[liberationtech] PCD 5/8/09 - Dan Siroker, How We Used Data to Win the Presidential Election

[Terry Winograd]

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Stanford Seminar on People, Computers, and Design (CS547)
see http://hci.stanford.edu/seminar for the quarter's schedule

Gates B01 (NEC Classroom) and SITN, 12:30-2:00pm PST
Video: http://myvideosv.stanford.edu
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Friday, May 8, 2009

Dan Siroker, Obama Campaign and Carrotsticks
     http://www.siroker.com/

How We Used Data to Win the Presidential Election

Of the 129 million people who voted in the election last November 
nearly 70 million voted for Barack Obama. Obama's popular vote 
percentage (52.9%) was the highest for a Democratic presidential 
candidate since 1964, and his margin of victory was the largest ever 
for a non-incumbent. These are all astounding facts but they are just 
part of the story. A story about what went into securing those 70 
million votes. A story about data.

In this talk, Dan will describe how the campaign used data to win the 
presidential election. He will share the lessons his team learned 
along the way and how you can apply them to any data-driven decision 
you need to make-- whether you are a developer, designer, or even a 
marketer. If you are building a product or selling an idea, you can 
use data to do it better. Data can be a powerful force for good.

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Dan Siroker recently founded CarrotSticks, a startup focused on using 
technology to help kids learn.

During the presidential transition, Dan was the Deputy New Media 
Director where he was responsible for strategic planning of the 
administration's use of the internet and technology. He led several 
online initiatives on change.gov including a way for the American 
people to publicly comment on proposed policy, ask a question, or a 
submit an idea-- all of which could be voted on by others and went 
directly to President Obama and his cabinet.

Prior to working on the presidential transition, Dan led the 
analytics team for the Obama presidential campaign and served as a 
senior member of the larger New Media team. He led a team of software 
engineers and analysts responsible for optimizing the effectiveness 
of the campaign's online operations that ended up raising over half a 
billion dollars, registering over 2 million voters, and enabling 3 
million phone calls to be made in the final four days of the campaign.

Before joining the campaign, Dan was a Product Manager for Google 
Chrome, the open-source web browser from Google. Dan worked 
previously as a Product Manager for Google AdWords.

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NEXT WEEK  - May 15, 2009 -Scott Snibbe, Snibbe Interactive
     Social Immersive Media
     http://hci.stanford.edu/seminar/abstracts/08-09/090515-snibbe.html