Category: Uncategorized

Like a moth to flame, I was drawn to Howard Dean’s seminal pronouncement on 5/28:

You need to support Dean because he has said the most important thing that any candidate has ever said:

“I’m not unwilling to change positions based on facts,
  but I am unwilling to change positions based on polls.”

Since then, I’ve found myself drawn to another flame–the fervor of passionate people who want to help anybody besides Bush, preferably Dean, become our next president.

These denizens of the ‘Net think like open source people. Given a problem, they start coding, and collaborating, and spotting bugs, and improving the code base, and welcoming positive suggestions and including new voices, and not paying much attention to the economics of the project, or why something can’t happen.

It sounds a lot like how a society works and nothing like how politics works.

The contributions these guys want to make involves doing real work for real campaigns to accomplish real change. They want to set up wikis, websites and WiFi; not press the flesh and position themselves for political appointments. How can you not do what you can for these guys? So we started imagining, together, how we might help candidates with lots of admirers but who aren’t set up to sell $2,000 hamburgers.

Specifically, we imagine a specialized sets of open resources for campaigns that deserve more help than they can afford. We’re particularly focused on the Dean campaign, but the infrastructure is agnostic. As Jon Lebkowsky said recently:

…the real importance of nodal politics is not in successful support for specific candidates, but in the successful construction of a more democratic model, with increased participation and increased understanding of the process and the issues. We get there by building a network, many connections and many nodes, and distributing quality information over that network, ensuring that there is at every node someone who can facilitate understanding of the messages we’re distributing.

Struggling campaigns deserve to have access to A-teams of geeks covering each area of production and IT, addressing needs common to any campaign:

1. graphic design (flyers, postcards, websites)
2. online organizing and communications
3. working with local parties
4. html emails
5. technology advice

The most urgent need is to establish communications & production support for meatspace functions. Here’s where we confront the problem every enterprise struggles with: sharing the knowledge of its individuals with the rest of the team. This is where forums, wikis and other collaborative tools are crucial.

This raises an interesting distinction between a big business and a time-limited campaign, whether military or political. In business, sure there’s a sense of urgency, but it lacks the visceral imperatives of people in mortal danger or a looming election.

Tech mentoring/task completion is a big part of the support picture. Like all of us, campaign staff will only use tech to the extent they’re comfortable with it and trained on it. Experts need to be on call to help complete a task, take over the task, or coach completion if the skills will be required repeatedly.

Anvil Chorus

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I’m embarrassed and a little amused that I feel like that. Xpertweb’s my hammer, and work is the nail. The more Josh and I (and Mitch and Jock and Jon and Doc and Flemming and others) teased this idea out of its cocoon, I began to see it as a mini-Xpertweb: An open set of resources available to whoever the experts choose to serve. Well that really got me excited!

Tomorrow a few of us will meet to see if we agree that our vision is that the best of geekdom should rally ’round NOW and deliver the Dean campaign into IT Nirvana. It helps that many in the Open Source movement would like to prove they can outperform the big guns at conventional projects AND innovation.

We speak a lot among ourselves of the need to give the campaign an ego-free zone. We know geeks can get in the way of enterprise, but it ain’t happening here. Our adhocracy will focus on the skill sets every enterprise needs but few can afford. Once organized and staffed, the capabilities will be described on websites private to the campaigns – intranets – with forms that campaign staffs can use to describe needs and their deadlines.

Or, as described in below, they can just just pick up the phone and say what they frickin’ need.

Make sure Campaign HQ runs like clockwork. Find Dean-leaning tech-heads who can go up to Burlington and make sure their campaign is running like a swiss watch

JOB 1: Master the IT basics for the campaign ASAP, whether as flunkies reporting to a big-time consultant or as professionals prepared to carry the IT ball for 17 months. Like any Open Source project, this work can follow the sun around the planet.

We assume the campaign is at this point a small business with the conversation load of a big one. So for now we assume it needs contact management, data bases, Excel support, outsourced typing, research, writing, graphics, etc. Pros are expected to volunteer to work the systems as required, using best practices, free from FUD and vendor agendas. Security’s huge here, but sharable to the grassroots as required.

Make the flow of ideas open and quick and -actionable-. Need to move ideas from idea-makers to action-doers. Idea processor

The campaign staff, up to and including Dr. Dean, need to be able to shout out an idea and have others vet it and DO it. This allows good ideas to happen chaordically and promptly. After vetting, pricing, resourcing and outlining the project, THEN a go/no-go can be given whether to proceed. The pricing function acknowledges that there are always some costs, but not for staffing and implementation.

People have more ideas when they don’t have to implement them, and that’s the thinking behind Idea Processing.

