Various updates

It’s happening! Student unions at UBC, SFU and Kwantlen are moving ahead on VFM:

I got an unofficial report that UBC AMS Council created its new VFM committee on May 30.

I presented a brief VFM proposal to the Simon Fraser Student Society (SFSS) Board on June 6. They’ve invited me to discuss it with their larger governing body, SFSS Forum, on June 27.

Kwantlen Student Association (KSA) Council has also asked me to present a VFM proposal at their June 27 meeting. (Good thing they meet at noon, so I’ll have time to get to the 4:30 SFSS meeting.)

The general reaction at all three student unions continues to be favourable. But like last year at UBC, I’m concerned that slow progress may lead to late implementation, thus reducing VFM’s benefit to students.

So meanwhile I’m rewriting my paper Voter-Funded Media for resubmission to the International Journal of Communication.

Interesting news from other blogs:

1. UBC Insiders posted an interview of me. (Well, I think it’s interesting!)

2. Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig just announced a major change of his focus from intellectual “property” issues to fighting political corruption. So I sent him this email:

Dear Professor Lessig –

Thank you for shifting your focus to fighting political corruption – we need all the help we can get!

I’ve long admired your public-interest work on IP. We met when I organized a debate between you and a former director (Dickinson) of the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in February 2001.

My main project since 1996 has been designing ways to reduce corruption in corporations and politics. It’s more than 10 years but I’m not ready to change horses yet – I work slower than you!

Besides, the project is heating up now – see attached 1-page description, and www.votermedia.org.

-- Mark

It’s time to get VFM rolling for the coming year

Building on the success of VFM at UBC in January 2007, I’ve been meeting with student union members, representatives and employees at UBC, SFU, BCIT and Kwantlen, offering to sponsor VFM for them in the coming year. Their responses have been broadly positive, so I hope to see it happen in most or all of these democratic communities. (I’m contacting others too.)

Student unions need media coverage all year, not just at election time. So the sooner VFM is launched, the more benefit it will bring. Even just the anticipation of VFM can encourage new and existing media to cover student association issues. I don’t know if that’s a factor in UBC Insiders’ continued blogging, but I’d like to think so.

What’s the next step? I emailed this outline to the UBC AMS VP External last September, when we were planning the first VFM:

“Here are the main steps I think we need to follow:

1. Choose a name to replace “turbo democracy”.
2. Decide the rules for the media competition, including ballot format.
3. Get AMS Council approval to proceed with implementation.
4. Publicize the competition to potential media contestants.
5. Media sign up, start covering AMS issues and building their websites.
6. We publicize the new info system to voters, with media help.
7. Media gradually gain reputation in the eyes of voters and other media.
8. Potential candidates decide to run for AMS positions, partly because of this new info system that will help voters elect good candidates.
9. Election campaign period begins. Media cover debates, interview candidates, write evaluations and endorsements.
10. Media review and critique each other.
11. Voters read media websites, vote for election candidates, and vote funds to media contestants.
12. Candidates are elected; media awards are paid out.

All these stages take time. …

I think it’s important for voters, media and candidates to develop their understanding of how this new info system works, before the election campaign starts. That education process is in steps 5, 6 and 7 above, and can be expected to take several months.

Ideally, I would have liked to be at step 5 by now as the semester begins. How fast can we play catch-up and get the first four steps done? As each week goes by, the chance of success diminishes for a full implementation by January 2007.”

As I feared, it took months to work through steps 1 to 4, and we ended up launching the contest in early January, a mere 3 weeks before the election. UBC students would have benefited more from an earlier launch.

Our next implementations of VFM can build on what we already learned at UBC. Based on the above 12-step program, step 1 is done – we now call it "voter-funded media" instead of the too-retro "turbo democracy". But most of the remaining steps will need to be redone in whole or in part, which will take months. Although the rules used at UBC worked pretty well, there’s plenty of scope for trying to improve them. So if we want to launch VFM in September, we should start designing the rules ASAP.

Although many students are away in summer, and everyone has competing priorities, each student union could create a small committee to move this plan forward. I’m available to help!

Candidate Time Drain Problem

In UBC’s January 2007 student elections, many candidates complained that the voter-funded media contestants took too much of their time. The lists of written questions that most media sent them overlapped each other heavily. Those asking for in-person interviews added a further time burden. Some media seemed not to have read the candidates’ published platforms. With thirteen entrants trying to prove themselves worthy of voter funding, this diverted electoral candidates’ time away from other campaigning. Reducing direct contact with voters may have contributed to the low voter turnout. The media did not seem to deliver many votes in return for all the time cost. Does VFM help or harm the democratic decision process? Does it make running for electoral office more difficult?

