Author: brittblaser

I honestly believe that the Howard Dean campaign, during its ascendence, was the most important project on the planet. I can’t help thinking in those terms, since there are only a few days in our four score and ten years, so we ought to spend them on the most consequential projects we’re allowed to pursue. That’s why I spent a week each month at the campaign, and most of the rest of my days on the campaign.

When I watched the CNN special on the Dean campaign Sunday evening, I was watching my friends, at a place that still seems to me like somewhere I could just drive to tomorrow, as I did so many times. But my harsh brain tells me what my heart doesn’t want to admit, that there’s no one to welcome me and ask me to stay up late to do something for them, there at 60 Farrell St., So. Burlington, VT.

But Onward!

We need a framework for developing the next generation of organizing tools. It seems to me that, if we release everything into the public domain, this development work will qualify as an activity under the requirements of the 501(c)3 statute that governs charitable foundations. I know that Zack Rosen and Joe Trippi are separately considering forming such a foundation. However, these things can take time to form and staff up and have an operating organization that donors feel comfortable supporting. It would be far better to find an existing organization that can take this on immediately. If so, this is what they ought to be thinking about:

The Open Republic (“OR”)
A Clearinghouse for Political Action Software

Background

The Dean campaign galvanized the world by demonstrating that a community can be built around a campaign for change, and that such a community is more interested in giving money and time than politicians thought was possible.

With the acquiescence of Governor Dean, the many software developers and projects he inspired are gathering their forces and going to work for other candidates and movements.

Project Structure

I propose a simple structure that is capable of exemplary results due to the nature of political software writers in particular and of open source contributors in general.

Over the last year, political software writers have demonstrated their willingness to put other activities aside in order to make their contributions. Their idealism would have seemed unlikely if it hadn’t been demonstrated so broadly. They will respond to the need for a particular feature rapidly and will cooperate spontaneously with strangers to meet a deadline.

It’s well known that open source code contributors are motivated by the attention and credit they receive from the open source community.

Relying on those characteristics, it should be possible for OR to galvanize the political software space by praising great work, promoting its use, and by paying professionals to add to the body of political organizing tools.

A Three-Stage Process

Therefore, I propose a three-stage process as the operating mode for OR:

1. Identify and praise the currently available resources
2. Specify improvements and extensions to those resources:
   1. Software
   2. Documentation and users’ guides
   3. An OR web site that guides users in deploying the resources
3. Make cash grants for improvements to those resources

This structure will be most manageable if it is simple, so I suggest that each activity should be conducted by a small committee of volunteer experts, each committee meeting monthly. They may generate their own recommendations or they may hire contractors to do all or part of their work.

By this means, OR will maintain a current list of the best resources to quickly launch a campaign, whether it’s for a President, a Representative or for a general purpose such as campaign reform or health care. Jeff Jarvis suggested yesterday that Howard Stern is organizing a movement and would be a candidate for the kinds of tools OR would be promoting.

OR would maintain a current list of proposed improvements to its current recommendations, with RFPs seeking responses and grants outstanding, pending completion and acceptance.

OR would constantly review and accept or reject submittals in response to its contracting work.

All tools funded by OR would be released into the public domain under a best practices license to be determined. OR would encourage developers of political software to adopt such a license.

The Hard Part

I’ve made such a proposal to a candidate organization which was enthusiastically received until the issue of leadership came up. Surprisingly, the opportunity to have a positive effect on the American Experiment is not in itself enough to manifest the perfect leader for such an effort.

It had never occurred to me that I might be that person. I spoke with Doc, David Weinberger and John McCarthy about this, and they expressed their support by saying that of course I’m the right guy. Presumably, they’re easier on new hires than I ever was. David was kind enough to suggest that, if I didn’t see the fit, I needed to take a course on self-esteem. This led to the obvious banter about pots and kettles.

So I’d like to open the floor for comments, wondering if the OR approach seems practical and fundable, and if it’s an urgent enough project that I might lead the effort until the perfect candidate comes along.

8:32:31 PM    

Circumstance spares you, gentle reader, from my lengthy rants this week. I’m finishing a chapter for an upcoming O’Reilly book on emerging democracy, and doing some actual work to assist the separate but friendly efforts at DeanForAmerica and ChangeForAmerica to ensure that the spark ignited last year is not extinguished by the water pail which the advantaged class keeps handy for populist emergencies.

Meanwhile, here’s a quote from the cover story of the current issue of American Conservative magazine:

The tendency to hate, really hate, opposing politicians surely is not good for American democracy. It is not rational to hate George W. Bush, just as it was not rational to hate Bill Clinton. But after spending eight years hating Clinton, conservatives who complain about the Bush-haters appear to be hypocrites.

George W. Bush enjoys neither royal nor religious status that would place him beyond criticism. Whether or not he is a real conservative, he is no friend of limited, constitutional government. And for that the American people should be very, very angry.

I’ll get back to overloading your RSS feed next week. Of course my hiatus may be evidence that I have nothing to say when Doc is out of the country, feeding me material…

8:51:11 AM    

Archimedes famously said that if you gave him a long enough lever, he could lift the world. Well, it works both ways. Using the long lever arm of mass media, a tiny core of politically powerful people controls the rest of the population’s choices, economics and future.

