Youth Organizing in a Pandemic, How We Win

If a global pandemic that disproportionately kills Black Americans didn’t already surface the entrenched and systemic racial injustices that propagate throughout this country, the senseless murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor have ignited them to the fore. 

As a generation of young Americans, we are livid. And while so many of us are asking ourselves how to move forward amidst this renewed crisis, one thing remains clear. Campaign leaders, student organizers and grassroots volunteers of all kinds realize how crucial the efforts will be to get out the vote come November.

But due to stay-at-home policies potentially continuing throughout the summer, the political ground-game is still effectively digital. Regardless of how this strange reality has come about - it has flipped on its head what has so often been a political paradigm that has counted us out as the politically “disengaged” younger generation that does not show up when it counts.

We constantly find ourselves asking our elected leaders for a seat at the table. To have our voices included when addressing urgent concerns such as the generational crisis we face in climate change, or be heard when speaking up for our over-policed Black communities.

Now, while campaign events engaging in policy issues on Instagram or TikTok would normally be considered a “youth voter outreach” initiative, our reality forces these to be the only mediums to engage with any voter at all. A presidential candidate speaking out about the 100,000 American lives lost to Coronavirus was an Instagram post, not a rally in front of a hospital with healthcare workers. Mourning the death of George Floyd was a live stream, not a community town hall in Minneapolis. 

The proverbial table now lives on the Internet - and we so happen to find elected leaders asking for a seat at ours.

This is an unparalleled opportunity for us. We must use our digital fluency to our advantage for what we do best: creatively bend and strengthen the political discourse, in the hopes of converting engagement into real political action.

It is time we recognize that as a generation that has been coming of age in a world in which our attention is highly commoditized, the “meet them where they are” strategy - one that speaks “at” young voters, not “with” us - is reflective of a playbook from a bygone era of political content that simply doesn’t meet the moment.

Put another way, a top-down approach to scale experiences that centers a candidate’s appeal and charm in order to inspire voter turn-out efforts simply cannot overcome differences in adopting a youth-driven policy agenda. Instead, we must look to the movements that we know have made a difference.

The common thread that connects #BlackLivesMatter, March for Our Lives, Sunrise Movement and many others, is that they have lent themselves as a source of optimism and inspiration through the shared understanding of their collective impact, irrespective of age or ethnicity. Specifically for those whose faith in our democratic and judicial process is dwindling, they have helped connect us with others who share the emotional labor of discovering what we care about, and what we are willing to fight for.

In this way, the immersive experience of off-line organizing is unmatched in its ability to provide a sense of civic responsibility to communities, by allowing them to witness change up close for themselves.

It is why we protest. It is why we are in the streets. Tired and exhausted from the vitriol and inaction of government leaders past and present, amidst economic distress and upheaval, we find that the only recourse we have is to be physically present for our Black brothers and sisters in spite of a pandemic. The necessity of these forms of solidarity also means that it won’t ever be possible to fully operationalize movements on a digital platform entirely. 

But there are ways that creatively architecting digital experiences can help mobilize us in ways we have yet to see. Organizing efforts succeed when individuals connected to them feel a deep sense of ‘ownership’ over the organizing process, so that they feel that their presence and their voice is just as important as their vote.

This is why crafting digital organizing efforts around local races is so crucial. 

President Obama’s call to action in response to the continued protests erupting across the country, rightly pointed out the critical need to target local elections that hold decision making power. More importantly, focusing efforts around local races also centers what is already deeply personal to community members; their homes, their parks, their streets, their neighbors. Championing candidates that community members might already know personally, and digital organizing efforts that connect those already within walking distance from each other, can help create accountability around civic engagement and ‘ownership’ that is needed to move the needle forward on political action.

Pouring our creative talents and abilities into local communities also doubles as a means to building sustainable organizing movements for the future. Dismantling systems of oppression, and pressuring institutions to divest from a carceral state and invest in the future of their own communities requires much more than voting. It requires changing our own lives, reconfiguring our own priorities, so that we can help grow and lift up others as allies in the larger fight for justice.

This isn’t about beating Trump. Or about electing Biden. It’s not about creating content that conforms to metrics of engagement like follower counts fuelled by celebrity guest appearances, or viral memes. It’s about empowering ourselves, to recognize that we are no longer willing to be the underperforming demographic in a fight for the future of our own democracy. 

As digital natives, the battlefront is on our home turf. Now is the time for us to show up when it matters most.

- Vibhor

This piece is written from a personal observation about what it’s like to be a young voter during this time and, in thinking about President Obama’s earlier medium post, what we can do to organize during this crisis and respond to racial & systemic injustices brought on by George Floyd's death in the hopes of increasing youth voter turnout. 

The Most Important Political Influencer of This Election: Our Youth

It was Easter Sunday when I found out about Joe Biden’s rollout of a new student loan forgiveness plan. It’s a plan that would eliminate widespread student loan debt for many who attended public colleges, as well as historically black private universities. It is by far the most progressive action taking by the Vice President on this issue.

