With most polls and pundits predicting further electoral annihilation for Labour ahead of the 2017 general election, many were surprised when it clawed its way back into the running. While not managing to gain a majority, the party managed to deprive the Conservatives of theirs.
Momentum, however, was not surprised. With the help of My Nearest Marginal (MNM), its political organising tool, the Labour-affiliated activist group had mobilised thousands of volunteers to knock on millions of doors up and down the country.
“Almost every constituency Momentum targeted, we won,” Jeremy Parkin, an organiser with the group, told The New Statesman after the election. Labour lost five seats to the Conservatives, but won 28 from them, as well as six from the SNP and two from the Lib Dems.
This time around, Momentum’s ambitions have grown: they want to paint the electoral map red and put Jeremy Corbyn in Number 10. To do so, their strategy has become smarter and their digital tools sharper. “Politics is inherently digital, and tech is inherently political,” says 25-year-old Jan Baykara, a software engineer for Momentum’s technology team. He’s one of the people who built the group’s new organising tool, MyCampaignMap (MCM). To date, the tool’s been accessed 1.4 millions times (compared to about 100,000 times for MNM in 2017) and used to set up more than 21,000 canvassing events. It’s the centrepiece of the group’s updated mobilisation strategy.
Baykara says he’s been working shifts of up to 12 hours over the course of the campaign – but working hours are effectively immaterial as the spectre of the upcoming election looms overhead at all times. But despite the physical exhaustion, Baykara seems buoyed by a quiet contentment when I meet him in a cafe near Momentum’s offices in Finsbury Park – incidentally, Jeremy Corbyn’s neighbourhood. Earlier that week, an Opinium poll put the Conservatives at a staggering 19-point lead, but he is not perturbed. Things are going well on the ground.
Since the election was called, the movement has galvanised thousands of activists to participate in campaign activities – including more than 1,400 “Labour Legends” (those committed to devoting at least a full week to campaigning). Sitting at the heart of the group’s mobilisation strategy is My Campaign Map.
Anyone can access the tool (currently only available for desktop), which, at the user end, appears usable enough. It shows a map of the UK carved up into constituencies colour coded different shades of red depending on how marginal they are. Users enter their postcode, and the map directs them to the nearest constituencies in need of campaigners.
Once you select an area, you’re presented with a list of events taking place there (like canvassing or phone banking parties). You might also be supplied details of a local WhatsApp group that you can sign up to through the map to be kept in the loop. MCM’s interface might appear fairly intuitive at the surface level, but the tool represents the culmination of two years of development, as Momentum built the tool entirely from the ground up.
Baykara says that My Nearest Marginal was rudimentary by comparison. “It was kind of the technical equivalent of writing on the back of a fag packet,” he laughs. Its map used previous election data to identify Labour marginals, and then directed volunteers to the one nearest to them, showing events ordered by time.
“That's fine if you care about geography and clocks,” says Baykara. “We care about winning an election, with a distribution of volunteers that doesn't necessarily match up to the distribution of battleground constituencies.”
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The realisation that this tool could be far smarter prompted the team to start working on MCM straight after the last general election. They designed MCM so that it does not direct volunteers to their nearest marginal seats, but to the ones most in need of boots on the ground, and where they can be most valuable.
There are other differences. In technical terms, MyNearestMarginal was clunky, built on centralised technologies and in non-conventional code. “The problem inherent in that, is that new developers can’t come in and pick it up,” says Baykara. It wasn’t easy to tweak or update the tool either, which prevented the organisation from adapting through the course of the campaign.
“In 2017, we essentially had a static set of targets that stayed the same for the whole election,” says Joe Todd, Momentum’s head of communications. “This time we are constantly shifting our priorities and targeting.”
MCM’s development was driven by a desire to right the mistakes of the past. Momentum’s technology team chose a very well-established framework that is written in a very accessible language (Django, a full-stack web development framework based in Python). “We chose that specifically – so that we could mobilize as many technical volunteers as possible around it,” Baykara says.
Momentum has explicitly sought out volunteers with technical skills. While Baykara is only one of two permanent staff members in the tech team, up to 50 volunteers have signed up to its Slack channel. Momentum’s flat hierarchical structure means that everyone’s input is welcome. The team has been giving volunteers access to the repo where the code is, encouraging them to constantly propose tweak and changes to the tools themselves. Suggestions can range from whole features to little fixes and performance improvements.
Baykara recalls one moment when a glitch in the site meant it had trouble loading. It triggered a frenzy, until one volunteer proposed a fix. “They submitted this little patch, and we're back to ‘cool, everyone can load the website within two milliseconds’,” Baykara says, with a breath of relief, as if reliving that moment of bliss.
The most important source of data for the tool’s algorithm – the one determining where to direct volunteers – is footfall. That is, how many activists have been active in each constituency. This is based on how many events have been set up in the constituency at the time the user enters their postcode. “The algorithm goes both ways,” says Baykara. “Organisers are talking to central Momentum, who are talking to regional organisers, who are talking to the Labour party – and that’s all part of the algorithm.”
He says that while what users see does not appear to have changed much, under the hood things are being tweaked constantly. Prototype features are often launched to a small number of users first and then sometimes rolled out across the whole tool.
MCM is a centralised organisational tool, but Momentum embodies a strategy of “distributed organisation”. Popularised by Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign in the US, this refers to an organisational structure where clusters of activists across the country are encouraged to self-organise, rather than follow top-down direction.
MCM is the tool that initially brings volunteers onboard. “Afterwards they go dark – they find their mates, they separate into lots of groups that talk amongst themselves,” says Baykara.
It’s a strategy that is closely calibrated to the times. “The horizontalism of the internet – that it’s a network of networks – means that if you knock out one node of the network, it’s not going to affect the message,” Athina Karatzogianni, a senior lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Leicester. “This structure, coupled with a distributed organising model – it fits like a glove”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
