The day after the presidential election, when everyone else is celebrating or mourning, a transition team will be working – to prepare for the day the new president will take office. The transition process itself is extremely complex and will happen during a short, three-month period. This handover of power will involve an unprecedented amount of information and will require fast, effective communication. The transition team must make the most of modern social technology to shape, coordinate, and run the process of moving the next president into office. Here are some suggestions on how that can work.

What’s the transition team?

The transition team has many responsibilities. They are concerned about staffing the White House, vetting potential cabinet members, developing advisory councils, recruiting lower-level personnel, coordinating with the outgoing administration, communicating with key outside advisors and leaders in government and the private sector, and drafting an initial presidential agenda. Also, in the executive branch agencies, team members have three main jobs: analyzing the overall organization and function of parts of the executive branch, reassessing key senior personnel positions and responsibilities, and looking at pressing and long-term issues in specific subject-matter areas.

Previous administrations – and ultimately the American people – have suffered from poor communication and coordination during transition periods. For example, the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident occurred in Somalia at the time of the Bush 41-to-Clinton transition, and the “Bay of Pigs” occurred during the Eisenhower-Kennedy transition. Ultimately, it can be argued that these crises, and numerous others, boil down to a lack of communication, coordination, and collaboration between old and new administrations.

Technology in the transition

During the Clinton-Bush transition to the 43rd presidency, we were just past the Y2K confusion and at the peak of the dot-com bubble; Time-Warner purchased AOL; Microsoft released Windows 2000 and was in the middle of an antitrust case; Netscape launched its open-source Navigator 6.0 browser; Wikipedia did not yet exist; and the first true online short film debuted.

Now, presidential campaigns are longer, pricier, and more stressful, and the government is larger. The U.S. is also in the middle of numerous critical world events. In this transitory period, personal connections between the people involved are all-important. How might social technologies, which inherently act to bring people and ideas together (for example, Tip’d, a community for exchanging finance news), improve the transition process?

The Transparent Transition

The transition team will face many challenges. They need to understand the institutional memory of the Office of the President and the executive branch agencies. The president-elect must be made aware of issues that could affect national security and other vital interests. There will be a large recruitment effort – up to 70,000 applications will come in - to seek out individuals with required expertise to staff the incoming administration. The transition team will be overwhelmed with advice from think tanks, experts, interest groups, lobbyists, governors, legislators, and donors. And within cabinet departments, small teams will be preparing materials for cabinet and sub-cabinet heads, teeing up important upcoming issues, and reorganizing resources and personnel.

Social software has many applications here. Tools like blogs, wikis, and collaborative software can be useful internally to make information more widely available, searchable, and discoverable, and it can also promote and aid discussions between relevant transition personnel with areas of overlap. Experts can now also conduct briefings remotely using videoteleconferencing, present information via secure webpages and internal wikis, and conduct real-time discussions and make document modifications using collaborative software and chat tools. Private social networks with blogging, etc. are readily available, whether highly secure like INTELINK, or more causal like GovLoop.

Social software like knowledge management tools, collaborative software, advanced Internet search algorithms, and knowledge of online social networks like the increasingly popular Facebook could also facilitate the vetting of job candidates from outside the government, and possible recruitment and promotion from within it.

With regard to handling all the incoming “advice,” some social tools like CreateDebate allow coordination of formal debates so as to allow actionable conclusions from what might at first seem like the chaos of many opinions. And the new administration might consider using social software like PolicyPitch to reach out to stakeholders as well.

Finally, social software would enable teams interacting with different departments to share information and advice while they perhaps struggle to obtain information or solve problems. Software like CollectiveX can also be used to coordinate informal social networks and organize advisory groups of outside-subject-matter experts to advise the transition team members, keep track of discussions, and include people who cannot attend in person.

Risks During the Transition

Once the president takes office, there is a very real chance of a crisis that will test the new administration. Both World Trade Center incidents occurred in the first year of a new presidency; there are numerous examples of other such incidents in the window around elections from other countries as well.

Social software could bolster formal and informal networks of communication that in turn could help to avert such incidents or react more efficiently to them. This applies not just to intelligence analysts and disaster relief workers but also to “ordinary” government staff. For example, each president organizes his staff in a very personal manner; while surely well-reasoned this has side effects. Staff with insufficient titles cannot go to certain parts of the White House; e.g., the Mess. So, if (say) a senior policy advisor outranks a deputy speechwriter, they might not informally see each other very often. Social media can help create more soft interactions that bypass physical separations. Similar to using Twitter, every morning each staff member could answer the question, “What are you working on?” in 140 characters or less, with the resulting internal data being simple, searchable, discoverable, and archivable.