Systems design is the study of how to balance inputs into and outputs from a dynamic process so that it optimally serves the needs of the highest possible number of users of the process. From a systems design standpoint, American politics is a disaster:

Last time, I suggested that there’s only a tiny sliver of the population zealous enough to be active in politics, and that it even takes a kind of zealotry to get out and vote. I don’t have the figures, but do any states have more than 1,000 full time activists? Sure, there are a lot of political hobbyists who will canvass occasionally or show up at a state convention and perform as directed, but by activists I mean those who live for or off of politics and do their party’s bidding whenever asked. My working hypothesis is that there are no more than 50,000 active political foot soldiers at any one time, less than.02% of Americans. Even if you think there are double or triple the number, the fraction is still vanishingly small.

In turn, those few activists are manipulated by a tiny political elite which is probably no more than .001% of the population (2,862 politicians, lobbyists, journalists and business leaders sounds about right for the political power elite in our enlightened Republic, don’t you agree?). Clearly, Americans aren’t chatting each other up to get out the vote, but rather responding to the unfolding media messages in the same passive way they might discuss episodes of Friends around the water cooler.

And, as Dave Winer often reminds us, it’s even worse than it appears. This tiny group of power brokers drives the agenda for a nation which the rest of the world depends upon for its very existence, in a protection-racket kind of way. This is a system that no conscientious systems architect would sign off on, but which most Americans meekly accept as how things have to be.

Paul Boutin points out in an enlightened Slate article today that attracting new voters is the secret sauce for any winning candidate, and that’s what the Dean campaign did well, though no one has the statistics to prove it. Dean’s coterie of new activists were an energizing force that establishment Democrats cynically shut down as fast as they could:

Recent polls showed Kerry and Bush at a dead heat. But it’s not so much a 50-50 split as 25-25—half the voting-age population has failed to show up in recent elections. Bringing in new voters—if you could find a way to do it—would swing an election much more easily than converting the people who already plan to cast their ballots for the other guy.

It’s this mechanism that the Dean campaign didn’t get quite right in time to empower its true believers to evangelize ever larger circles of new true believers. Next time, I’ll suggest (and demonstrate) that the meatspace evangelism failure may have been as much a web design fault as a political process breakdown.

12:24:18 PM    

I’m taking a break in Colorado for a week, half skiing and half family–just about a perfect mix. I’m jacked in at an Internet café in Breckenridge, where it’s about 50 degrees at 10 in the morning. We’re rooting for the snow that’s been forecast.

Meanwhile, I’m imagining a guild of developers loading democracy-friendly tools into the public domain. This is a movement with thousands of people ready to contribute, and just enough experience over the last year to know what a usable beta version should look like.

12:09:12 PM    

There’s a lot of buzz around the core players in the Dean campaign about where we go from here. This has some of the elements of any campaign dealing with its disappointment. However, the Dean threads are as active as ever, with 7,413 comments on the blog so far on Wednesday.

If nothing else, the Dean campaign has given every campaign the hope that the right mix of web services and online dialogue can open voter’s hearts and wallets.

Where we go seems to be to develop a set of tools even better than the Dean team put together and release thgese tools into the public domain for the benefit of every campaign from PTA President to US President. Although my vision is for tools that improve the character of governance, campaigns are the place to start, and only partly because that’s where the money is. The electoral cycle is to governance as the Krebs cycle is to biology: it’s the fuel that makes democracy work.

Political campaigns engage zealots who try to motivate partial zealots to vote a certain way. (Relative to the general disregard for politics and voting, one must be a partial zealot to vote and a real zealot to be a campaign activist.)

The required zealotry is a clue to the poor user experience of American politics. The people who know how to “do” politics today don’t see what’s wrong with the current system, in the same way that Unix geeks don’t see why more people can’t learn to live with a command line interface.

My many months of work with the Dean campaign convince me that our cynical and closed political system depends on its miserable user experience for its sway over our lives. There are probably other ways to improve politics, like better civics classes, public television, parents’ interest groups, responsible party leadership. But I and the people I know are limited to improving the user experience for people who might be better citizens, if they were just given the tools.

The Users we’re Designing For

There are many potential users for the Net-based tools I’m thinking of:

• Voters
• Politicians
• Election Officials
• Political Action Committees and 527 Organizations
• Citizens

That’s a much broader set of users than we’ve been thinking of in this area. In fact, the Dean Campaign and its Johnny-come-lately imitators were thinking only of a fraction of the voters, thosequalified and inclined to vote in a Democratic primary. So let’s start with the voters, which is the only thing the campaigns care about.

The Voter

While the customer for these open source tools is any campaign that wants to do things even better than the Dean campaign, their user is the potential voter and campaign donor-activist.The crucial design challenge is the user experience of a voter coming upon a candidate’s web site and discovering that there is a place for each voter’s voice in this campaign. The thing the campaigns have to do better is to solicit each voter’s input on the issues, not just to promote the horse race between two stylized candidates.

