Author: brittblaser

OK, the system is flexing, both visibly and not. Joe Trippi, the man who planted the seed, is out and Roy Neel will now try to grow it.

I assume they’ll let me retain my corner office (corner of a folding table in the volunteer bullpen), but I’ll let you know in a couple of weeks. This should make the Digital Democracy Teach-In on Feb. 9 even more interesting. For starters, Trippi should come as the patron saint (along with co-saint Joi)

People seem to be looking for insiders to comment on this, and Jim Moore said a lot about this transition just before the announcement, perhaps preparing us for it. Jim’s point is that the campaign has in many respects been about its momentum rather than its accomplishments.

Back in the dotcom days, there was an awful lot of “momentum investing” where a stock was seen as valuable because of its rate of gain in value.  Sort of like being famous for being well-known.

The Dean campaign is no longer a momentum play.  Momentum investors are going to go toward Kerry, or stay with the ultimate momentum stock, George W. Bush. 

The Dean campaign, meanwhile, is now either going to become a solid contributor to our political landscape and society–bringing real value and a return to investors who want to make a difference, or the campaign will wither away.

Pretty candid words from a Dean insider who happens to blog.

The marketplace of political ideas is the fastest moving marketplace in which I have ever personally participated.  This week, this day, feels different from last week, and from yesterday.  Organizational learning is paramount.

So what does this mean for the Dean campaign? We have been criticised of late by our supporters for not telling the news, bad as well as good.  Supporters feel betrayed when they are told things are fine, and then find out otherwise when the votes come in.  “We could have helped” they say in distress, “but you didn’t really ask us!”

Truth and learning is vital–as an organization and as an extended community.  Learning must be built into our values, our practices, and our information and Internet systems.  We need to get the feedback going with our marketplace–a marketplace that truly wants us to exist, and has many many ways to help.

Postmorteming

There’s been a lot of back and forth about what to do and what Dean’s non-winning streak means. Today, Mitch posted some of the stuff he’s been sending to an ad hoc email group formed around Clay Shirky‘s Many 2 Many post on the possible failures of social software and my responses. It’s led Mitch to wonder where the Dean effort might go from here:

Here’s a crazy thought: Could the widespread discussion of the Dean campaign’s current challenges produce a retooling of its software (both the code and the ideas in people’s heads) fast enough to yield an astonishing turnaround that out-turnarounds John Kerry? Not if Dean and camp are defensive about the critiques and refuse to internalize them. If it is true that no corporation can access all the intelligence in the world if it is closed off from the world, it is certainly true that a campaign that sees criticism of its strategy as an attack on the candidate will grow dumber by the minute.

Could the Dean campaign turn on a dime, like Microsoft reacting to the Web browser or Roosevelt’s America, which quadrupled production capacity of planes and ships to win World War II?

Mitch also recalls a discussion he and Doc and I held in Portland last summer (I’ve reversed these graphs for flow):

Last summer, Britt, Doc and I were sitting talking at Powell’s Books in Portland about the Dean campaign. I said I wanted to have a real impact on the campaign, which I think might have been taken as meaning that I wanted to run or be a top advisor to the campaign, but my point was that I wanted to see the campaign take me seriously enough as an individual citizen to argue with me. That’s clued. As a creator of publications and events, I can say with authority that this can be done in a very efficient manner, but when I pointed out this idea, it was ignored by the campaign. They weren’t interested, because they had completely hacked the fund-raising mechanism, which felt like enough. It wasn’t.

Engagement means arguing with, convincing and compromising with your constituency. The Dean system, which emphasized bottom-up organization of a network, but top-down delivery of policy (through a system of small advisory groups that presented the candidate with policies that, once approved, were unveiled to the electorate), remained relatively aloof from the individual voter. Britt may not see it that way, but he was involved day-to-day as a true believer. That’s a great thing.

At our meeting in Portland I described my imminent Steal this Campaign post, a meme whose time may just now be ripe for the picking. I learned a long time ago to listen carefully whenever Mitch Ratcliffe speaks. But I’ve also learned that a trusted observer on the ground is worth a squadron full of conjecturers.

The real reason is far more simple. One thing that’s not obvious from out here is that the campaign is not just some half-assed pickup game. It’s run by real pros with decades of service, who share the values and mutual respect with the programmers and web designers.

Scaling Challenge

The campaign grew by a half million registered users in about 5 months. Simultaneously, it was hiring staff and adding field offices in about 15 states.  Simultaneously, it was creating an entirely new software space, with most of it built by volunteers or underpaid virtual volunteers working even harder than in startups, and building tools in response to a fast moving target market that had never existed before. Jim Moore is correct when he tells us (above) that The marketplace of political ideas is the fastest moving marketplace in which I have ever personally participated. Jim’s been a world-class consultant for a long time. My limited experience tracks his, and yes, I’ve stayed up all night with the troops to finish before the trade show opens.

Everyone knew the field staff was vital and needed primary resources. Everyone also knew that we should do whatever could be done to have a perfect user interface on the software side, but the resources had to go to the field first. Life is choices. Mitch continues:

Now, given that the system as it is designed now has failed to produce a campaign win
, what needs to be improved? I think I’ve made my ideas clear: Build for engagement. Debate with your own supporters and by converting them to your opinions when you are right and adopting theirs when they are or compromising when you can to extend your coalition to create an enduring movement that will get people out on the streets and to the polls. If not this year, then next time. Better, do it for another candidate–there is a political eternity between now and November.

Mitch repeats what many have said. “Take the time to listen; don’t ignore my ideas.”

News flash, gang, the campaign ignores my ideas too, and I’m there a week a month. (I’m not as smart as Mitch, but I have my moments.) It also ignores most staff ideas, from a better idea pool better than any you can imagine.

There is simply no time to listen and, like any company, most ideas from the team itself are not acted on, even if they’re discussed. I sincerely believe that Mitch does have much to offer, and I’m pleased to be writing a chapter in an O’Reilly book that Mitch and Jon Lebkowsky are putting together. But without putting his fanny in a seat up there, his ideas cannot be appreciated.

We Have Met the Campaign and It is Us

Joe Trippi, R.I.P., said it best: The campaign’s out here, not in there.

