Both data portability and open source software are essential to guaranteeing user freedom with cloud based services

A very important appeal and proposal by Jason Lantz. Read it in full here.

“How does this relate to political campaigns? The current thinking about data ownership in campaigns is that the campaign owns all the data produced by volunteers and most likely provides that data to the party for integration into the party’s voter file. What’s missing in this approach is the recognition that the data is really owned at a lower level than that: by the volunteer who created it. The volunteer effectively grants the campaign, and by proxy, the party, the right to use the product of their work.

If campaigns really respect the work of their volunteers and want to empower them to become sustainable forces for change long after the campaign is over, shouldn’t the volunteers have the freedom to use their data in future campaigns?

By providing volunteers with their data, volunteers bring extra power to future campaigns and causes they work for. When a volunteer comes to a campaign with a rich data set in hand, there is more likely to be an environment of mutual respect.

One objection to overcome is the concern that volunteers may use that data for an opponent’s campaign down the road. I think a better way to rephrase that is: Do campaigns own the volunteers that work for them in one campaign cycle or does an environment of mutual respect mandate that campaigns continue to appeal to volunteers to keep them involved in the future?

For example, if a candidate recruits volunteers by promising a public option in health care reform but later caves to industry lobbying pressure, doesn’t that candidate deserve a challenge based on the volunteers they recruited under false pretenses? With the current model of data ownership, the information about who those volunteers contacted is owned by the campaign and the party. Take the example of Georgia, where challengers to a Democratic incumbent are forbidden from purchasing access to the state’s voter file. If volunteers owned the data they created, they could mount an effective challenge in the next election cycle.”