This is an inversion of the Dean model, where people could only discuss issues among themselves at Meetups and in blog comments, for there was no explicit means for voters to express their policy preferences in a way that could be aggregated as a coherent direction for the campaign. I always maintained that this is what the people wanted most from the campaign, and their admirable efforts would have been amplified if the issues had not been on the back burner.

The aggregation of explicit voter preferences is the secret sauce of open source politics. The politicians who embrace specific and authentic input from their constituents will be the ones to gain and hold office. It is the only counterweight to the ideologues who trash constituent messages they don’t want to hear.

It will be up to campaigns and their consultants to connote the sense that there’s something worth paying attention to on their site. Next time, I’ll suggest a grassroots-way to expand a core constituency.

11:38:03 PM    

In Henry IV, part 1, Shakespeare penned a brilliant outburst by the great warrior, Hotspur. As he stands bloody and exhausted from battle, a mincing nobleman demands that he immediately turn over his prisoners to be taken to the King. Hotspur’s later response to King Henry IV:

My liege, I did deny no prisoners.
But I remember, when the fight was done,
When I was dry with rage and extreme toil,
Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword,
Came there a certain lord, neat and trimly dressed,
Fresh as a bridegroom, and his chin new reaped
Showed like a stubble land at harvest home.
He was perfumèd like a milliner,
And twixt his finger and his thumb he held
A pouncet box, which ever and anon
He gave his nose, and took’t away again;
Who therewith angry, when it next came there,
Took it in snuff; and still he smiled and talked;
And as the soldiers bore dead bodies by,
He called them untaught knaves, unmannerly,
To bring a slovenly unhandsome corse
Betwixt the wind and his nobility.
With many holiday and lady terms
He questioned me, amongst the rest demanded
My prisoners in your majesty’s behalf.
I then, all smarting with my wounds being cold,
To be so pestered with a popingay,
Out of my grief and my impatience
Answered neglectingly, I know not what–
He should, or he should not; for he made me mad
To see him shine so brisk, and smell so sweet,
And talk so like a waiting gentlewoman
Of guns and drums and wounds — God save the mark! —
And telling me the sovereignest thing on earth
Was parmacity for an inward bruise,
And that it was great pity, so it was,
This villainous saltpetre should be digged
Out of the bowels of the harmless earth,
Which many a good fellow had destroyed
So cowardly, and but for these vile guns,
He would himself have been a soldier.
This bald unjointed chat of his, my lord,
I answered indirectly, as I said,
And I beseech you, let not his report
Come current for an accusation
Betwixt my love and your high majesty.

It sounds like any warrior’s disdain for those who benefit from battle but choose not to participate. It echoes my raging disregard for Lt. Bush, who enlisted at the same New Haven USAF recruiting office that I did, but three years later.

Bush and I received the same expensive pilot training, which obligated us to serve a specified period, as a pilot, to return the public’s investment in us. I trained with National Guard guys, and respected their participation and future role. But none of the kinds of people I trained with had any choice but to keep flying airplanes and keep taking flight physicals until they fulfilled their obligation.

In short, there are those who serve and those who do something else.

Shirking

Yesterday, Clay Shirky straightened us all out again in Dean and the Last Internet Campaign. I stipulate unreservedly that Clay Shirky is more qualified than I to comment on social software and on social movements. However, I cannot escape my sense that a culture needs to fully honor its heroes and do so for more than a news cycle. In this medium called the Web, designed to post and comment on scientific observations, should we not embrace the obvious and dismiss the superficial? Here’s the beginning of Shirky’s post:

I just re-read David Weinberger’s quotes from the Trippi speech last week, because something felt funny the first time I read it, and this time I found it, where Trippi says:

“We did a pretty damn good job of it. Given the Party rules, we should never have been able to get to where we were 3 weeks before Iowa: Ahead in the polls, etc. We did it without the Party. The American people did, using the tools provided by the Internet.”

The Dean campaign has been proof-of-concept for a number of novel political tools and tactics, and for that, their place in history is assured. However, Trippi comes this close to blaming the voters.

This is interesting. Clay Shirky isn’t part of Dean’s place in history. I’m pretty sure he never visited headquarters in Burlington or even on Lexington Ave. He didn’t attend the Digital Democracy Teach-In last week so he has no direct experience to report there either. What we have here is Clay Shirky’s musings on David Weinberger’s report of Joe Trippi’s speech.

Shirky’s diatribe against Dean’s Trippi’s historic campaign seems to be that the campaign played to the 600,000 Americans who signed up at the Dean site rather than to the Americans who had not yet registered. Fair enough. Here’s Clay’s conclusion:

So those of us watching Dean thinking “This is it — the campaign we’ve been waiting for” were, in a way, correct. This is it, or rather that was it, before Dean decided that he could run a populist campaign without the support of the populous. The big surprise, to me and to many of us, is how little it mattered. Though Trippi said “It’s all about money”, they blew through $40M to surprisingly little effect.

So there is a second piece of good news for democracy here, but it’s not the good news Trippi would have you believe. The good news is this: a campaign can use internet tools to help create extraordinary successes in fund raising and generating name recognition and getting good poll numbers, can even have its candidate anointed frontrunner before the first vote is cast, and all of that, taken together, is still not enough to get people to vote for a someone they don’t like.