Mitch does have the experience, knowledge and skills to hatch a great plan, but he needs to tell us about it and ask us to help shape the plan, scope it, resource it and make it work. So do Clay and Dave and Micah Sifry and Joi and Ben and Doc and Weinberger and all of us. And me, with earlier commitment and better access and absolutely no real results so far.

The failure of “the campaign” to do all the right things is our collective failure out here to generate, vet and deploy a superior expression of the social software that Clay feels has hurt the Dean effort. We have far more resources and ingenuity than the campaign, and we’re free from the obligation to wait for permission, which will be even harder to receive, for a while, even if Roy Neel is the answer to everyone’s prayers.

And Logic, Not Or

Could the Dean campaign turn on a dime, like Microsoft reacting to the Web browser or Roosevelt’s America, which quadrupled production capacity of planes and ships to win World War II?
                                                    — Mitch Ratcliffe

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
                                                    — Margaret Mead

If we pool our resources and find our own inspiration we can combine our strengths as a model for the future. We can invent the next America starting now, bolstered by how far the Dean campaign has come, not despairing over its interrupted crescendo. There’s nothing missing from the equation except a declaration we make, writ large so that King George will not need his spectacles to perceive it.

In doing so, we’d combine our strengths rather than piling on our mutual detractions.

The Dean turnaround is imminent, inevitable and overwhelming with simply our commitment to make it so. That commitment will succeed, staffed by so many smart, committed people. It’s time, money, brains and long hours. It’s deploying the capital we’ve sunk into the extra bedroom for these wonderful machines and immense copper pipes and glowing frames of shared enlightenment before us.

The will, commitment and follow-through are the kind of hero’s journey Joseph Campbell described, Luke’s force and Neo’s skills. It will take us as much courage as any Lord of any Ring in any age, even though it’s not physical. Trust me: what looks epic later is just a mental leap at the right moment.

The planet is watching and wondering why we’re waiting. The people at Davos last week can’t do what we can – just ask Joi and Jay and Loïc. And if we social software designers start, the world will never be the same.

Or we can just keep dissecting what went wrong.

Shakespeare said it better, but mythic warriors never had such a bold challenge with such an unforeseen outcome as we can work, simply by deciding to.

This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

6:30:49 PM    

Doc responded kindly to my Punditocracy post with his Democracy vs. Crockracy riff, and perhaps not only because he was our guest this week. We had, as he suggested, a swell time. (I use these archaic expressions purposely. They seem charming enough to be worth repeating, and perhaps resonant with our deeper, archaic selves).

If my point last time was a caution against certainty in the presence of inconclusiveness, I’d like to encourage each of us to embrace and extend that restraint by modeling another archaic virtue: commitment.

Around the core of each movement, there’s a less committed interest group attracted by the movement but not committed to it. The old saying about bacon and eggs is that the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.

Each of us should be aware of whether we are committed or involved. Both are OK, but commitment seems a little more scary and a lot more fun.

To paraphrase Clint Eastwood: If there’s something we believe in, we have to ask ourselves if we’re committed to our belief or do we feel lucky. If you believe in luck, then you don’t need commitment, since surely everything will turn out just great. If you’re a fan of civil liberties and responsible government, our collective superficiality during the 2000 election may convince you that luck isn’t always on your side.

Nothing happens without commitment. Heartfelt commitment seems Capraesque, more common in midwestern and New England communities.

In an election campaign, the direction of the energy seems important. If the individuals are committed, then they are sending their energy to the candidate and are a producer of the result – of democracy, if you will. If the individual is not committed but merely being entertained by the involvement, the energy is flowing the other way. In politics as in life, it’s more energizing to give energy than to feed off it. Or, as Margaret Mead famously advised:

“Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Early Mourning Lite

Doc’s got lots of fodder for me today, as he points to Micah Sifry’s lament for what Micah sees as a failed Dean campaign. My last post about creeping punditocracy was inspired by a visit Doc and I had with Micah, when he laid out verbally what became his Mourning Dean’s Promise post. I’m infatuated with Micah’s skills and sensibilities but I feel he’s giving up on Dean even though he’s actually ahead in the delegate count due to commitments made by so-called “super-delegates.”

The evidence is that Mrs. Sifry didn’t raise any dummies, so I’m looking forward to a resolution of the commitment/involvement dichotomy, as we fly to the Digital Democracy Teach-in together in two weeks.

Bigness and Badness

In responding to Micah’s points, and sharpening his own criticism of what I call the Bush kleptocracy but he never would, Doc recalled our conversation driving back from Vermont. He expressed in his post, as he had on our trip, his distaste for corporate-bashers.

I responded that there seems to be something about the corporate form that allows a kind of economic metastatic process that eats up adjacent life forms.

For about an hour we worked (I thought) toward central ground. Today, in New mourn or new morn, he lumps me in with the corporate bashers whose sentiments I admire but whose proposed remedies seem just silly.

I thought we reached agreement that the corporate charter is simply a legal mechanism, of no great significance except for its nurturance of passive capital by shielding investors from liability. Now that was a brilliant invention.

We seemed to agree that larger organizations, whether companies or churches or governments, seem to behave more badly the bigger they get. But size is not the direct problem. There are marvelous organizations with thousands of people – Doc cited Johnson & Johnson, which loses money on bandages because it’s their mission to make sure that everyone who needs one has one. But there are also small organizations which bend every rule and monopolize their market space using egregious measures.

No, it’s not size or the presence of a corporate charter that transforms an organization into an unresponsive, ruthless force. That’s about as far as I we got, I think, driving along the western shore of Lake George.

Upon reflection, I think I do perceive a fundamental element of the corporate form that allows an organization, if so inclined, to behave in ways that all but a neocon would describe as sociopathic. That element is the fungibility of a corporate life form, which can be bought and sold at will, for whatever reason. Coupled with the extreme malleability of employees with a mortgage and college-bound kids, a corporation has little in common with its customers, its natural environment or its individual component cells – its employees. That makes it a very strange amalgam, because a successful one like Microsoft and Wal-Mart can accumulate and deploy assets so fast that it behaves precisely like a metastatic tumor in its host, the larger economy.

The Tipping Point

And yet we have the example of Doc’s former client, Johnson & Johnson, where the employees speak specifically of the teachings of Mr. Johnson, and continue to sell Band-Aids at a loss.

