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Ava’s Bake Sale: The New Family goes wiki
This New Bake Sale involved a “New” family, one represented (almost) by the NY Times article on gay marriage: my partner Sue and I, along with Sue’s 12-year old son, Zeke, hosted a bake sale for Obama in front of our house in Venice, California, a big old California Craftsman on the corner of a well-traveled intersection near Abbot Kinney.

The bake sale was set to coincide with Zeke’s 12th birthday party. We thought the event would provide both entertainment and political awareness — plus plenty of birthday cake — for him and his friends. We’d do the sale, and then “move on,” seamlessly, to his birthday party later in the afternoon.

We signed on to do the bake sale Monday the week before it was to happen. By Thursday MoveOn had emailed us to let us know that we had more than 20 people signed up on their website and we might want to think about logistics. Soon, 41 people had signed up — and everyone, it seemed, wanted to bring chocolate chip cookies. Something had to be done and fast. Sue set up a wiki to manage the participants (none of whom we knew) and that’s when things started to cook.

By the next morning, people had logged onto the wiki and organized drinks, tables, ice delivery, coolers, and the perfect balance of sweet and savory snacks. Someone needed a ride, another an extra table; thanks to an impending heat wave, people began offering lemonade, popsicles, and bottled water. Zeke innovated with water balloons and hose-spraying, 50 cents each. We printed donation forms, made posters, adapted artwork into a “Barack Obama Bake-o-Rama” t-shirt and introduced our selves and our home (via Google maps and photo sharing). I was stunned. I had never met any of these people, though they were my neighbors, and here we were working and baking together.

Within three days, the bake sale had developed a life of its own, beyond us, Move-on, the birthday party or even our house. This was true not just in terms of the social networking that led to crowds, but also because no single person or household was in control. We weren’t representatives, we were simply participants. And so was everyone else.

Julia’s Bake Sale: Suburban Renewal
My husband, four children, and I live on a cul de sac in suburban Orange County. We threw our bake sale on a modest corner near our community pool. About 30 people donated baked goods, drinks, good will, and of course money (over $600 total). Like Sue and Ava, I hosted this event as much to involve my kids in the election as to raise money. My kids, aged 8-11, were on sugar highs all week, as we planned our menu, shopped for sprinkles, and cooked up graphics for the event.

At first I relied on my usual listservs. I was thinking small. Very small. The day before the event, however, I figured out that lots of people had signed up to bring things on the planning site provided by MoveOn. Emails had gone out to every MoveOn person in the surrounding zip codes. Like Ava, I was surprised to find truly perfect strangers bearing cupcakes and checkbooks.

My suburban street corner, usually devoid of pedestrian traffic, suddenly felt intimate and social, populated by a pile of memories defrosted from someone else’s childhood (my bra-burning mother never got near a bake sale!). Yet it was the internet, not church or school, that had pulled the neighborliness from the back of the deep freeze. Standing on our Orange County corner, we knew Sue and Ava, and hundreds like us, were also counting change and swatting flies for Obama. The digital dimension served to intensify rather than neutralize the sweet directness of a traditional bake sale, while also amplifying and modernizing its resonances. Sugar, and spice.

Branding tales
At the edges of the event lay the larger question of the “Obama brand.” MoveOn provided snappy logos, slogans, and signage for the bake sales, along with tips on how to talk to the press and publicize events — recipes for grass-roots activism transferable to new situations:

The Betty Crocker graphics certainly made planning easier for 700 hosts — but they also aimed to bring visual consistency to the different events, to provide a common brand. Neither of our households, however, ended up relying on the social media tools that MoveOn provided. Sue’s wiki soon supplanted MoveOn’s e-vite page, and we all chose to throw away the chipper MoveOn cupcake in favor of an edgier image created by Julia’s daughter Hannah.

Hannah based her painting on Shepard Fairey’s poster campaign for Obama. Fairey, famous for his guerrilla street art, had issued some unsolicited stencil graphics in support of Obama’s candidacy, images that became instant hits among collectors and designers as well as voters hungry for image change.