As someone who spent time on the campaign, I was surprised. 

How did I miss this? I pinged a group chat filled with other Team Joe fellows and interns I served with and asked if they had seen this plan.

None of them did. It had already been five days since its release.

Perhaps this is to be expected. The media’s raison d’être is, rightly so, being a voice of clarity during a time of emotional upheaval. In other words, any inch of coverage could never be ceded to anything other than the Coronavirus pandemic.

It’s also what I find most worrisome.

As our country continues with the fatigue of emotional and economic distress, our capacity to cling to the excitement that comes from organizing around new political realities - ones that move us towards unity and hope - seem to diminish drastically. How can we fix this?

In what now seems like a lifetime ago, the answer could previously be found in diverse candidates - both in their generational appeal and their fresh perspectives. But now, any previous room for this attitude is drowned out by the fear and instability brought on by the pandemic, on the heels of the most important election in modern American history.

The situation recalls some of the darkest hours of our country in recent memory. Analogous to the evil that befell us on 9/11, the pandemic threatens to move us away from a politics of hope towards one centered around fear, wrapped tightly within a rhetoric of divisiveness and hate. We know all too well where those paths have led us. 

But unlike that period in our nation's history, we now have a unique opportunity to break free.

As many of us remain quarantined away, the outbreak has shuffled everyday-life into the virtual world. Now, many parents and elderly voters are cozying up to digital platforms we would have never imagined them to find; parents and grandparents are now boasting to their children about their seamless adjustment to a new reality—Slack, Zoom, Viber, Twitch, Facebook Messenger and all at the same time, even with guest appearances on Tik Tok videos and on Instagram live streams. 

This presents an unparalleled opportunity for our generation of young voters to use our internet fluency - as architects of digital communities and facilitators of intimate connections online - to heighten and strengthen the political discourse in a time of great need; to utilize our perspective as the most ethnically diverse generation to be a force that keeps the concerns of underrepresented voices front and center; to welcome a new cohort of elder citizens onto our home turf—the internet—in a way that moves the conversation forward. 

Had the global community been adequately prepared for the Coronavirus pandemic, we would still be seeing the traditional fervor around the campaign trail. Conversations with families around the dinner table on economic anxiety, large rallies in stadiums and high school gyms around climate change and healthcare, to intimate town hall settings where generating meaningful dialogue or challenging candidates to answer honestly would be the norm. But going door to door is no longer an option. Handing out flyers, or having meaningful conversations in bars or at schools feel like a distant memory. 

The political ground-game is now fully digital. And regardless of how this strange reality has come about - it has flipped on its head what has so often been a political paradigm that has counted out the young political generation. 

Now, instead of asking our elected leaders for a seat at the table, we somehow find them asking for a seat at ours. 

These movements, originating and fuelled by the internet, meant that the organizing efforts to broaden the coalition with elderly members of the community began with gathering offline.

But for what might be the first time ever, this is now possible to replicate on the internet. Examples from within the Hip Hop community show this to be true, where Quarantine Radio shows and live DJ sets have people tuning in that wouldn’t ordinarily be doing so in person. Artists are now architecting their livestream experiences and musical sets to broaden generational appeal, as they find their own reach now includes your grandparents, your preschool teacher, and friends made overseas due to the ease of accessing content online. Similarly, this newfound intergenerational appeal can help young creators reimagine their reach around organizing—to view it as a lever to demand policy asks from the older generation and to strengthen coalition-building with younger voters, by keeping youth in the loop around when to vote and to help the first-time voter, who's never seen that mail-in ballot before, to ensure their voice is heard too.

This is a call to action to our generation of young people, who are not only the leaders of today, but who represent the new creative class: the high-school gamer with an engaged livestream community of thousands of viewers across the world, the university students who walk and chew gum at the same time as content creators, daily storytellers, and full-time students, and the recent grads who’ve impressively built an intellectual audience around their passion on Twitter. 

That isn’t to say that political excitement and engagement can only be spurred from within. Adopting an agenda that aligns with the values of the new political generation is ultimately up to the candidates since it’s the leadership required for moving our country forward.

But there will be needed action around creating cultures of engagement for down-ballot candidates, from young progressive Senate candidates in Nebraska to congressional candidates on the East Coast. Virtual town halls and phone banking competitions and, more importantly, creating an apparatus that ensures as many folks are registered to vote—understanding their options to doing so during the pandemic can be immensely impacted by how we use a digital platform and narrative.

This is now a world where content has become more of a utility than entertainment; where digital spaces and experiences can reach new communities; and where community drives trust around shared values. And therein lies the opportunity. There is hardly a better calling for young people to reimagine their importance over the next few months—to utilize their home turf as a way to be arbiters of creative messages that can excite us to vote, under the most difficult circumstances, come November.