I think the tipping point for any organization comes when its mission is no longer what it does but becomes what it is. When its actions are about growing (greed), or not shrinking (fear), then its actions have abandoned the compass that the founder gave it, and has gone over to the dark side of the corporate force. I get that feeling when I see Gateway and Dell selling TVs.

Doc likes to tell the story of Steve Jobs remark when describing what he doesn’t like about Microsoft: “They have no taste.” Apple without Steve Jobs drifted slowly as its central nervous system lost the Jobs and Woz DNA, and became irrelevant. Doc feels that Wal-Mart, while clearly not adrift, was transformed on the day that Sam Walton died.

(The Apple experience is almost a corporate clinical trial, where good practice says that you have to change an input and see the effect, then reverse the effect by negating the change. When Jobs returned to Apple, Shazam!)

So I suggest again to Doc that corporations can never escape their core problem: The founders always die.

12:05:25 AM    comment [commentCounter (257)]

There’s yet another piece of conventional wisdom developing. Today Clay Shirky said it succinctly: Is social software bad for the Dean campaign?

Finally, when Dean (and Trippi and Teachout and Rosen) came along, we thought “This is it – these are the people finally making it happen!” And in a way they are, by providing the model – all top 3 finishers in Iowa use MeetUp, and they all have weblogs. But the Dean campaign used those things organically, while everyone else is playing catchup. And many of us (self very much included) thought that the inorganic adoption of social tools by Kerry, Clark, et al left them at a disadvantage.

Now, though, I’m not so sure. Maybe the adoption of those tools by a traditional campaign is a better way to fuse of 21st century organizing and 19th century “Get out the Vote” efforts. This would be especially true if these tools, used on their own, risk creating a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that doesn’t translate to driving down to the polls in freezing weather.

As Clay says, the Dean campaign started delighting and amazing us less than a year ago, in a crescendo of overdue good sense, impeccable candidate credentials and unprecedented cluefulness. Its people and money rocket started taking fire from 3 quadrants late last year and landed safely but damaged a week ago. Less than a week later, Clay reconsiders and compares the Dean people to some stoners he once saw grooving in a car:

When I was 19, I remember seeing a bunch of guys in a parking lot in New Jersey absolutely rocking out to Twisted Sister at top volume, “Oh we’re not gonna take it, No, we ain’t gonna take it, Oh we’re not gonna take it anymo-o-o-o-ore” and thinking the song was using up the energy that would otherwise go into rebellion.

Just rocking out to Twisted Sister so hard, and feeling so good about it, made those guys feel like they’d already stood up to The Man, making it less likely that they would actually do so in the real world, when the time came. And I’m wondering if the Dean campaign has been singing a version of that song, or, rather, I’m wondering if the bottom-up tools they’ve been using have been helping their supporters sing that song to each other.

I’m not clear how 3,500 people going to Iowa is the opposite of being proactive. Does he think those people are passively going to other states to avoid the hassle of voting in their home precinct? New Yorkers like Clay and me like to ridicule others for not being sharp or driven or hard-working, but I’m missing this one.

Betrayal?

What’s really at work here is a sense of treason and loss. Some Netizens seem to feel betrayed by the Dean campaign since it isn’t fulfilling a Jongian dream of a zipless victory. The Dean campaign may have violated some followers’ tender sensibilities by starting strong but finishing 3rd in the only “primary” that isn’t actually a vote but rather a get-together where older people sit around and debate candidates over bean salad. Surely this means that the best-financed and populated campaign is doomed to failure in every other state where people actually vote behind a curtain rather than a coffee cup.

We fantasize that bloggers – especially the Power Law bloggers like Clay Shirky – are leading edge and visionary. But this feels like criticizing Edison for the flaming filaments or Wilbur and Orville for failed airfoils.

Let’s get a grip, people! The Dean campaign is as close as we’re going to get to one that conforms to the values we’ve been fantasizing since 0 BC (Blogging Commenced). After pining for an Internet-based solution to the old political order, are we going to cut and run at the first hint of a setback?

The more insightful position might be to ridicule the Deaniacs for not being sophisticated about the real nature of campaigns as Tom Steinberg comments:

This supports a theme I’ve been banging on about for a while now, the idea that ‘politics as usual’ is not sclerotic and ossified, but is in fact a fine tuned, turbo injected, iteratively refined wonder-machine powered by The Message. The battle may be New Tech vs Old Tech, but the Old Tech is actually incredibly good at doing what counts – getting enough people out to win elections. When Old Tech starts getting challenged by New we shouldn’t be surprised if the New Tech adoptees have problems – they’re up against The Message, a prize fighter which has won every major political bout for thirty years. This isn’t to say that it can’t win, just that the Old Tech approach is still one hell of a fighter, and we’ll need more than a messianic faith in emergence to beat it.

But that still rings hollow. Is the Old Tech “good at getting enough people out to win elections”? The larger consensus is that there’s not enough interest in politics, precisely because the old tech – broadcast – can’t get people excited about the process. The evidence is that only the New Tech is motivating people, as smallbrain points out:

Iowa – it is important to not confuse swings of public opinion with a lack of organization. As organized as Dean was, the campaign put thousands of activists on the ground from all around the country. Without the social software, none of that would have happened. Those people weren’t deterred from action. And we should really not ignore the significant organization and recruiting that was made possible by his social net.

Granted, Jim Moore points out that the campaign “lost” 15,000 caucusers on the actual night. That doesn’t speak well for the organizing success, but take a look at the thousands of letters sent by supporters, the number of calls made and doors knocked upon. And then think of where Dean was at this time in 2003. Clearly FAR more action was generated by the social network than was lost at the end – after all, the polls predicted Dean was losing ground, and caucuses are notoriously difficult to deal with, as voters can be persuaded or picked off due to the 15% viability requirement.

(FWIW, when the dust settles and the skeptics learn the real story behind those 15,000 missing caucus-goers, the skeptics will understand far better what a transient and capricious matter the Iowa stumble was. We can discuss it over champagne at the Inaugural Ball.)

The Old New Activists

I’ve never been active in politics before, but I’m taking the year off because I represent the Internet Wing of the Democratic Party, and frankly, my
dear, I don’t give a fuck about the Democratic Party.

