Micro targeting

Recently the Obama re-election campaign employed similar population-wide behavioral analytics to micro-target voters to ensure his re-election. There is no reason why we in India must not look to technology to devise ingenious methods for near real time data collection and population-wide analytics of social performance. This will not only help micro-target and localise welfare Interventions by local Governments (as opposed to centralised schemes) but it will also shift the focus away from agenda-driven politicking based on lagging indicators and towards a debate on actionable interventions that can make a difference here and now.

I love this idea in this article in Niti Central on how we can leverage technology for social welfare.

The bit about Obama’s re-election campaign is best read about in this article called The nerds go marching in, although I still haven’t been able to find specifics about the tools that they built.

P.S. Also see Wikipedia article on Microtargeting.