How is this relevant to politics? Because the more you know about your customers (in politics, voters), the better you can serve them and the more you (and they) will thrive. Facebook FB +1.62%, as recently explained in theAtlantic Monthly, begins to look like the wave of the past.
The Republican National Committee recruited Barkett from, most recently, a brief gig at Facebook. According to the HuffPo:
In 2006, Barkett went to work for Google GOOG +1.35%, where he was a technical program manager for two years. During that same period, he co-founded Greenlight Apparel, a “fair-trade, organic clothing company.”Barkett left Google in 2008. He was a senior IT management consultant at Taos Mountain Inc. for several months, then a senior director for engineering at Livescribe Inc. for almost two years. In January 2011, Facebook hired Barkett as an engineering manager.
GOP technorati wish Barkett well. The big question being quietly asked has little to do with his qualifications. It is whether Chairman Priebus really will give him the level of authority (and the political heat shield) he needs to get the job done. The Obama campaign gave its Ubergeek, Harper Reed, serious authority. The RNC has a history of undermining the authority of its tech execs. Will Chairman Priebus protect Barkett from meddling by clueless National Committee people (on a majority of whose votes Mr. Priebus’s chairmanship depends)?
Barkett’s technical credentials are impeccable. The jury, necessarily at this stage, remains out on his strategic political cred. Facebook, his most recent gig, is built on what are called “weak bonds.” This columnist calls Facebook the “High School Cafeteria of the Internet.”
Harper Reed got his chops from Threadless.com. Threadless uses a vastly different model of user engagement than does Facebook. Threadless is a crowdsourcing icon. Threadless is fundamentally different, too, from Barkett’s Greenlight Apparel a good but generically top down business-to-consumer e-commerce business.
What do Threadless, Narwhal (the Obama 2012 campaign tech) and, yes, Waze have in common (that Facebook, Greenlight, and Romney 2012’s Orca do not)? Crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is geek speak for honoring the American principle known as subsidiarity: delegating authority to the front lines. Subsidiarity is at the tactical heart of the left’s recurring victories.
Central planning vs. subsidiarity is a critical distinction. Weirdly, it is the libertarian faction that is pushing central planning on the Grand Old Party. And not just in tech.