- Vibhor

How Pro Sports Teams Will Make Wearables Really Work

Similar to many professional sports teams, the Golden State Warriors use a range of wearables to track everything from players’ recovery to their heart rate to their sleep patterns. Data analysts filter through the data produced by these devices, find patterns, and present these findings to the training staff — often in rapid progression as decisions can be timely.

For example, NBA teams like the Warriors may use Catapult in practice (clipped to the player’s jersey) to calculate a variety of metrics including velocity, acceleration, change of direction and total distance traveled. Using this, Catapult creates a score to gauge the amount of stress a player is putting on their body. Training staff can then use this information to make decisions like whether they should rest the player during the next game.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of grunt work associated with visualizing the data produced by multiple devices, sharing it amongst the team and searching for historical patterns. This leads to slower, less informed decisions, which results in more preventable injuries, underperformance, and lost games.

The Product's Foundation

Guided by the belief that each category of data requires a singular location to access all of that category’s recorded data, we decided to design the following for the Warriors: an analytics dashboard that aggregates the performance metrics of each player — metrics that were recorded through a player’s various wearable devices — and visually present this data in a beautiful, seamless, and shareable way. You can think of it as similar to Welltok providing a consumer with a dashboard of their aggregated wearable device data but for enterprise-level sports teams tracking their player’s performance.

Using this dashboard, the Warriors would be able to toggle between the team’s roster, wearable devices, player metrics, data history, and format of data visualization. In addition, Warriors can share the data they are viewing, refresh the page for updated metrics, and download it to their computers in .csv format. Click here to click through the mockup (when navigating, click anywhere on the page to see where to click next).

Our proposed dashboard

When creating the dashboard, our goals were to create an interface that minimized page shifting, was intuitive to navigate, displayed only essential information, and used popping colors; overall, we wanted the Warriors team to enjoy using the dashboard.

We began by being empathetic to the needs of the Golden State Warriors’ data analysts and training staff. Considering what would make them better decision-makers, we strove to make the dashboard’s key functionality be in its data visualization, sharing, and search.

Features

Upon signing in, the user is brought directly to the profile of Stephen Curry under the Roster tab. This is done to immediately deliver the core value of the platform, which is to visualize aggregated data that is searchable and shareable; we hope this maneuver will shorten the learning curve associated with the dashboard’s adoption amongst the team. A Warrior can toggle between each player to access the player’s recent metrics, and using the scroll button, can scroll down the page to view additional metrics. The visual data (Warriors can opt to see data in a line graph, bar graph or table) is always displayed at the top of the page, where Warriors can select the number of past data recordings they desire to view. “Recordings” are used instead as a unit of measurement such as “days” since certain metrics are recorded more often than others. We displayed values on the graphs’ x-axis in descending order instead of increasing order. This is done to make the output of selecting “past x recordings” be as intuitive as viewing a stock market graph, where the oldest data points are always closest to the graph’s origin. When selecting Wearables on the side panel, the user is directed to viewing the Neuroon score of the entire team (again, to immediately deliver core value). A Warrior can switch between wearable devices to view the metrics associated with that device for the entire team or an individual player.

Clicking the circling arrows will refresh the page to present more recent data (connected through Bluetooth), the arrow emerging from the box will share the selected data, and the document with the lettering “CSV” will download the selected data to the user’s computer in a .csv file. These three buttons — especially the one to download data in csv format — create massive value for Warriors data analysts and training staff who can now easily execute tasks that previously would’ve been laborious if done in the database that stores the wearable data. When a Warrior clicks on their profile, they are not directed to a new page but simply to a pop-up where they can edit their account information and quickly revert back to the dashboard. This is an example template for the Golden State Warriors that can be modified for use by any team in any pro sports league. We’ll allow each user to customize their dashboard’s colors and content (e.g., metrics tracked, players, wearables).

We’ll build the dashboard initially as a web application since the desktop is where most data analysis is done and coaching decisions are made. Afterwards, we’ll build a mobile app to allow training staff to make decisions on the move through a tablet or smartphone.

Next Steps

In later product iterations, we hope to gradually incorporate machine learning into the dashboard to alert the user when a player’s performance has deviated from the norm. For instance, after collecting multiple years of data on Thompson’s endurance workouts, the Warriors’ dashboard could intelligently determine the amount of minutes he should play in the next game for peak performance and injury prevention. To solve for loss of data when players are traded, it would be interesting if each sports league set a standard where the team trading a player must give the player’s historical data to the new team.

We plan on adding features such as the ability to compare similar metrics, writing notes on graphs/text boxes, and searching specific dates for data. Most importantly, we’ll work closely with each team to help them customize the dashboard to their needs.

Separate from our product, we see the market for managing wearable device data only increasing as leagues such as the NBA begin allowing wearables to be used in games. The NBA is already forming a wearables committee that’ll determine which devices can be used in games. With this new in-game data, training staff and data analysts will increasingly need solutions that allow them to visualize, share, and search aggregated data. Similarly, as wearables become cheaper and more sophisticated, they’ll become more widespread and relied upon, making understanding the data they produce all the more important.

- Vibhor