The VFM Committee Report raised this issue on page 6. AMS Council discussed it when the report was presented at their March 28 meeting; minutes should soon be available here.

Some have argued that allocating time for campaigning both to media and directly to voters is part of being a candidate. Nonetheless, I think this problem is worth some attention. VFM should make it more inviting for well qualified candidates to run for office. Public-interest media can make elections less about postering one’s name all over campus, and more about qualifications and issues. There must be more time-efficient ways to achieve that.

We can expect some components of this problem to work themselves out naturally through time, even without specific countermeasures. VFM is a brand new mechanism, and all participants (candidates, media, voters, administrators) are moving rapidly up a learning curve. (Well, most voters are moving slowly, but still upward.) Voters will learn about the new media, increasing their impact. Electoral candidates will learn how to better allocate their time. Media will learn how to create more public benefit, and using less candidate time is a public benefit.

Launching the next VFM contest in September will spread media attention across five months, covering AMS Council policies in the fall, rather than just concentrating on a three-week election frenzy in January. That raises the possibility of excess demands on councillors’ time, but the distribution of effort through the semester will be more in line with voters’ information needs.

The AMS should take another look at how best to sequence the various possible stages of electoral campaigning – announcing candidacy, responding to media, active campaigning etc. One goal has always been to make campaigning effective without excessive time commitments, but VFM offers new ways to do that. For example, the VFM Committee Report recommended: “Allow candidates to declare their intent to run in mid-November, initiate non-public campaign period until the beginning of formal campaigning” (page 15).

Clearly the media can coordinate better to reduce duplication of their questions to candidates. But election administrators should beware the temptation to step in and impose a solution. Freedom of the press is a key political principle; government control of the media is to be avoided. Remember that VFM is intended not just for student elections, but more importantly as a model for reforming our national political systems.

Voluntary adherence to a consensus on best-practice media principles may be enough. For example, media contestants could create a question pool for each electoral candidate, with a few core questions plus one contributed by each contestant. The candidate can answer just the one list, and all media can use the answers.

Media should monitor each other’s behaviour in serving the public interest, and reflect those assessments in their media voting recommendations. They can thus encourage each other to use candidates’ time efficiently by:
- preparing for interviews;
- not asking questions that already have answers published;
- posting the full interview recording and transcript on the web;
- allowing any copying and re-use of their material as long as it’s credited.

This approach to sharing information is referred to as “Open Access” on page 14 of the VFM Committee Report. See www.creativecommons.org for info on the global Open Access movement. VFM can be seen as a mechanism for funding a creative commons.

UBC election administrators should consult with the media to decide what mix of coordination mechanisms (rules, consensus principles etc.) would work best. AMS Council and its next VFM Committee should also keep in mind the likely impacts on candidates’ time when they discuss next year’s contest design, including total award pool, number of awards, and entry fee or other entry hurdle.

Media consolidation – yes!

It’s ironic for a media reformer to advocate consolidation these days. The mainstream private sector media in the USA are heavily and justifiably criticized for excessive concentration of ownership (e.g. www.stopbigmedia.com). But the nascent market for voter-funded media at UBC is at a very different stage of evolution, and has a very different incentive structure.

The brave souls who jumped into this unknown VFM contest in January 2007 had a lot of fun with it. We saw an exciting proliferation of new media styles. Next year there will be less uncertainty about how a VFM contest works, and many more people will know about it in advance. So we can expect more media groups to form and join in the fun. They will all look at what happened in January 2007 to see what is possible and what worked, then plan how to do it better. The bar will be raised!

In this earlier post and spreadsheet I analysed how the various media entrants won votes by their very different strengths. I predict that next year’s contestants will win more votes by assembling teams with several capabilities:

1. Insightful coverage of AMS policies in fall 2007.

2. Coverage and endorsements of electoral candidates in January 2008.

3. Reviews and endorsements of media contestants.

4. Graphics, photos, videos.

5. Humour.

6. Name recognition – some already have it; some will invest in it for the future.

7. Website presentation – appealing, easy to use.

8. Print publication – even if it’s just a flyer with summary info and website reference.

9. Other promotion, e.g. on Facebook.

Some examples of how January 2007 contestants could fortify their offerings: The Underground could create a website. The Thunderbird could recruit some AMS insider knowledge. The Knoll could get a photographer. The 432 could have more AMS-related content (humorous and/or serious). Elections Insider could print flyers. This media team formation can be facilitated by a Facebook group, by a networking meeting in September, etc.