Governing is very different from campaigning; the president must look out for the needs of the entire nation. Social software can help with this too. Microblog websites – for example, this one dealing with the election – offer real-time information on public discussions people are having on the Internet. Quantifying public sentiment is important for reaching out, listening, and engaging the citizens post-election, and for influencing new policies.

Finally, citizens should be engaged in the transition process, and understand what increased risks there may be during that period. In an increasingly fragmented media and information society, that level of engagement requires more than a press release and newspaper coverage. It means full multimedia engagement using blogging, speeches, informal gatherings, mobile technologies, podcasts, online video, and widgets. The outreach should also use social tools that allow bidirectional conversation, increasing citizen participation and interest in government.

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Dr. Mark Drapeau is an Associate Research Fellow directing the Social Software for Security (S3) project at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy of the National Defense University in Washington DC. These views are his own and not the official policy or position of any part of the U.S. Government.

Today, IPDI released Poli-fluentials: The New Political Kingmakers, which builds on their Political Influentials Online in the 2004 Presidential Campaign report.

RoperASW's Influentials took politics, especially Republicans, by storm. This study examines those Influentials who are highly involved in politics.

Based on an e-mail survey completed by 10,000 people this summer, Poli-fluentials dug into the nuances of online political junkies (chances are if TechRepublican is on your reader, you fall into this category). This wasn't a random survey, so findings are specific to population. However, if you're running a campaign or promoting or work for an advocacy group, you want to attract Poli-fluentials.

The report helps answer the question that plagues all of us here--are Republicans behind on the web? Now we have some evidence that there's work cut out for us. Poli-fluentials are, "more likely to be Democrats than Republicans (46% vs. 30%). Similarly, more Poli-fluentials were liberal or very liberal (45%) than were conservative or very conservative (33%)."

Another interesting finding revealed that social networking worked best for progressive or social conservative issues. People need to have internalized and have a personal stake in the issue for it to be successful. Business or private issues that don't engage people on an emotional level aren't the juicy topics that socnets attract.

These two facts alone, show that Republicans can make the most impact by appealing to our base. It's acknowledged that the right has far bigger offline networks to tap. It's time to get those groups online. We've touched on the need to get pro-life groups more active on the web before, and these numbers just show us where the holes in the rightroots are.

Poli-fluentials also overwhelmingly volunteer:

Our research indicates that volunteers to political campaigns come almost exclusively from the ranks of Poli-fluentials. Our study finds that people who make contributions but who do not actively promote candidates and causes are much less likely to volunteer--only 12% of them did. Similarly, among the people who publically promote candidates and causes, only 10% volunteer. Candidates and causes in search of foot soldiers to perform actual work of campaigns would do well to cultivate Poli-fluentials.

Bottom line: You want these people. Not only do they donate, but they're also eager footsoldiers.

There's a lot more in this study that I'm still weeding through. If you're willing to spend $25 to order it, it's worth the investment.

For a blog that's dedicated to teaching Republicans how to use the internet to achieve electoral success, that may seem like a strange title. But it's true. Zack Exley writes about the problems of hiring a Director of Internet Communications in a time when a Director of Communications should know about the Internet.

“No, don’t hire an Internet guy,” I say. “You need to make your senior leaders, campaigners & organizers responsible for the Internet just as they’re responsible for everything else. The Internet is the biggest, greatest opportunity you have—so why would you outsource it to some Internet person you’ll just stick in a closet anyways?”

But it usually feels like I’m wasting my breath. They call back a few weeks later and say, “We’ve taken your advice and decided to hire an Internet person…do you have any recommendations?”

Frustrating, sure. But it's exactly what I face when pitching services to corporate executives. Those of us that live and breathe online are comfortable with mixing our daily work with the internet. When we think of contacting people, we don't think - let's go to the internet - we just use what's available.

Executives aren't like that, and neither are politicians. It seems like work to have to learn something new, and so it's easier to hire an "expert" to do the work for you. The problem with that model is that the experts are expected to do all the work, when the only way to truly reach a constituency online is to model your behavior on what works offline. Social networking is still about connecting with people - I preach that social networking isn't hard - it's doing the same things you do in your normal life, but it's using computers to broadcast your personal message to a wider audience.

A Tech strategy works when it magnifies what the candidate is doing. It fails when it's a separate piece of the puzzle.  Think of the online strategy as your advertising department. Do you want them to make a commercial without talking to your product people.  The purpose of the commercial is to sell more product.  And the purpose of the online strategy is to increase donations and bring in more votes.  What's the point of a brilliant online strategy that doesn't deliver victory?

So take Zack's advice. When someone wants to hire you for your internet skills, take the time to explain that your tech ability is not magic - and that it doesn't work if it isn't integrated into the full campaign.