When I spend my 16 hour days up in Burlington, paying dearly for the privilege of doing so, I’m surrounded by people 14-80 who’ve never worked on a campaign before, communicating with about 2/3 million people who’ve never “joined” a campaign who are sending issues-based emails and letters – about 3,000 per day, which the volunteers dutifully answer as fast as they can. I sit with Wayne and Tommy and Joe in the Policy department, discussing policy more than blogging and marvel at something I thought only happens in corny movies.

During the big December snow, Halley was up in Burlington with us. We got a lot done, but we had a lot of fun, too, attending the Christmans party and walking Doc around the halls and introducing him to Joe Trippi and the rest of the gang. At the time, she told me a story about one of the volunteers, Laurie, who had such a deep and personal debt to Governor Dean that it brought tears to Halley’s eyes, but she thought it too private to blog. Making conversation, Halley had asked Laurie why she was stuffing envelopes. It’s simple, Laurie started, “Governor Dean saved my life.”

Tonight, Laurie Hammond bravely told her story on the Dean Blog. Don’t pay any attention to Clay or me or Tom Steinberg or smallbrain, or to Hammersley who pointed me to Clay’s second thoughts. Read Laurie’s story to keep all this in perspective and glimpse what’s really at stake here.

Then check out Halley’s pointer to Laurie’s story, and then Halley’s This Isn’t a Political Campaign, a post she shelved last December. Maybe because it seemed just a little too real.

Yeah. We pundit wannabes wouldn’t want to get too real.

If you blog it and you know it clap your hands!

As bloggers, we’re perfectly equipped to address politics as a web app design challenge, not an obligation to mimic the pundits’ sophisticated sophistry. This is the Internet and we’re supposed to know what to do with it. Let’s spend some cycles on the answers, not on sounding like a an expert.

At a rally today at Phillips Exeter Academy, Howard Dean closed with a lesson he learned at 17 that I prefer to Clay Shirky’s at 19:

It’s like when I was 17. It took us 6 years to get rid of two Presidents to get us out of Viet Nam – a war we didn’t belong in. Now you’ve got the Internet, you oughta be able to do it in 6 months. I’ll see you tomorrow.

The man has spoken. Excuse me, I’ve gotta get back to work on mydeanpeople.com.

11:17:52 PM    

It’s hard to know if we’re at the twilight of Broadcast Politics, but it’s interesting that so many of us feel we need to sound like the talking heads on TV.

The characteristic of PunditSpeak is certainty in the presence of open issues and single mindedness when confronting complexity. Nuance is reduced to serial certainty.

There are two kinds of people who have no knowledge of what the outcome will be: people who are paid to be expert and people in their audience.

It’s laughable when the pundits have convictions about the unknowable.
It’s kind of sad when we the audience mimic their uninformed confidence.

That’s why I was struck by the explosion of certainty about why Dr. Dean didn’t sweep the field in Iowa and how he’d do from here out.

The Illusion of Control

Howard Bloom, my reliable seer into human behavior, teaches us a lot about our all-too-human need for control. Apparently, it’s not control we seek, but just enough of an illusion of control and hence of a reliable future. A reliable future does not seem to require a lock-in. Rather it depends on a shred of plausibility. People buy lottery tickets because they want to entertain themselves with the thought of controlling their future, which is not a lot different from the RIAA suing teenagers under the illusion that they can control their destiny.

Bloom tells a story about three tribes in Africa. They are, respectively, farmers, craftspeople and priests. They trade with each other for what they need: food, pots and implements, and . . . spells. The farmers and craftspeople live reasonable lives, understanding rough parity between food and goods.

Of the three tribes, the shamans live the best because, when someone’s sick or dying, there’s no price too dear for a spell to ease their burden. If the initial spell fails, then the victim’s family is told to bring more offerings to pay for a stronger spell. If the spell works, its because the priests’ magic is strong. If not, it’s because the family ran out of offerings to up the mojo. Perhaps its where we learned our system.

Hopeware?

Is that why most of us feel compelled to hold an opinion about the unknowable? In one moment in his role as his team’s Player-Coach and Dean is declared finished. Even some Dean supporters seemed ready to throw in the towel (though most of us just threw in more money). Doc just read me a NY Post N.H. Debate report declaring that Edwards and Clark are toast because they did not do as well as expected. Not satisfied with just any horse race, the press is compelled to jiggle the lead every half-week.

The capriciousness of some Dean supporters really threw me off. Unbridled enthusiasm melting into terminal gloom in 3 hours. Yet we all know it just doesn’t work that way. It’s as if Dean had let them down, failing to maintain the crescendo of hope and optimism they’d been investing in for 6 months. Where’s the conviction? Where’s the gumption?

It feels to me like a vague analogue to how we once regarded desktop apps and how we now seem to. Productivity software once seemed a bright promised land of power and promise. We couldn’t wait to master the next app and add it to our toolkit. Now someone releases a new widget and we greet it with a collective yawn.Where we once sought power we seem now to simply avoid complication. Is that what’s at work here? As long as Howard Dean maintained a steady arc of promise, our work and contributions seemed their own reward.

But the prospect of work without assurance attracts a smaller crowd than easy pickings.

12:17:34 AM    

Doc’s got a great take on Howard Dean’s Iowa meltdown. He’s sitting over on the couch, making more sense than the rest of, as usual, the sumbitch:

My take is that the Iowa story comes down to looks. Kerry and Edwards present themselves very well. They’re attractive on TV. Media-friendly. Telegenic. Watching Edwards right now, he sounds so much like Bill Clinton, talking about “hope and optimism,” it’s like some kind of re-run. New stars, same ball game.

Dean is the only star of a whole new ball game: one that’s all-grass-roots, no special interests. Great game, but not one that’s playing on TV. And most of us still watch hours and hours of TV every single night.

Further, Doc quotes Matt Stoller over at BOPNews:

What a disaster for the new politics. Dean could play in the new world, but as JFK showed in 1960, it wasn’t enough to be great on TV. He had to win the machines first. Dean won the internet in July, but lost Iowa in February.