Friendly Interface for conversations.

We have a forum tool with a user-seductive GUI to add to the volunteers’ kit for collaboration, featuring an XML data store. We hope it will be as useful as a Wiki to the geeks, but more accessible, perhaps even the staff & Dr. Dean can use it as a dashboard interface to monitor the campaign’s production aspects.

Creative graphics people, get some leaders on board

Tomorrow, Josh and I will define the presumed zones of expertise: copy writing, graphics – prepress & web. Media development. This is basically the NYC Creative dream team I had blogged about after the Dean meetup. The categories are probably obvious, but suggestions are needed.

At this point, we want to finger the leaders and project managers in each area – the best we can find. Then they’ll ID the workers and coordinators.

Build the list of talented, vetted, responsible individuals who are ready to do something for the campaign

Rapid response campaign collateral, print to Kinkos (or Everett Studios)

With the creative people in place, digital pencils sharpened, campaign staff can describe requirements, which will then be translated into a task spec by one of our volunteers, then staffed, created, checked by another and sent through pre-press or to the media outlet. For print jobs we’ll provide a print-to-Kinko’s protocol (or email for media placement), so it’s printed in Burlington VT or Burlington IA as needed, and delivered to the client on time and WAY under budget. Josh proposes Everett Studios for higher quality materials.

Support for idea generation: talk to the web, leave notes to be perused, allow the idea makers free reign to pour it out

We propose an 800 voicemail number with people checking it several times an hour. Campaign people can dictate their notes to be parsed into communications, ideas, orders, position drafts, research, whatever. Some materials (after client approval) will be emailed or faxed to volunteers with good penmanship to hand write a letter and envelope, lick a stamp and confirm the posting of it – high tech/high touch.

Provide detailed data to voters based on their specifics; up to the minute statistics aimed at specific situations

Research can make issues come alive. Compelling facts can be on 3×5 cards or as sophisticated as a WiFi-equipped tablet computer/teleprompter in the speaker’s hands, perhaps with a technographer speaking into an ear mike. Obviously this applies to foreign affairs, Bush’s Fiscal Follies, etc.

Allow cross geographic/interest collaboration. Sure-thing blue states can lend resources to battlegrounds. Isolated talent in sure-thing reds can do the same

GREAT idea from Josh and/or Zack: Engage the people in non-swing states to help from afar in crucial must-win states. Let volunteers from Idaho and California help out in Florida or Michigan.

Meet Level, the playing field

IT’s interesting and a little heady to realize that there are far more talented people, fans of particular candidates, waiting to be put to productive use, than there are workers in even the best-funded campaign.

There’s nothing magic in this approach. We’re simply going to expose a set of well-described resources to the campaigns, and let them use those resources as their imaginations allow. Naturally some campaigns will inspire the volunteers more than others. If the resources are useful, responsive, professional and knit together into ad hoc teams that are truly productive, they’ll surely be used. When that pattern is established, a new force will have been added to American politics: Open Resource Elections.

It’s been said that candidates might as have their donors send the money directly to the TV stations, since that’s where it’s going anyway. So money, media and voters are the vital forces in elections. If Open Resource delivers useful work products and collaboration tools to campaigns, Those workers will be a new force, leveling a field which seems more tilted than ever.

10:52:50 PM    

I hear through the grapevine that the Dean campaign does welcome geek support, but, like any client, they’d like to get their current tech together and then imagine a bigger picture.

I’ll put on my consultant’s hat here, and predict with some confidence that the campaign’s priorities look something like this. I have no direct input, so All of the following is conjecture:

1. Pull together the campaign’s existing systems, which are probably ad hoc and surely need to be optimized
2. Consider the data flows they’ve got now and that they anticipate, and create a structure that grows with the campaign. You can bet the ideal structure will be a series of intranets, extranets and web apps.
3. Tune the current effort until it runs like a Swiss watch, unlike most businesses and all political campaigns.

                         then the campaign can afford to dream:
   

4. Brain storm and prioritize the exciting web apps that Dean’s Army of Geeks might implement.
5. Assign a team to each web app, with hard but possible schedules, milestones and deliverables.
6. Craft a networked mesh of citizens, fence straddlers, influencers, volunteers, commanders and SWAT Geeks, all knit together by a system of web communications that talks to the team and also to fax machines and citizen callers, Tupperware activists, bake sales and to volunteers handwriting letters from their PCs or fax machines.

Above all, like any enterprise, the Dean Campaign can only flourish in an ego-free zone. Helpers need to understand that just because geek volunteers have passion and a sliver of competence does not mean that we can push our pet technologies and agendas.

A sure-fire way to kill the spark that Dean has ignited is to drown the campaign under a Slashdot flood of good intentions.

