One of the final sessions at The> Organizers’ Collaborative’s Grassroots Use of Technology Conference was Outcomes Mgmt. & Case Mgmt. for Human Service Organizations: Build, Buy, or Lease?. It started off with some interesting comments about output management and outcome management and went on to clearly lay out a framework for understanding the total cost of ownership (TCO) of different systems.

As an old IT guy, the idea of TCO was nothing new to me. However, the aspects about output and outcome management were particularly interesting to me. How do we know if the projects we are working on, or the technology we are using are getting us the most desirable outcome? We can measure output, the number of people cared for, the number of people who have signed up for a mailing list, or for a website, the number of visits that the website has had, but how do we get better at measuring meaningful change that has come about as a result of our efforts?

I wrote about my workshop here, and I received some positive comments. Adam posted a link to his blog which he started after our discussions at the conference. A nice simple metric; a blog created. By the looks of it, it promising to be a very interesting blog. Will this bring about some other meaningful change? I hope so. We shall see.

In a comment from Adam about my new role as Blogmaster for the DeStefano campaign, he asked, "Now that blogs have become a part of political campaigns, I was wondering if you could give us a little insight into how blog posts for a campaign are created. Who writes them? Who checks them? Is there a clearance process or is it based on trust and implied standards of propriety?"

I'm not sure that I can say. Micah Sifry writes over at Personal Democracy Forum, campaigns hiring bloggers. He mentions my new role, as well as new jobs for Tim Tagaris and Matt Stoller. I would love to hear Tim and Matt's comments on this. I can say that so far, I've written my blog posts for the DeStefano campaign and posted them. I believe everyone involved with the campaign reads them, and I get feedback from lots of different sources. Currently, I post without being cleared, as I believe, do others. As the campaign grows we shall see if and how this changes.

It is worth noting that bloggers are generally pretty independent people who like to speak their mind. Personally, I believe that if a blogging operation is going to be successful, you need to give bloggers a pretty free reign. A good blogger will say what they think, one way, or another. That said, I recognize that some campaigns are a little more top down in their approach and the blog becomes just another news outlet.

One blogger, whom I hold in the highest regard, is David Weinberger. He has an interesting blog entry today about his experiences with MSNBC. His tagline was, "So, fuck it. I quit", with a pretty good description of how he got to that point. I want to thank David for a timely illustration of my point, "bloggers are generally pretty independent people who like to speak their mind".

What does this have to do with Outcome Management? I'm not sure. For campaigns, the primary outcome sought is to get more votes than your opponents. A very important side outcome is to get people more involved and thinking more deeply and clearly about electoral and governance processes.

I hope that Adam, Tim, Matt, David and myself all achieve some of the outcomes we are hoping for in our various blogging endeavors.