‘Splain, Please

I honestly don’t know what to make of this, but here’s my instinct. People who are outside the Internet religion resent we who have it and want to peddle it to them. Frankly, our orange hats may have worked against us, making the conversation about our movement, not Iowans’ interests. Kids brimming with enthusiasm and inexperience can seem irrelevant to graybeards like me and the many people I know in Iowa. Here’s a message Doc just received and posted:

How is this for a theory? (I’m serious about this.) The Dean volunteers and troops contacted and nagged and pushed the same potential caucus-goers so repeatedly that people just looked for a way to “punish” them by voting for someone else. I honestly think that’s how I would have felt…so sick of upbeat, orange-hatted people calling, knocking, etc.

Most of us gauge others by their appearance first and their ideas and skills second. Bush proved that in 2000. We Netizens are confident that the ‘Net changes everything. But it’s not certain when it changes politics.

I believe we can affect that date. It doesn’t have to be 2008: It can be 2004. But changing politics via the Internet isn’t easy, and – amazingly – it won’t happen online, at least not yet.

Internet politics doesn’t happen online? Nope. In the real world, where the votes are, it happens over back fences and at soccer games and water coolers and PTO meetings. It may happen online for 20-somethings, but not for most of us. So how do we use our amazing Swiss Army Knife to inspire and inform and transform those offline conversations?

I’m still working on that.

12:08:09 AM    

The Dean Campaign has about 3,500 people on the ground in Iowa, and the Gephardt people about 1,000. But in terms of body mass, it’s more even then the ratio suggests. Most of the Dean Supporters are young people, male and female, with an average stature of Dennis Kucinich. Most of Gephardt’s people are labor guys, mostly Teamsters, I understand, with the average stature of an NFL lineman.

Consider the political import of that difference: the total mass of Dean vs. Gephardt canvassers is probably equivalent!

I’m amazed that the media has not picked up on this vital statistic as yet another example of Dean’s diminished lead. After all, their job is to bring out the important, subtle issues that we mortals might not perceive. And they do this as consummate professionals, subject only to preemption by more important issues, like Michael Jackson walking from a limo to a court room.

But the Dean canvassers outweigh the Teamsters in another metric: they include a lot of bloggers, and they’re documenting the canvassing experience so heavily that there’s a site set up to point to their posts. BloggerStorm (referring to Joe Trippi’s “Perfect Storm” Iowa campaign) offers some pretty good insights that are more biased, but more nuanced than the press, of course. Even the Deaniacs are suffering from ad fatigue (from Seth-Tech):

Campaign Overload

You know there are too many campaign commercials on TV here in Iowa when I start complaining. As someone with an interest in political science, and 18 hours of coursework to back it up, I’d consider my tolerance to be higher than the average Iowan, but last night was relentless. I’d say that at least 50% of the ads were political last night, all Dean, Kerry, Gephardt, and Edwards. At least it will all be over soon…

Speaking of media fatigue, the Michael Jackson event seems to be enough to cause Doc to flee Santa Barbara for Burlington’s -40 wind chill.

The Doc is In

I’m picking up the SearlsDude at the Burlington Airport at 11:35 tonight. He says that he hasn’t been in really cold weather in 2 or 3 decades. I’ve been disingenuous about a critical fact I should not have withheld: There are no jetways here. He gets to walk from the plane to the terminal in whatever golf jacket he’s wearing.

I’ve been urging Doc to visit Dean HQ since the weather was clement. He’ll interview Harish Ro, Tony Lyon, Tom Limoncelli and Jascha Franklin-Hodge to learn about the campaign’s abundant use of Linux and open source, and probably act as Team Cluetrain’s Inspector General to see if we’re as clued as we seem to be.

It’ll also be fun to hang with him up here in the midst of this ferment of smart young people.

1:02:23 PM    

The general goals of the yet-to-be-realized Assertion Processor are being embraced in many corners of the blogosphere. I had discussed this idea with Ben Hammersley on December 9th. That led to several posts between Ben and me on the subject, and some good comments helping us along.

Blaser: 12/15; 12/17; 12/19; 1/06

Hammersley: 12/19; 12/28

Our most recent posts respond to Danny Ayers’ important contribution – his QuestionGarland concept.

The idea behind the Assertion Processor is to extend an article’s RSS feed with a few new data tags to suggest the character of an article’s content, not just where the content appears in it. In other words, what are the phrases that get our attention?

Adopt a Campaign Journalist

On January 10, Jay Rosen reported on a distributed suggestion he saw developing in late December:

Adopt a Campaign Journalist in 2004: The Drift of a Suggestion

Over the holidays, an idea gained some Net traction: webloggers “adopting” a campaign reporter. That means you monitor and collect all the reporter’s work, and then… And then what? Follow the turns as the suggestion is taken up and debated.

Saturday Night, Jan. 10: Link flow and blog authority have been combining in the atmosphere. In sequence:

Dec. 23. At the Daily Kos, Vet 4 Dean reacts to discussion at Blog For America, the Dean campaign’s main gig:

Earlier today on DFA, there was a good bit of discussion of the latest piece of “journalism” committed by Ms. Jodi Wilgoren in the NY Times. Well, I decided it was time to lose my blogging virginity and created The Wilgoren Watch.

Dec. 23. And he does. The Wilgoren Watch: “Dedicated to deconstructing the New York Times coverage of Howard Dean’s campaign for the White House.” (The inaugural post.)

Dec. 28. At Steve Gilliard’s News Blog, Gilliard says he has had enough: Time to Take the Gloves Off:

The media in America lives in a dual world, one where they want to hold people accountable, yet flip out when people do the same to them…

I think it would be a really, really good idea to track reporters, word for word, broadcast for broadcast, and print the results online. Not just for any one campaign or cause, but to track people’s reporting the way we track other services….

Keeping score of who’s right and wrong, how many times they repeat cannards like Al Gore invented the Internet and make obvious errors. Not accusations of ideology, but actual data and facts.

Dec. 30. Reacting to Gilliard’s idea, Atrios gives it a second. Hardball: “We should have an ‘adopt a journalist’ program. As Steve suggests, people should choose a journalist, follow everything they write, archive all their work, and critique and contextualize it where appropriate.”

It’s a terrific chronicle of the birth of a new weapon in the war on hierarchy – Read Jay’s catalogue at PressThink or at Blogging of the President. Both have a good review of the reactions. Most are intrigued, but also concerned about the establishment of “truth squads.” Even Jay takes the idea with a grain of salt:

Why I Love the Adopt-a-Reporter Scheme. Why I Dread It.