Aha! There it is, the root of the outrage:

“This is it — the campaign we’ve been waiting for”

It took me a while to understand the love-hate relationship so many social software advocates have with the Dean boom-bust cycle. Having embraced the campaign early, they feel betrayed by its meatspace results. Since the campaign “failed” in winning a primary, they must either dismiss social software as a force, or savage those who try and “fail.”

They never suited up for the game, but feel qualified to judge it from the cheap seats. They play the smaller and safer pundit game, where expertise and wisdom is implied by the voice of profundity, uncompromised by the inconvenience of engagement. What would be wrong with “Hey, this and that worked great! Why don’t we work together on this other thing?”

It’s like the guys peddling books on getting rich. Why would anyone skilled at no-risk wealth bother selling books about it?

Trippi’s Honor

On Sunday night before his keynote, Joe stopped by our table for about an hour with Josh and Franz and Neil and me. Joe has a huge heart and passion for the work he started wit
h the Dean campaign. He was struggling with how he would communicate the miracle that was wrought by the people attracted to the Dean campaign. His mantra is that the Dean renaissance was a dotcom miracle, not a dotbomb, as you can hear directly at Doug Kay’s terrific IT Conversations site. He did not then nor does he yet comprehend how so many smart people see what happened.

Joe is amazingly open and humble and has anecdotes from decades of Presidential campaigns. He also has some serious technical chops. He was the energizing and intellectual force that made the possibility of Digital Democracy even coherent enough to have a name. When Tim O’Reilly asked me the best way to introduce him, I suggested that Joe is the Thomas Edison of the movement, whose accomplishments are undimmed by our collective failure to identify better filaments.

Tim O’Reilly knows what all of us do, that Digital Democracy was the most galvanizing topic of what may prove to be the most seminal conference O’Reilly has produced; and that without Joe Trippi, the most urgent topic this week in San Diego might have been something about secure WiFi or maybe military robots.

It was interesting to follow the IRC channel during Joe’s talk. It gave me a raging case of cognitive dissonance, as I struggled to reconcile my direct personal experience and what I was hearing from Joe’s mind and heart, compared to a self-destructive dialogue of experts lacking expertise.

Snatching Disappointment from the Jaws of Exuberance

Net-savvy techies and blogizens have a liberating message for the world: The Internet is the planet’s best hope for deliverance from incompetent and often conspiratorial media, political and corporate dinosaurs using entrenched power to stifle innovation, information and individual freedoms. This is the “Information wants to be free” cohort of our culture, and there can be no better thought space as a basis for third millenium values.

Clearly that was the dominant mindset at Etech–the people commenting on Joe Trippi’s description of the intersection of politics and the Internet as expressed by the Dean campaign.

The mystery was why so many of them, rather than listening to the were telling each other that they understood this problem so much better than Joe Trippi, and so dismissive of the best work yet done in this space.

The present and future leaders of a new movement dedicated to the Great American Restoration have been created because one transformational leader, win or lose, will have made a difference beyond words.

And win or lose — so must we.
                                                         — Joe Trippi

 

5:28:32 PM    

I’m settling into the chapter I’m writing for an upcoming O’Reilly book on Emergent Democracy. The title is “The Revolution Will be Engineered.” Obviously, my continuing focus is on design and tools and as little conjecture as possible. That’s too bad, because conjecture sells better than specificity.

There was a lot of conjecture this week around the tech of campaigning and governance: starting with the O’Reilly Digital Democracy Teach-In (DDTI) on Monday and continuing all week at the Emerging Tech conference. This high level of conjecture frustrated me since so much of it was just mistaken, with so little interest in listening to anyone who was close to the subject being discussed.

That phenomenon–disregarding the insights of those close to the problem in deference to one’s own provably mistaken impressions–deserves a book of its own. (Of course, that would be redundant. The disconnect between fact and myth has occupied most philosophers. La plus ça change, la plus le même chose. Roughly translated, “The more things change, the more the memes stay the same.”)

I hope to continue to develop my chapter here in public. This thinking out loud will be mercifully brief, since my deadline’s the end of this month.

“You’re such a Tool!”

OK, I confess I’m a tool. Or at least a tool lover, which many consider the same thing. This comes up because there was a backlash against tools at DDTI on Monday and its aftermath. This caught me and Joe Trippi, separately, off guard. Joe expressed his amazement candidly over drinks on Sunday night and in a more restrained version in his much-quoted keynote on Monday.

I’ve come to enjoy and admire Micah Sifry, especially after flying to San Diego with him and Franz Hartl of MusicforAmerica. Our conversations carry the undercurrent of tool-building vs. a sentiment that sounds to me like, “Forget about tools, everyone just needs to get smarter and better organized and more conscientious. Sheesh!” Here’s part of Micah’s DDTI post mortem:

   For all the intense discussion going on online and in the hallways about what the Dean campaign did or didn’t do right, and on how social software tools can empower people, I’m amazed by how little interaction this community seems to have with people who actually know something about social movements, political organizing and power analysis. Perhaps that’s a reflection of how new to politics so many of the people here seem to be, and that’s ok. After all, DeanforAmerica (my shorthand for the decision to try to run an “open-source”-style campaign, as opposed to Howard Dean the candidate for President) clearly inspired many people both in and outside of the hacking community and the A-list blogging community to get excited about personal political participation, and hopefully that will be a lasting thing.

