Liberty Concepts - Creators of New Media Campaigns

Microsoft TownHall - A Giant Sails in Unfamiliar Waters.

• Development, Politics

At the 2010 Politics Online Conference, the annual gathering of polinerds (a term of endearment), Microsoft announced its foray into the political space.  They released a product, called TownHall, designed to create a new engagement platform for civic purposes.  The system will allow elected officials, nonprofits, essentially anyone, to create an instant poll, track feedback, and provide points for individuals who engage in a certain amount of activity. 

Microsoft has ambitiously, and uncharacteristically, released the code for Political Space to the open source community.  Users do not need to pay for the software, only for the hosting costs using the Azure platform - Microsoft's cloud computing solution.  The system has a beautifully built API, and is integrated with Facebook Connect for easy login and advanced sharing capacity. The system has been put in place by Nasa, as a component for its Be a Martian project, inviting people to be part of a Martian community.

Upon first glance, despite the foresight to make the platform open and low cost, the new product seems a disappointment.  The problem is that the product doesn't really offer a new approach or model for constituent relation.  The functionality is completely underwhelming, none of which is so complex or advanced that a small development team couldn't reproduce an approximation in 4-6 weeks.  Simple polling and point systems are hardly a new concept.

Digital communication for elected officials (not in campaign capacity) has endured mixed success over the past several years.  While outgoing emails from elected officials are a convenient way to keep citizens updated on legislative progress, incoming digital communication from constituents are rarely considered important or often ignored by legislative offices.  In order for a tool like this to be truly effective for a legislator, you would need an elected official that both paid attention to online communication (rare) and you would need large participation from a cross section of a constituency to ensure a statistically significant indication of collective opinion (almost impossible). In the past, any type of online chat or polls are used as gimmicks to portray a candidate or elected official as 'tech savvy.' This technique is usually designed to gain some form of earned media through traditional venues or commendation from the NetRoots.  Managing incentive redemption for point acquisition also has been a roadblock for many elected officials and campaigns. Online conversations around civic issues often do not produce enlightening dialogue but instead more closely resemble individuals shouting at each other in a room (see Congress).  TownHall does nothing to solve these dilemmas.

There are areas where these tools could be far more useful than in the examples mentioned above.  Specifically, for non-profits or community organizations with a fixed membership group, TownHall could be extremely useful.   When universal (or near universal) participation is guaranteed or possible, the system can provide transactional value to both respondent and questioner.  Also, as several blogs have noted, the application could be for more useful for businesses looking to gather consumer feedback from focus groups or smaller market demographics. 

I am pleased with Microsoft's attempt to make a mark in the civic space.  However, the current product lacks true innovation, and resembles more of a promotional scheme for its cloud computing platform and willingness to adopt an open source approach.  Given the resources available at Microsoft, it would be great to see a real attempt at innovation, not packaging many existing tools and approaches with strong social networking capacity.  Our industry over the past several years has shown that lowering the transactional costs for civic participation only goes so far in increasing participation.  Our challenge is not just to make tools that work efficiently, but also inspire more people to use them. Further we collectively need to find a way to transform political dialogue from incessant shouting to meaningful and informative debate - an area where technology may be able to help.  This is no easy task, but I look forward to 2.0.