A weblog devoted to watching the work of a journalist is democracy in action. It is bound to be educational, for the watcher and perhaps for the journalist who is watched. But there are reasons to worry.

All the ideas, examples and disputes are here: Adopt a Campaign Journalist in 2004. It has more than thirty links. I stayed out of that post because I wanted to know what others think. So… no illustrations in this one. Use the links and fill in any details you need.

Why I Love It.

It’s practical. People can do it, and they don’t need permission or oversight. Tracking a reporter’s work is a good thing for a very simple reason. It’s participation in the presidential campaign, and in politics. It’s doing something useful with your own civic time. It’s what Thomas Jefferson, the botanist, did– observe nature, and record what you find. Except that culture is our nature now and media a surrounding sea. So we observe this, and try to sense its motion…

…Why I Dread It.

I have this question, seriously intended: What makes media hate any better, any more “okay,” than other forms of politicized hating? Nothing in my field of vision. Check yours.

Don’t tell me it doesn’t exist–floating hatred for The Media, (which has no address) addressed to individuals who in someone’s eyes represent “the” media–because I can find occasional evidence for it in comments here at PressThink. You can find it at a million Web pages in public view. Bipartisan evidence, too. Is the contempt deserved? A lot of intelligent people think so, and they act on that belief. They write of it. They sometimes commune around it. Is there contempt for an intelligent lay public by the press? There is, but right now I am not discussing it.

Processing my Assertion

The Assertion Processor is conceived as a general-purpose tool to catalogue any set of assertions, wh
ether a single article, a series on the same topic by different writers, or, as in this example, all articles by the same writer. What we continue to lack is a good enough agreement on the interesting tags that elicit what there is about a story that gets our attention.

In my last post on the Assertion Processor, I more-or-less jokingly suggested a few data tags to get at the attention-getting.

• <moneyPaid>
• <payor>
• <payee>
• <scapegoat>
• <wretchedExcess>
• <cynicalGreed>
• <whiningVictim>
• <statuteViolated>
• <wrongedSpouse>
• <fiduciaryViolation>
• <rampantConflictOfInterest>

My amateur opinion is that every writer projects her bias on her audience by the whats and hows she details. I asked Jay to help us out on the concept:

We are drawn to the media based on its power to push our buttons. There is a characteristic to outrage as there is to beauty and grace. Just because they’re hard to describe is no excuse to abandon the quest.

These are the elements that journalists strive for even as they attempt to push their master narrative of omniscience and objectivity–the dominant myths of the press, as Jay Rosen is so masterfully teaching us.

Jay, could you put an oar in here? I’m sure there’s some small set of tags that captures the traditional six Perry White questions included in Danny Ayers’ QuestionGarland but also feeds out the crucial elements of cynicism, greed, Pollyanna optimism and self-victimization that marks our delusional responses to life’s challenges.

And Jay responded in the comments:

I would love to help you out, Britt. But I am afraid you reached the limit of my processor– i.e., brain. I do not quite understand what you are up to here, or what you are really asking. It seems to be what kind of narrative structures indicate a sexy, readable, outrageous story likely to get reactions.

If that is the case, I think there are too many. Sure, we could probably lay down some predictable ones, (conflict-of-interest) but for anything worth knowing the unpredictable ones would be as valuable. But then some items in your list are not story elements, as far as I can tell, but critics’ reactions and categorizations (“Smith is being made the scapegoat for…”)

Who, what, when, where, why and how (“the 5 w’s and an H,” as journalism textbooks put it) are “elements” in a simple news story, yes. But what people often care about is another element: what it all means. This too is an element in the more sophisticated news accounts: who did (or said) what, when was it done, where did it happen, why did it happen and how did it happen are supplemented with: “what does this mean for the outcome of the New Hampshire primary?”

If I knew what I was asking, Jay, I’d be more useful. I don’t know journalism, but I know what gets my attention. Everything that makes a story meaningful is an attribute in the 5 <w>’s and the <how>. The RSS feeds that our blog software generates automatically already tell us who the author is, headline, etc., but there’s a legitimate need for the qualitative tags as an option, and without the requirement for an overly determined standardized namespace to define all tags.

I’m going to be thinking of 3- 6 attributes for each of the w’s and the how tags. Perhaps there’s just a few straightforward characteristics of each that we’ll recognize when we see them, but which are not obvious yet.

1:33:33 AM    

I’ve always loved space travel. I devoured science fiction as my default genre through high school. In my early teens I borrowed books from the branch library that catered to Robert Heinlein when he was my age. My favorite first book had been the 1949 Conquest of Space, realistic paintings by Chesley Bonestell of Willy Ley’s conception of the space travel everyone knew would be routine by the third millennium. Three buddies of mine in USAF Pilot Training became astronauts and later gave me an insider’s tour of Johnson Space Center. One of them, Roy D. Bridges, Major Gen., (Rtd.) saved my life with a radio call, and, last I heard, was the Director of Kennedy Space Center.

Further, I’m enough of a trekkie to know that Gene Roddenberry’s widow, Majel Barrett, is the voice of the computer on the Next Generation series and played Deanna Troi’s mother, the fabulously outrageous Lwaxana Troi (a daughter of Betazed’s Fifth House, holder of the sacred Chalice of Rixx and heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed) and was nearly cast in the Captain Kirk role in the original series.

Yep, I’m in the cross hairs of the old fart population of space exploration fanatics.

But I don’t see how going to Mars relates to developing our Global Brain. Global Brain is the book by my favorite sociobiologist, Howard Bloom, describing how we are wiring ourselves together to form a superorganism linking us as tightly as bees in their hive. Bloom thinks every life form is a superorganism comprised of simpler life forms that link up so avidly they take on the appearance of unity. In our case, it’s useful to remember that all our biological energy is generated by the mitochondria at the core of every cell, which is literally a separate, symbiotic life form. Our mitochondria are with us but not of us.

Howard Bloom says we’re connecting so fast that major projects will need a broad cultural buy-in rather than by presidential decree. Imagine how different the federal budget would look if it were designed the way they develop budgets in Vermont.