    But people here talk like all that’s needed is better tools, and then people will pick them up and take back their country from the powers-that-be. There’s almost no sense of how hard organizing actually is, or why. Britt Blaser, who I’m getting to know and like a whole lot, is talking about “one-click politics,” as if mobilizing people for collective action might be made as easy as buying a book on Amazon. Last night at the open participant session on continuing the Dean campaign, someone, maybe Jon Lebkowski?, said something about how change can take place in an instant, as if it were simply a matter of spreading the right meme or something.

    Umm, sorry, but change is hard.

(Umm, sorry, but due to a CSS error, Micah’s blog is almost unreadable)

My phrase was “1-Click for politics”, not “One click politics”. There’s a world of significance in the conjunction. Amazon’s inappropriately patented means for charging and shipping your purchase with the stroke of a mouse hasn’t revolutionized online purchasing, but it may be the seminal tool (that word again) that defines the Amazon user experience. Amazon is to purchasing as DeanforAmerica is to politics.

User Experience vs. Experienced Users

None of us cedes our turf gracefully. “Or Logic” means that the existing experts must fight new ways of doing things in order to survive. Frankly, Micah, I think that’s what’s going on here. Instead, we have to embrace “And Logic,” whereby we add the new thinking to the old and thereby increase the odds of achieving the shared goal. That is the essence of invention.

Tools are all we have. Micah Sifry is a bona fide authority because of his political activism and his authorship of 3-going-on-4 books and a sheaf of articles. His experience and ideas are important whether or not they are published, but we only know they’re important because they’re published. When Micah looks at publishing, he sees a cultural phenomenon and I see a technical one dependent on specific tools.

Without recent technical contrivances, Micah Sifry has no voice.

We only benefit from Micah’s voice because publishing now allows authors to type their own books and e-mail their drafts to editors. Public Campaign, which Micah serves as Senior Analyst is just one of many organizations with a tiny physical presence and a profound virtual one. In short, Micah Sifry, who works mostly out of his home, is a creature of the virtual world, deploying the tools of virtual presence, spending money that’s an electronic fiction to educate bright kids in how to be more effective in a world which, because of emerging tools, will look nothing like the world Micah lives in and, compared to the world Micah was born into, is pure science fiction.

Regarding Micah’s broken blog: a fascinating example of the importance of tools is what happens when they break, as did Micah’s blog almost a week ago:

Apologies to anyone reading this blog who is having trouble with the margins (or the lack of same). I’ve got my ace designer Bryan Bell looking into the problem and hopefully we will have it fixed soon. I would have gotten that going sooner, but in the process of engaging Bryan’s help I managed to lose my password to get onto my own blog!

I’m writing a quick web report on the Digital Democracy Teach In for The Nation, and a much longer piece for the magazine that will incorporate conversations I’ve had here with all sorts of interesting people. (If you want to know who, check out my expanding blogroll…) I’m also committed to talking to people from the other side of this equation: political organizers and academics who study social movements. If you have any suggestions on other stuff I should read or people I should talk to, I’m all ears.

I know that Micah is excited by and committed to his blog. As a professional writer he know
s the value of his bully pulpit, unimpeded by editorial caprice or publishers’ misguided business plans. He’s even learning the mechanics of FTP and CSS and, mirabile dictu!, what those acronyms mean.

For now though, Micah’s blog is unreadable, since each paragraph runs unchecked across the page: about 5700 pixels wide as I write this. Unless he fixes it, his most dynamic expression of his valuable voice will be silenced.

Micah Sifry’s voice is more dependent on tools than the tools are dependent on him: they arbitrarily give and taketh away, yet he dismisses rather than embraces the tool-builders’ naiveté.

This is not a great way to stay in the loop as we the tool-builders fire up our forges to make the next generation of arrowheads for Micah and all the other marksmen clamoring for social justice.

7:40:23 AM    

The blogosphere is humming with the Dean post mortems, but the Dean people are giving money in record amounts. What’s going on here? This morning, as Jim Moore reports, Dean’s List received a message from the Guv:

The entire race has come down to this: we must win Wisconsin. We must launch our new television advertisement on Monday in the major markets in Wisconsin. To do that, I need your help to raise $700,000 by Sunday. Please contribute $200 today so that we can reserve the air time: http://www.deanforamerica.com/wisconsinad A Wisconsin bat went up at 2 this morning, and, as I write this, the Dean faithful have sent in $693,000 as of 11:15 pm. This is a live bat, so YMMV. Jim describes this as a perfect swarm and wonders what it means: Is the DeanforAmerica community transforming itself into a community that goes well-beyond its original mission to create multiple ways to make itself heard and to be powerful–using the web as centerpiece and platform. I think perhaps so.

