I started with GCI as a common door canvasser in the Philadelphia office and worked my way up to be a field organizer on their MoveOn PAC "Leave No Voter Behind" project, also in Philadelphia. I get the sense that our office was one of the best organized in the country---we actually had an office with phones from day 1, we had three major volunteer recruitment events around the city already publicized before we organizers arrived, we still had 95% of our staff with us on Election Day, and we had a huge influx of volunteers from New York from October 30th to Election Day.

I think the basic outline of the model was just fine. (Precinct-based organizing with a goal of three contacts with lazy-Dems seems like a fairly sensible strategy, and there's evidence that it is effective.) The problems lay in some of the details and moreover in the rigidity with which the higher-ups clung to the Model.

In a lot of the places (including Philadelphia to some extent), the volunteer recruitment model required people to drive a long way to the organizers' office in order for us to sell them on becoming precinct leaders. My precincts, although filled with enthusiasts of the MoveOn brandname, were far away from our office (especially during rush/dinner hours), and it was much more effective to have recruitment meetings at locations closer to their homes, even though I didn't have a car to get up there.

In a couple "targeted" precincts, I recruited volunteers early on, but it took weeks after that for the lists to even arrive, let alone be input into the dreaded WAC. I don't know whether others had this problem.

Speaking of the WAC (Web Action Center), I'm surprised it hasn't been commented on yet. For those who don't know, the WAC was a piece of web software meant to allow volunteers to input the results of canvassing. It would allow volunteers to print their own custom walk-lists, precinct leaders to communicate with subsidiary volunteers, and organizers to track volunteers' progress. My understanding was that the WAC was developed by the MoveOn PAC folks themselves, rather than by GCI, and I've heard rumors that the GCI people wanted to scrap it early on. Before criticizing it, let me say that the WAC could be a great tool, and I hope the MoveOn people stick with it, but, like any large piece of software, needs several months of rigorous testing and debugging before release. That didn't happen in 2004. The WAC was complicated and inefficient to use, it failed entirely with some common browsers, volunteers usually could not input canvassing data successfully, and many features were never functional. It was surely one of the main sources of frustration for volunteers and organizers alike. Our initial one-on-one meetings with precinct leaders (the top level of volunteer) should have been devoted to role-playing the script, planning out volunteer recruitment within the precinct, and scheduling canvass time; instead, they devolved into WAC trainings.

One great thing about the WAC was that the Model was designed for organizers to have about 12-15 precincts apiece without the WAC. Allowing volunteers to enter data and communicate through the WAC was supposed to push this number up to 20-25. Unfortunately, when the campaign was eventually forced to go WACless, organizers were saddled with a heavy burden. There wasn't really even time to call through volunteers to get canvassing results every night.

I mentioned the rigidity with which the higher-ups clung to the Model, and I want to elaborate on that a little. I certainly recognize that you should stick close to a plan once you make it. However, it quickly appeared to everyone implementing the Model that it needed some tweaking. People weren't going to come to the office from far-flung areas to an "emergency meeting." (Frankly, one should never call a meeting a meeting if one wishes to attract volunteers.) Some precincts were oversized and there was no really good way to split them up. The Model didn't work well with precincts that consisted in university dormitories. And so on. Most of these issues could have been resolved on the ground by organizers and lead organizers (our bosses). However, it did take us a long time (and it took organizers elsewhere a longer time) to get the go-ahead to implement the fixes.

I want to end on a positive note, because I believe that a similar campaign could be a great success. (In fact, I just signed up to volunteer with Philadelphians Against Santorum, which is run by a MoveOn PAC lead organizer and has a fairly similar model in many ways. Even so, I think the optimal solution is for the Democratic Party and the candidates themselves to run great field programs along the lines of LNVB. That would solve the rampant coordination problems.) We in the Philadelphia office had a well-attended debrief a few days after the election for volunteers, and another for the organizers. (I assume other offices did the same.) The weekend after the election, there was a nationwide debrief in Colorado for all the organizers. Trust me when I say that all the issues in the post and comments here were clearly voiced at all these debriefs, and I think the lead people from both MoveOn PAC and GCI took the lessons to heart.