Last week, armed with that question, I read a skeptic who declared that there’s no market for Mars exploration, except for the military-industrial complex. How does he know that? If people hankered for Mars, he said, there’d be settlers queuing up to live in the Gobi Desert, which is a million times more hospitable than Mars and a billion times cheaper to get to. Besides, there are far more interesting challenges waiting for us here on earth, like getting democracy right and building The Economy, Rev. 3.0, which I call Xpertweb.

Harmonizing with the Enemy

On Saturday, Tamara and I visited with Franz Hartl, Dan Droller and Kevin Collinsworth at Music For America’s east coast headquarters. Franz is the spiritual head of MFA, and dropped in on our mini-summit last July to say hi to Zephyr and Zack. Franz loves the idea of the Great Centrist Party, but wants to call it the Great Consensus. He says that the labels Democratic, Republican, liberal and conservative have lost their meaning and that we need a new way of describing the animating force behind American politics.

As Franz and Dan’s interview by Chris Lydon reveals, MFA will sponsor a series of concerts across the country to inspire a new generation of political activists. This initiative, combined with the energy that the Dean youngsters have introduced into the race, is a tsunami sweeping over American politics.

I’m in Burlington for my monthly stint at the capacious corner office in the volunteer bull pen, and I’ll witness this force again, firsthand. Most of the volunteers and staff have never been involved in politics and often have never voted. I certainly have never been involved in politics and swore I never would be.

What does Tom Harkin Know that We Don’t?

Tom Harkin is the senior senator from Iowa and one of the most beloved politicians in Iowa’s history (I’m surprised I can even type “beloved politician”). Last week he joined Al Gore and Bill Bradley to campaign for the Gov in Iowa. Why would he do this when pundits are saying that the race is getting closer? Does this mean Harkin’s casting caution to the winds and throwing in with Dr. Dean to rescue him from the teapot tempest inspired by his 1999 observation that only committed professionals will spend several hours at an Iowa caucus?

Actually, no. I’ll bet Tom Harkin likes Howard Dean as much as anyone else, but he’s not likely to turn his back on Gephardt or Kerry unless he’s quite confident about Dean’s victory in Iowa. But where is he getting his confidence? The difference is that he’s an Iowan and the pundits aren’t. The polls are tilted to the old politics and not to the new, as Franz Hartl explained yesterday.

Franz pointed out that pollsters mostly poll people who voted in the last caucus, discounting the likelihood that a newcomer will show up next Tuesday night. But Franz reminded me of an important point. As we heard again on Meet the Press this morning, Iowa expects twice the turnout as the 2000 caucus. And what kind of people are those new 60,000 voters? People who now have a reason to caucus and did not before.

MidWiving the Revolution

As we left Music For America, Tamara and I thanked our new friends for sharing their time and enthusiasm. And Franz gave us one of the nicest compliments I’ve heard: “It’s great to get better acquainted: You guys midwived the revolution!”

10:30:33 PM    

Teach In with Teachout

With any luck, the O’Reilly Digital Democracy Teach-In will have Zephyr Teachout virtually onstage. I’ve been helping with the planning and it appears that we may have Jim Moore and the legendary Zephyr join us through iChat AV. The logistics precluded anyone from the Dean campaign attending in person, though Joe Trippi was genuinely enthusiastic when Doc asked him to keynote last month.

You may recall that the invitation happened when I was carrying Doc around Dean HQ embedded in my PowerBook via iSight.

Let’s see. The campaign will be in the middle of its entire raison d’etre, and Joe or a designated thriver is supposed to fly from Burlington to San Diego for an hour session? Well, telepresence probably should have been our original plan, and we’ve got a great agenda now, so I’m optimistic about the conference.

The O’Reilly folks have been using me as a placeholder until some things got resolved in our conference call today. If you look fast before they revise the schedule, you’ll see my service as the body double for the real Dean team, now to be present virtually, since we all knew that I, the virtual Dean teammate, could really be there (sort of a reverse bait-and-switch):

---

Sessions

These sessions will be part of the Digital Democracy Teach-In. Please check back often as we will be adding sessions and panels in the days to come. For more details about specific speakers, see the Speakers page.

Internet Campaign Magic
Britt Blaser, President, Blaser and Company
Time: 8:30am – 9:15am
Location: California Ballroom C

Howard Dean has rocked the political establishment by raising more than $40 million over the internet, mostly in small donations, by harnessing the power of weblogs, meetup.com, and email. Pundits now say that the 2004 presidential election will be shaped by the internet as surely as the 1960 election was shaped by television. In this session, key technologists involved with the presidential campaigns will explain how to build a grassroots campaign — what some people call “Open Source democracy” — using the net to empower local activists.

---

Y’all C’mon Down, Y’Hear?

Admission is just $100, the weather will be great, and it coincides with the Emerging Technology Conference, which was moved to accommodate our teach-in, as Tim O’Reilly writes today:

Wes Boyd of MoveOn.org is keynoting, but we’ve also got key people from the Dean and Clark campaigns, a bunch of noted bloggers, Scott Heiferman from meetup.com (which has become a critical political organizing tool), and other online activists. We’ve also got a panel on the critical issue of transparency and trust when using electronic voting machines.

We actually moved eTech to this earlier date (from its usual April time slot) because we wanted to have the Teach-In early enough in the campaign season to help make a difference in getting people involved.

Whatever your politics, the increased use of the internet for everything from fundraising to activism is extremely interesting. I’m looking to hear more about success stories in this space, and especially about tools that can be adapted and used by others, not only for campaigning, but for making government more responsive after the fact.

We’re Peddling the Electoral Cycle – Buy in Now!

Tim’s last point is crucial. The fuel for American governance (sort of its Krebs cycle…:) is the electoral cycle. This seems to be the only time when politicians look at what good they might do. Then they spend their time in office to weasel out of their insights into governance, or pandering, depending onyour viewpoint.

That’s why we democracy-lovers need to get involved in politics now, not after government goes back to business as usual. Perhaps that won’t be true of a Dean administration, since no one tells the Dr. what to think, which he does on his feet, and has the self-confidence to develop his diagnoses in public. He honors us by treating the public as co-producers of democracy.

As some wag said the other day, “To Washington insiders, a gaffe is what they call it when they think you should have lied.”