More revealing is Jim’s description of how groups find their common rhythm:

What is going on?  Swarm power, emergence, something larger than ourselves.  Here is a fun thing to do: Take a large crowd–perhaps you are giving a speech–and ask them to clap together to an aligned beat.  But don’t give them a lead beat.  Just ask the crowd to find a beat, by paying attention to their neighbors, and syncing up as they can.  I’ve done this dozens of times, and the amazing thing is how fast a group can come together when it wants to.

The Dean community is coming together.  It is starting to experience a new level of emergence, of power.

The Dean community will make itself felt and heard at a new level.

Last summer, Doc asked my why people give money to the Dean campaign and the ready answer was that they’re buying hope, one month at a time. Today they’re buying hope, one ad at a time. Those of us most interested in how social networks form are trying to figure out why Dean can attract so much money but hasn’t received more votes. I’m more interested in how we can use this ideal laboratory, before the urgency dissolves in 9 months, to answer that question. The answer will be the rosetta stone of politics, whether or not it’s discovered in time to save the Dean candidacy.

Perfect Form

I suggest that the secret is to provide a way for the hive mind to grow its own relationships. We see this all the time in nature, whether it’s the insect hive, a nervous system growing its dendrites, or plants which spread by runners or roots, like strawberries or aspens. For about four months, I’ve been encouraging the Dean campaign to formalize what I call strawberry roots. Grassroots grow from individual seeds, sending a few blades out. Strawberry roots are planted by the runners that come from another clump.

Strawberries propagate by sending out runners. In special cases, like this one, the runners can be productive without putting down roots.

The metaphor is that it takes a gardener to plant grass, but a healthy strawberry bush can create many other productive clumps.

I suggest that the secret is to provide a way for the most dynamic political nodes to grow their own relationships.

With just a little structure, it’s probable that the Dean movement can operate self sufficiently yet with organizational forces that approach the efficiency of the Linux or Apache movements. That idea defies conventional wisdom, since open source projects typically need a central figure who brings the code to a point and who continues to lead and inspire the volunteer programmers. That way, the versions are reasonable and coherent.

But for political action, where successful techniques can be forked as desired and there’s a need for millions of actions but no need for a single code base, there may be only one criterion for successful organization. That would be something like the school telephone tree. Many organizations, and all schools, have a telephone tree, by which one family alerts 3-6 others to a snow day, and the message propagates rapidly, like DNS data across the Internet. The enabling technology for all these systems is the explicit connection between an originating node and a satellite node.

This structure may appear to be hierarchical but it’s actually chronological. The first parent in the calling tree is simply the first one to be assigned to a task that any parent is adequately skilled to do. The enabling tech? A POTS line and a calling list. Synchronized group clapping, says Dr. Moore, all you need is the will to clap. Or, in the NFL, merely the idea of doing the “Wave”.

Tim O’Reilly is the instigator of the Digital Democracy Teach-In on Monday (San Diego. Joe Trippi live. $100. You really should go). He describes the central dynamic of operating an ISP, using yet another biological metaphor:

During my tenure at UUNET, I described the real business as operating a giant Petri dish — we kept it warm, we pumped in nutrients, and we made it bigger when it filled up. And people paid us money to sit in the dish and see what happened.

Dishing the Movement

So what’s the ideal petri dish for a net-enabled political movement? Here’s an email I sent to Jim Moore late last night:

Why not try a “Draft Dean” approach? Allow the grassroots to take charge and to prove what they might about peer-to-peer outreach. Let them demonstrate that a pure grassroots effort can work this year, when the tools aren’t right yet, rather than waiting until 2006 or 2008.

In other words: a true end-to-end approach, based on total transparency, a hollowed-out campaign. Expose the budget to the people and ask them to give what they want on an a la carte basis. Let them decide if we want state offices, how many programmers to pay, etc.

…In the 1986 AFC final, with a couple minutes to play, Denver was behind 20-13, on their own 5 yard line. Dan Reeves sent in the play with a lineman, who kneeled in the huddle, looked up and said, “Now we got ’em where we want ’em!” Everybody breaks up laughing, stunning the Browns’ defense and loosening up the Broncos. 15 plays later, Denver scored, sending the game into overtime, and winning with a field goal.

Get creative. Make a big deal announcement that’s so creative, humorous and endearing that we glimpse an entertaining way out of this.

I suggested today that we ought to keep a fundraising graph up all the time, showing upcoming uses of funds, inviting just-in-time sources of funds. Blogfo
rAmerica could track the contributions to Kerry’s campaign and invite the Deansters to raise, say, 125% of Kerry’s funds, as a way of demonstrating where the passion lies.

In other words, perhaps the function of “the Campaign” is becoming more of a support function, like accounting, ad placement, data management, shipping & receiving and logistical support. The real sales and operational arm of the real campaign may have to migrate out to the strawberry roots, as Zephyr has been telling us all along.

11:38:08 PM    

My mentor Howard Bloom teaches that there is a uniform pattern to behaviors, and they extend from the lowest to the highest level of species and that they really aren’t conscious, even though they seem like it.

