Internet start up, but it's more importantly about how disruptive technology can change the world. How does one do it? According to Auletta, it's 1% inspiration and 99% boldness, or at the very least, 49% inspiration and 51% boldness. This idea emerges from the book as a whole but jumps out in a few key lines.

Auletta writes that the founders of Google shared "a reflexive belief that whatever the status quo is, it's wrong and there must be a better solution." They had a "penchant for pushing boundaries-without asking for permission," and that "they were not breathtakingly more brilliant than their peers...what was unusual about them, he said, was their boldness." I think Auletta is right about the Google founders, but more importantly, I think he's articulated the necessary mindset for entrepreneurs trying to build revolutionary innovations.

My dad always said, "ask for forgiveness, not permission." I can't discern whether this was always good advice in the pre-Internet world, but it's certainly good advice now. The Internet makes it possible to build a service so popular that most of the world uses it, and build it so fast that the businesses the service will replace don't even know what's happening. In the past an old assortment of private-sector (and possibly public-sector) interests could slow or stop a disruptive technology that would replace them. It is harder to stop that disruptive change than ever before.

The book also offered various pieces of reassurance for TurboVote. Brin's quip, "What's a business plan?" is telling. Google had a team of engineers before a business plan. It was more important to build something useful than to make money. Our business plan is similarly underdevelopment.

Auletta seems to really believe that on the Internet you can build it and they will come. That is, if someone builds something useful enough on the Internet it will become popular. I think he's right. Page and Brin were told there wasn't room for another search engine. They created Google anyway because they knew they could do it better. They were successful because they built a better search engine.

If TurboVote isn't successful right away it's because it isn't yet useful enough. Lawrence Lessig describes the motivation of an Internet entrepreneur: "I'm going to build it and you're free to use it however you want. I'm just going to empower you to do what you want." Since my last blog post TurboVote has gone online. Now we just need to keep improving it until it works.

My one disappointment with Auletta was that he told us about the disruptive power of Google versus other companies but he never explored the disruptive power of Google in regards to society. When Auletta spoke at HKS last year I asked him how he thought Google would change the culture in the United States. Would Americans become more or less interested in learning now that information was so much easier to access? Would Americans become more or less knowledgeable now that knowledge was free and easy to find? Unfortunately it didn't seem like he had given the questions much thought. I'm hopeful that the answer is that Americans will become more interested in learning and more knowledgable in general, but I have no evidence as of yet.

GETTING READY FOR TAKEOFF

Last night I realized that we were 36 hours away from launching our kickstarter campaign for TurboVote and that I didn't have a plan. The plan as far as it existed before 8:30pm Friday night was to send a "Launch Email" to "everyone" and let the awesome prizes and video we created turn us into a celebrated internet viral phenomenon.

I knew enough to understand that this was not a good plan, but I didn't know what a good plan looked like. So I turned to Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody" for help. Basically I was like "Help me Obi-wan Clayobi, you're my only hope."

Thus, I began my analysis of Clay's book in terms of whether it could answer three big questions. First, what was TurboVote's launch story? Second, how would I tell our story? Third, how would I get the proverbial "everybody" on board?

In answer to my first question Clay advised that our story had to offer a plausible promise, "to work out a message framed in big enough terms to inspire interest, yet achievable enough to inspire confidence" (16). TurboVote seems like a plausible promise to me, but of course, there is a higher bar for plausibility when you promise to build a better democracy by making voting as easy as Netflix. I'll be paying attention to how people react to our message over the next few weeks to see if our message needs tweaking.

The second question was more about the method of telling our story. I knew we needed a blog to tell our story but was grappling with whether to launch a new TurboVote or Democracy Works blog or to just use the blog on our Kickstarter page. Clay's story about the lost/stolen cell phone partly provided the answer. It gave the impression that most people tune into most blogs temporarily, each blog its own fully encapsulated news story.

But this didn't answer my question. Just because the Kickstarter page offers a temporary blog doesn't keep me from easily setting up a temporary external blog. In fact, Clay's observation that the economic logic of the internet is to publish everything and decide what's worthwhile later would imply that I do both! In fact, the answer to my question was ultimately the simple observation that our fundraising was the story and if I want people to both pledge support and follow our story, then it makes sense to send them just one website. Not only that, but blogging on the kickstarter site makes the site more dynamic and provides reasons to post the site on facebook multiple times.

Third, how could I get everybody involved? Clay provided the authoritative reason why: we need a place for our supporters to connect with each other and not just a place for them to hear from us. The blog accomplishes the latter, but it allows absolutely no opportunity for our supporters to organize themselves. The obvious solution was a facebook page, but what wasn't obvious was how to title it. This is where I could have used more guidance. When someone "likes" a group on facebook it announces it to their whole feed. But these news feeds are now so full of news stories about friends joining different groups that you need an emotionally powerful title in order to stand out.

I'll let you know when I come up with it.