Dirty Politics

I don’t speak for the O’Reilly folks, but I have a closely-guarded secret few people know about Governor Howard Dean. He intends to do precisely what he’s describing, since he’s on to the one dirty trick politicians can’t deal with:

Candor.

11:36:39 PM    

A compilation of governance tools that
might deserve a programmer’s attention

The Revolution will be Engineered

1. Assertion Processor – RSS feeds of facts that matter
2. Constituents’ Issues Assessment and blog archives of comments
3. Explicit vertical and horizontal linkages among like-minded individuals
4. A citizen-based Administration elected by a citizen-based campaign
5. Citizen-based (not faith-based) programs for training, jobs & mutual support
6. Peer-to-peer vigilance through our personal sensors and shared video archive
   1. of terrorism
   2. polling place coercion
   3. brutality by armed and unarmed bureaucrats

1. Assertion Processor for the Great Centrist Party - Part D

Danny Ayer to the Rescue – The W6 Vocabulary & the QuestionGarland

Ben Hammersley connected the dots between my Assertion Processor plea and Danny Ayers’ brilliant QuestionGarland solution. First, Danny Ayers’ concept:

Think of something. Call it an idea. Draw a circle, and label it with the name of that idea. From that circle draw 6 radial arrows. Label them who, what, where, when, how, why. At the end of those lines write an appropriate label : i.e. for who write the name of a person or group. Etc etc. That’s the Question Garland.

…I reckon if this vocab is used somewhere like a weblog, then you’re halfway to the ‘Assertion Processing’ Ben and Britt have been talking about. E.g. (quoting Britt) “Yesterday he pointed out an important truth: no one’s going to be elected by hating Bush.” In the first part of the sentence there’s a link to a statement – woo-hoo! a URI:

http://doc.weblogs.com/2003/12/14#powerFromThePeople.

In the second part there’s a proper noun, ‘Bush’. So if we already had Dubya in our person table, we could automatically extract the simple statement:

#powerFromThePeople w6:who #Bush

It doesn’t capture the human nuance, what’s actually being asserted, but the basic ‘related’ is there.

Aha! who, what, where, when, how, why! The prime directive(s) of journalism. When Ben and I first discussed the Assertion Processor at the Intermezzo Café in Philly, we too felt that the whowhatwherewhenhowwhy architecture was a guide to the answer, but we were thinking less specifically than Danny, and therefore less usefully, IMHO.

Commenting on Danny’s structure, Ben remarked:

Continuing on with the Assertion Processor idea, I think Danny’s contribution may have cracked it for me with his introduction of the W6 vocabulary.

To recap: Britt wants a system to aggregate assertions about political figures, in order to create a database to, well, in the old phrase, fact-check their asses. I posited the way to do this would in in RDF, naturally, and that there are really three different levels of information we can retrieve from a news story:

1. Data about the story itself, as a separate object. Its author, its date of publication and so on.

This is usually supplied, or could be without fuss, automatically at the point of creation.

2. The Who, Where and When of the story. These are either proper nouns (George Bush, Washington, Republican Party), or are roughly parsable dates (September 11, 03/04/76, Last Tuesday)

These could be retrieved automatically with, among other things, fancy regular expressions. Shouldn’t be too hard, anyway.

3. The Why, What and How of the stories.

Tricky. Why, and How, I would suggest, are too complicated a set of potential actions, with too many ways to express them in natural language, to make their collation worthwhile or efficient. In other words, let’s leave them out and let the reader do some work.

And here we are, back at the beginning again. The complications of our shared frailty causes us to seek truth when there is none (except among the prematurely convinced, but that’s another rant). I agree with Ben that there is no truth to be discerned here, but the utility is lost if we don’t encourage articles to assert the truth or biases they think they’re exposing.

I can’t imagine some grand namespace in the sky that reveals the “truth” to us by showering us with the inconsistencies of our enemies. The point here is that there are no external enemies. As Pogo said so long ago, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

It’s an assertion processor! There is no way to mediate in the questionable processes by which biased authors, editors and reviewers populate assertion feeds to sell their biases to the rest of us. Just as there’s still no consensus on Sir TBL‘s dream of a semantic web to deliver us from ignorance (I know I got that wrong, but you get the drift).

Who predicted Google? How about this new Vivisimo‘s results for Assertion Processor, which discovers the themes embedded in results themselves and organizes the results according to that discovered “namespace”? See how it discovers that I’ve been blathering on about assertion processors, leavened by Ben Hammersley’s treatment whereby he applies actual knowledge and perspective to the problem, which has never slowed me down! (Be sure to click Vivisimo’s [preview] link in each result for an instant glimpse of the found page).

The Proof is in the Put-In

So I’m less focused on the establishment of an orderly system than I am on the set of tags to encourage liars to streamline their biases: None of us is to be trusted, my precioussss.

My hopeful cynicism suggests that we embrace and extend Danny Ayers’ QuestionGarland (who, what, where, when, how, why) with some additional tags to let the expositors sell us more efficiently on the outrageousness of
their assertions. What is there about some otherwise lifeless lump of ASCII text that causes it to be worth the author’s effort? Without some animating force, it’s not worth our time either. Those elements of outrage must include the kinds of data that excites people at a cocktail party or sells books: sex and money and intrigue:

• <moneyPaid>
• <payor>
• <payee>
• <scapegoat>
• <wretchedExcess>
• <cynicalGreed>
• <whiningVictim>
• <statuteViolated>
• <wrongedSpouse>
• <fiduciaryViolation>
• <rampantConflictOfInterest>

I’m kidding around a little but not a lot. We are drawn to the media based on its power to push our buttons. There is a characteristic to outrage as there is to beauty and grace. Just because they’re hard to describe is no excuse to abandon the quest.

These are the elements that journalists strive for even as they attempt to push their master narrative of omniscience and objectivity–the dominant myths of the press, as Jay Rosen is so masterfully teaching us.

Jay, could you put an oar in here? I’m sure there’s some small set of tags that captures the traditional six Perry White questions included in Danny Ayers’ QuestionGarland but also feeds out the crucial elements of cynicism, greed, Pollyanna optimism and self-victimization that marks our delusional responses to life’s challenges.

12:02:58 AM