That’s why I agree with the direction of Chris Lydon‘s latest post, but I’m unwilling to impute consciousness to the lurching media beast as he does:

Big Media came out of its cave to beat Dean over the head with Kerry, and that that this is a Problem.  This was not critical journalism at work, this was an industrial offensive from a declining sector of the information and intelligence business, a corporatized, overconcentrated, underventilated giant that feels itself threatened.  The newsmag headlines, the network cliches about “anger,” the emptiness of the “electability” standard (which newsmags giveth and taketh away, without ever having to show evidence) and that completely mindless, truly Goebbels-esque repetition of the scream tape–all the manipulated frenzy of the last three weeks smacked of a fiercely anti-democratic bullying that I find personally, professionally and publicly offensive.  I confess some naivete here. 

I am surprised the old devils tried it; I am surprised that they got away with it.

I’m making a fine distinction here, and don’t want to harp on it, but it may be useful to see the difference between purpose and outcome. I don’t perceive any conspiracy or even intention by the media to “get” my man Howard Dean or to suppress the Internet’s grand promise.

Just as we don’t need to believe in a watchmaker designing life forms to appreciate how biology has evolved unconsciously (well, some of us), neither do we need to impute purpose to the outcomes which the media produces. Understanding the biological basis of memes is useful, especially when you remember that the man who coined the term, Richard Dawkins, is a geneticist. So I don’t detect a grand conspiracy behind most actions of the Meme Machine.

Jay Rosen seems to say to me that the individuals in the press are like any knowledge worker, generating words and insinuations mostly to serve their career needs and ambitions. Writers and talking heads and editors and publishers are playing to their individual boss first and to their audience second. That’s just survival of the fittest, in a culture where attention is the gold standard of power and possibility.

In the universal battle for attention,

• The catchiest memes win
• The most prolific producers of catchy memes win
• Outlets employing the most prolific producers of catchy memes win

I’m no Jay Rosen, but I’m confident in that universality of behavior in all fields, including the press.

But something must happen when you get tenure. Otherwise how can we explain Wolf Blitzer and Tim Russert? Might a cynical agenda be on the mind of the real king-makers?

The Tim Russert Problem

My inclination to avoid labeling the press as malevolent is harder to justify in the case of Tim Russert. This morning on Meet the Press, he challenged Howard Dean:

When I was in Iowa, I read a letter to the editor in the Des Moines Register, which caught my attention. And this is what it says: “Now I know how Howard Dean gets his exercise while he’s on the campaign trail. He drops to his knees to beg Washington insiders to endorse him, and then he jumps up to insult them. I’m guessing he does about 20 repetitions of that a day.”.

Russert was reading from one of 53 letters the Register published on Jan. 18 – presumably of 2,000 or so letters over the six weeks prior to the caucus. By what archery is Russert able to retrieve that writer’s cynicism out of so many?

But it gets better. If you Google the letter writer’s name, Jim Bootz, the 3rd item returned reveals Bootz’ day job: Minnesota State Director of . . . wait for it! . . . the John Kerry campaign!

You wouldn’t make this stuff up.

FWIW, Bootz’ planted letter immediately followed this one:

It’s time for a Vermonter in the White House. Someone who will return America to the values that our forebears institutionalized as they created one country united by common interests and beliefs. As a Vermont resident of 35 years, married to a fifth-generation Vermonter whose family was cared for by Dr. Howard Dean, I’ve been thinking about what those core values are and how I have seen Dean live them out as governor. The most important value we New Englanders hold dear is integrity. When I was head of a small Vermont school, my 7th-grade students asked Governor Dean questions like, “Have you ever told a lie?” He answered honestly and thoughtfully (yes, he has told lies). Over the years I have come to trust Dean’s word and his judgment. If he is elected president, he will bring the values of rural Vermont – and of the heartland of America – to the most important elected office in these United States.
Harry Chaucer
Castleton, Vt.

But perhaps Mr. Chaucer’s a plant also. Google says he’s the chair of the Education Department at Castleton State College. Maybe he’s as biased as Kerry’s patsy, you never know. Surely Russert is doing his best to separate the wheat from the chaff for those of us who depend on his objectivity.

Or maybe Howard Dean never should have said that he wanted to break up the media.

2:13:14 AM    

Clay Shirky responded by email today to my pushback on his important Many 2 Many post, Is Social Software Bad for the Dean Campaign?

Britt, you say “Let’s spend some cycles on the answers, not on sounding like an expert.”

My apologies for the snarky comment, Clay. Your post intersected with my peeve-of-the-week on the chorus of doomsayers having witnessed the first mile of a marathon, projecting the results on little evidence with a pundit-like urgency. As my man Dean might say, we can do better than that.

Before we spend those cycles on answers, maybe we oughta spend some on questions.

The interesting thing about politics is that it goes from theological to phenomenological in an instant, and the phenomenology of a presidential race is voter turnout. I think you’ve posted a good description of the campaign as it existed a week ago Monday morning, but by a week ago Monday evening, any analysis of the campaign had to factor in the Iowa loss.

Not only did Dean fail to win, eviscerating the inevitability story, and not only did he fail to come in second, he came in a distant third, getting half of Kerry’s numbers, 14 points behind *Edwards*, and only 8 points ahead of a guy who dropped out of the race.

So while the story of politics based on the engagement of the volunteers is interesting, if it doesn’t get people to the polls, it won’t amount to much in the short term.