Hannah’s painting turned up not only on flyers and cup cosies, but also on a big sheet cake (printed up at a local grocery store).

The resulting confection was equal parts baked good, campaign poster, and centerpiece. (The apricot-oatmeal bars baked by a gifted neighbor tasted a lot better, though!) Ava and Sue used the painting on t-shirts as well as real and virtual signage:

On all of her print materials, Julia used Gotham, the official font of the Obama campaign — in silent homage to the typographic consistency of Obama’s design people.

Yet events like these take branding out of the hands of the campaign. In the early days of mass marketing, the brand was a one-way communiqué that aimed to deliver desires back to the buyer in the form of new products. In the last decade, businesses have shifted their focus from sending ads out into the world to managing the brand’s social life once it gets there. Businesses and other groups increasingly depend on consumer groups to produce and sustain the meaning of the brand.

This new situation poses a risk as well as a resource for businesses and other organizations. Will consumers (and voters) stay on message? Will MoveOn — or Shepard Fairey — mind that we painted our own logo for our event? And how do the folks at BarackObama.com really feel about MoveOn.org’s bake sale frenzy? As Obama abandons federal money in favor of smaller donations, he may also be ceding some of the scrupulous control over his brand that the Gotham font has come to represent for design observers like Michael Beirut. At the very least, the elegant typeface first designed by Tobias Frere-Jones for Esquire may have to share the stage with some really fat fonts.

Recipes for democracy
In the news, Obama had just turned down public financing for his campaign, and MoveOn had liquidated the 527 arm of their organization — meaning they would now only be able to raise money through individual gifts up to $5,000.

The message here is that the power is definitely with the people.
But what does that mean? The Obama campaign has gone on record as being somewhat concerned with not being able to control organizations like MoveOn. As bake sale attendee and Virtualpolitik blogger Liz Losh commented, “I’m sure that the Obama team in turn was also anxious about the efforts of this technically independent PAC, since who knows if cannabis activists might decide to sell some extra special brownies to their customers?”

But beyond controlling the menu and the message, perhaps the real concern is about controlling “the people.” If we are “moving on” to a new political system (non representative democracy) where consensus or network is the government, then isn’t controlling the people besides the point?

In the Old Bake Sale, there was a clear line of authority and control. In a representative democracy, representatives form an independent ruling body charged with the responsibility of acting in the people’s interest. Such representatives have authority to act in the face of changing circumstances on behalf of their constituents, but aren’t required to ask them. This is more or less the system the US has used since its founding. But what happens when you can know the will of the people, all the people or nearly all the people, immediately, or within a matter of hours? What has Web 2.0 done to representation?

The news media has consistently reported that Obama’s campaign has “won” because of its ability to garner mass popular support through grassroots organizing and small donations (average amount = $20), a shift mostly due to the internet. Obama now has over a million “friends” on his Facebook page. Yet the campaign has also criticized satellite organizations such as MoveOn because they cannot control the messages these sometimes rogue organizations put out. The success of Obama’s candidacy, however, will likely depend on precisely this type of self-organizing support. Just as Zeke’s birthday party developed a life of its own, Obama’s message will morph and metastasize independently of his campaign managers.

Everyone who came to our bake sales was on board with good intentions and lots of hope. The desire for collective change was palpable, but one wonders about a potential underbelly that’s being overlooked. Or perhaps we are simply being naive. Can we trust Obama to give up control in favor of the collective good? More important, can we trust ourselves to give up control, more than once a year or during a kid’s birthday party? If people hadn’t been kind, if we’d had party crashers who stole the cash and ate all the cupcakes, would we be less than enthusiastic about the future of collective action?

While MoveOn uses social networking (you can see their collection of Bake Sale photos on Flickr), they are doing it in a centralized, branded way. There is no doubt that MoveOn is successful. But what this bake sale has shown is that MoveOn may just be the tip of the icing tube. In fact, they may have served up the Old New Bake Sale, with the New New Bake Sale coming soon to a street corner or cultural center near you. Will it be sweet or sour, a block party or a riot? Only time will tell.