It’s ultimately up to the voters though – media are free to consolidate or not as they wish, and voters are free to vote as they wish. The voter funding mechanism is designed to pull toward the public interest, including toward the degree of consolidation that is in the public interest. At a later stage of evolution, we could see some return to media specialization. But that would require a more sophisticated pattern of media referencing and crediting each other, plus voters voting for media they don’t read directly but benefit from by reference.

UBC VFM Committee Report

I held off blogging during discussions leading up to the VFM Committee Report, which was presented to AMS Council last night (March 28).

The report’s main points:
- VFM was successful in improving election campaign coverage;
- however, it did not reach enough voters;
- recommend doing VFM again in the coming year (especially since I’m willing to sponsor it again);
- launch earlier (September 2007), to give voters more time to learn about the media;
- encourage media team formation (name recognition + good content);
- plan how media can use electoral candidates’ time more efficiently (“open access”).

Next I plan to blog about the potential for forming stronger media groups by teaming up complementary talents. A subsequent entry may cover how to use candidates’ time efficiently.

Multifactor analysis of UBC VFM votes

I’m going on vacation to Mexico February 10-17, so here’s a going-away present for my readers: a toy you can play with while I’m neglecting this blog. It’s an Excel spreadsheet (fun, huh?) modelling how UBC media contestants won votes – linked here.

Some explanatory outline is in the spreadsheet. Here are a few more notes:

I created this to help understand what factors affected voting in the UBC media contest. I defined 4 factors:

Name = how well known the name is among voters
Serious = quality x quantity of serious election coverage
Fun = quality x quantity of fun election-related content
Non-web = amount of promotion by print media and advertising (including Facebook) beyond having a website

I subjectively evaluated each media contestant on each of these factors. The spreadsheet calculates an OLS regression to “explain” the nuber of votes based on these factors. I’ve posted the spreadsheet here so that you can download it, input your own subjective evaluations, and see what results you get.

Based on my numbers, the most important factor was “Name”. My preferred measure of importance is the number of votes (“Impact”) caused by a one-standard-deviation change in the factor. (Standard deviation here is the cross-sectional variation across contestants.) Impact of Name was 116 votes; of Serious was 50 votes; of Non-web was 38 votes; and of Fun was 10 votes.

Keep in mind that we can play around with the input numbers to make the outputs say anything we want – garbage in, garbage out – lies, damn lies, and statistics. I can’t claim any objective proof here. I’m just trying for some plausible explanation.

I think that a media group’s “Name” is affected cumulatively through time by its past performance, especially its past history of “Serious”, “Non-web” and “Fun”. So even though “Name” is the biggest factor in the short run, the other three are more effective in the longer run. (Of course there are bound to be additional factors I haven’t captured here.)

In my next post I plan to explore how media groups can become more successful.

Year-round media coverage

What might we expect if we have VFM at UBC again next year? I’m willing to sponsor it again, and preliminary conversations indicate some AMS interest in a second year of VFM, with modifications to be determined. So in my next few posts I’ll speculate on how the behaviour of various participants (media, voters, electoral candidates) may evolve, and on some VFM system design changes we could consider.

Many observers (including The Ubyssey) have recommended broadening the scope of voter-funded media to extend beyond the election period, perhaps covering AMS issues year-round. I agree. I had wanted to launch the VFM contest in September 2006, but it took time to work out all the implementation details. I’m glad we launched it anyway though, because we learned a lot that will help us make it more successful next year.

The January 2007 VFM implementation generated new insights into AMS policy issues, candidate platforms, experience, and qualifications. Judging from the still-low turnout, these insights did not spread to many voters, but at least those who were paying attention (candidates, media and some others) benefited, which should be healthy for the AMS. The critical comparisons of media quality were enlightening, especially (I hope) for journalism students.

While year-round coverage may be ideal, it will take a few months to assess the results of January 2007, decide whether to do VFM again and if so how. So suppose it gets launched in September 2007. How will that earlier start change things?

Let’s suppose that other aspects of the contest are as before, so the media contest will be judged by voters in January 2008, with $8000 in prizes awarded. The media will have to decide how to allocate their effort through time. Will voters remember enough to reward them in January for what they did in September? Probably some media will cover AMS issues throughout the fall, while others may enter later and just cover the election. This should lighten the over-concentration of all VFM effort on the election that we saw last month, so electoral candidates should find it less fatiguing.

Most important, a September launch will give the media a much better opportunity to build voter awareness, of their coverage and of the VFM system. They can do this even before the contest begins, investing in their name brand reputation. Voters might also appreciate expanded media coverage of departmental student elections.

Next I plan a couple of posts on what elements make up a successful media group.