Of course voter turnout is the point of the campaign. The question to ask is whether there’s a social network around the Dean campaign that can learn how to improve its methods and execution and deliver more votes starting next week in the states that are statistically significant, unlike Iowa and New Hampshire. Clay’s open-ended question in Many 2 Many asked if social software had been bad for the Dean campaign. That’s a striking question from Clay, who believes strongly in the promise of social software.

My point is the counterpoint: Dean doesn’t have too much social software, he’s got not quite enough. It’s obvious that only social software got him here. If the network learns how to act locally better, and if enough people in each state are attracted to his outsider message, then Clay’s concerns are the kind you have about beta software that’s almost right, not whether software is worth developing.

Clay continues:

Standard political analysis could explain a strong second place showing by Dean, but seeing him come in a distant third suggests to me that something more structural is at work. Dean has obviously unleashed a powerful new set of forces, but his use of them has not translated into votes, and the enormity of the gap between perception and reality suggests something other than a few swing voters changing their minds.

So while the campaign may be terrific at the “issues-based emails and letters” you describe in your post, its been third-place at getting votes. I wonder why that is, and your response does little to answer that question, which is, after all, the only one that will determine whether Dean becomes the Democratic nominee.

Then what should we make of Dean’s strong-enough field-defining second place finish in New Hampshire? Is the social network learning? Was he just the lucky Governor  from next door? Does that mean Clay will now retract his dismissal of of Dean’s Iowa performance?

Running the Numbers

Despite the pundits’ glee at having a horse race to sell, Kerry picked up just 6 more delegates than Dean did tonight: 14 to 8. This reduces Dean’s delegate lead over Kerry from 25 to 19. What’s that? Dean’s delegate lead? WTF?

Yes, Dean’s lead. Because of early commitments by Democratic luminaries called “super delegates”, Dean remains ahead, according to CNN, 115 delegates to 96.

Larry King and Bob Dole and Bob Woodward on CNN just now agreed to the jaw-dropping revelation that New Hampshire’s 27 delegates don’t even budge the needle, being just 1-1/2% of the 2,162 delegates needed to win the nomination. They also noted that Jimmy Carter was the last Democrat to win New Hampshire and the Presidency.

Earlier, someone noted that the last senator to win the Presidency was JFK, who only made it because his dad and Richard Daley bought the Iowa vote. Before that, you’ve got to look back a century for a senator becoming President. Governors routinely win the Presidency.

But none of that matters. Let’s stipulate that deference among true believers when approaching voters is hugely important. The Iowa/New Hampshire bounce for Kerry is hugely important. Politics is perception, and there’s plenty of perception to go around.

But also, this is still a mediafest and an election is about votes. A marathoner runs on glucose and a campaign runs on money. Only Howard Dean and John Kerry are allowed by law to campaign during the critical June-September period. That’s because they are not limited by the Federal Campaign limitations. (In 2000, Al Gore was even prevented from even driving in public after he spent the matching funds, since that was construed as spending gas money on campaigning.)

So Dean may or may not inspire his base to renew their vows, pony up more bucks and take the country back

The reason the campaign would be foolish to give up on social software is that it stands a much better chance of making it work than does Friendster or the others. Winning the Presidency is a lot more interesting project than triggering automatic emails to people who don’t want them.

We Netizens believe that blogs and more directed forms of social software have the potential to free us from the assaults of traditional media. Clay’s point is an important caution but it does not dissuade me from the wisdom of promoting working code and frequent revisions.

I believe there is some combination of message, UI, interactivity and coalescing social memes that can attract millions of people to the high-probability candidate – a centrist governor with the most registered supporters and donors and a receptive pool of fast-learning, highly connected people listening for a message galvanizing enough to move them.

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Some Figures

At the JFK School of Government, the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy is conducting the Vanishing Voter Project. Their Voter Involvement Index measures, well, voter involvement. You can almost hear their exasperation that the nation is so focused on what is, essentially, the New Hampshire beauty contest for 27 delegates out of 4,315 (obviously, the same applies to Iowa’s 45 delegates):

In the eyes of Americans outside the state, New Hampshire’s presidential primary is more than just a critical first test of the candidates’ support. It is
seen as a decisive contest in the allocation of delegates to the national party conventions. Although the New Hampshire primary selects only about 1% of the delegates, Americans think the total is much larger. When asked in the weekly Shorenstein Center national poll whether New Hampshire selects 25%, 10%, 5%, or 1% of the national convention delegates, only one in eight respondents said 1%. More than three times as many picked a higher figure, and 14% even claimed that New Hampshire selects 25% of the convention delegates.

“This is an indication that the primary system, as currently structured, is simply too complex for most people to understand,” says Marvin Kalb, co-director of the Vanishing Voter Project for which the poll was conducted. “Too many Americans exaggerate New Hampshire’s importance and role.”

The inflated perception of New Hampshire stems from the enormous attention that its first-in-the nation primary receives from candidates and the news media. In recent presidential elections, no primary has received as much national news coverage as New Hampshire’s, and the pattern is unlikely to change this year.

12:33:35 AM