This is about well-funded new-politics sites that failed. Since PeopleCount has (so far, 2020) not been able to find funding, the waste of money on these efforts feels poignant.

AmericansElect was the first exciting well-funded site I found, in 2012.  Visiting the site, I made an account and answered an interesting set of questions about my political positions. It seemed promising. 

But then it suggested a presidential candidate I didn’t know. There was a short blurb about her, and that was it. Nothing more.

The purpose of the site wasn’t to change politics, it was merely to make a political party that would nominate a presidential candidate using an online process.  The “great idea” was that non-politicians could be elected, and party members could participate online.

Unfortunately, that was it. It was very poorly thought out. I was not able to reach the people involved to suggest improvements.

Logging in a few weeks later, there were more questions to answer, and then more and more. They had added the ability for users to add questions. Questions became too numerous to keep track of. Some didn’t even make sense. They were not even organized. According to Wikipedia, they ended up spending about $35 million.

I managed to reach one of the founders a few years later. Rather than admitting failure, he concluded that nothing on-line was possible. He naively decided that politics must be done by parties with grass-roots organizations.

Brigade.com was the other well-funded site, starting with $9.5 million dollars in 2014. It allowed people to create political questions and add reasons for answers plus to follow other users. It was supposed to allow people to band together. I created an account and went back every few months. It was never very satisfying to use. Questions were also not organized and often of very poor quality. I’m not aware that they ever got past the beta stage.

I had no success contacting any of their founders. At one point, they contacted me as a random user to give them product feedback. Instead of doing it on the phone, I arranged to visit them in their office in San Francisco, about 40 miles away. I gave the UI designer some feedback and some verbal information about what I thought was possible and my contact information. I never heard back from them.

There were rumors that they actually burned through over $40 million. Some of the money was used to buy other startups to find people dedicated to working on politics.

Conclusion

To me, the moral of the story is to not throw money at a feeling, much less an idea. There needs to be a real plan to make something that’s both usable and valuable to users. For politics, there’s needs to be a plan to actually make a difference.

AmericansElect had an overall plan to make a difference, but launched before they figured out how to make something usable or valuable. Brigade.com had neither. Instead, they seemed to buy into the political myth that: “The essence of politics is forming a network and expanding it into a movement.” And they bought into the tech myth that: “Success is best assured by a good team.” Without a well thought-out product, teams fail.

In my view, both efforts would have done much better by hiring people to think, search and develop real plans before building software. At the very least, they should have had a few people searching for ideas and input in parallel. And having no real idea of what would work, they should have sought ideas from outside.

The result of their poorly thought-out efforts is that they have strengthened the dysfunction of our political system. While much is possible in transforming politics, people are more convinced that nothing new and valuable is possible in politics, and no money should be invested until a solution is proven.

###