Some tech Czar must emerge who has the respect of the campaign and the geek volunteers, with the background to pull together the solutions and opportunities that Dean’s Army of Geeks makes possible. That person needs to be the right blend of suit and geek, dreamer and hard-headed realist. Maybe the campaign’s already got that miracle worker, but probably not.

If you know that one-in-a-million leader, have him/her volunteer. If too busy, you know you’ve got the right person, so ask what anyone is doing for the next 16 months that’s more important. Re-tell the Cincinnatus story. Gag and tie the reluctant hero and drive non-stop to Vermont. You can work out the details later.

Update from Josh

On Thursday, June 12, 2003, at 12:08 AM, Josh Koenig wrote:

Just FYI — hack4dean is the hacker-facing element of the project; intended to lure in willing techies. Our citizen-facing elements will be americansfordean.com which is the meta-site, and fordean.net, which will be widely available domain suffixes (e.g. eastvillage.fordean.net) w/cheap server space and community tools that feed eachother top down and bottom up with RSS and other blog-like widgets.

This is the plan that emerged from out first IRC meeting. I’ve taken on the responsibility of keeping in touch with the “digirati” and making sure our efforts can dovetail when the time is right.

Cool.

Into the Chaordic Zone

Despite the need to manage the campaign so they operate in tech Nirvana, fine-tuned and smooth-running, chaos must be married to order so that the grassroots effort allows a thousand flowers to bloom. With Campaign Ops under control, grassroots geeks can do the unimaginable, like the Apache model, where each piece fits into a well-understood context. As long as the context is well communicated, the geek contributions can be useful campaign objects that work together as an ad hoc assemblage of passion and purpose.

Yeah. We could do that.

1:06:25 AM    

Sleepers Awake!

Tomorrow afternoon will be election day 2004. What will we have done to end the madness in Washington?

A bunch of proactive geeks want some Bush blood, believe that Dean is the best hatchet, and they may not wait long for the more active (self-important?) bloggers to get on board. For the moment, they’d like our help, perhaps in the manner I suggested some time ago, with Lessig & Searls getting together with the Dean campaign, as Josh Koenig reminded me today:

On Wednesday, June 11, 2003, at 01:02 PM, Josh Koenig wrote:

Any progress on that Doc/Lessig/Blaser/Trippi/Dean summit?:

1. Someone arranges a meeting with, at least, Dr. Lessig, Doc Searls, Dr. Dean, and Joe Trippi. The agenda is simple:
   1. Will you go to the mat to return fair use of published works to the people?
   2. Will you sponsor a blog-oriented, blog-responsive administration?
   3. Will you promote a fact-based judiciary?
2. If those answers are public, unequivocal and satisfactory, Searls, Lessig and other Net thought leaders should pull out the stops and get behind Dean, our last best hope for an administration knowing that managerial capitalism is about to consume the seed corn that makes capitalism possible. The nutrients they’re snorting up are the major food groups of the American miracle:
   1. A free and informed electorate
   2. The freedom to oppose the majority opinion (which usually isn’t)
   3. Freedom of speech, and, implicitly, freedom from single-agenda broadcasting
   4. Freedom from unreasonable seizure and, implicitly, limits on fair use of purchased media

The hack4dean movement has begun in earnest. Zack in Pittsburgh has set up a wiki and a mailing list, and we’re starting to have IRC meetings: http://www.pgh4dean.org/hack4dean/

The goal is to create something on the order to technorati but focused exclusively on Dean sites. We’re also planning on setting up a helpdesk for technically literate non-hackers to get support for their Dean efforts.

Having the endorsement of a few of the “A-list” people would be a big boost. It’s high time the geek community was activated as a political constituency. There’s too much to lose in the next four years not to do this.

Kingmakers Awake!

This is a time for leadership and not waffling, a time to pick a horse and not worry about picking the wrong one. This may also prove to be the time when Internet opinion leaders became the kingmakers in our society in the same sense that past kingmakers have been, by turns, the robber barons, the Hearsts, the Sarnoffs and currently the Murdochs.

The question is, will we collectively act or shall we keep discussing best practices? Josh feels geeks should be organized to be most effective.

Here are some obvious web applications that beg to be set up:

1. Pro-active online help to get voters to the polls, especially in places like Belle Glade, FL where the year 2000 shenanigans will be going on. (Mitch suggested yesterday that an online service could analyze the public registration records and turn up anomalies)
2. Web cams at polling places, so voter intervention can be publicized.
3. A web app to match up drivers with voters who need transportation.
4. A web app to train zealots how to communicate with humans, the point being to make friends, not flames. (E.g., hack4dean may be a poor message since most voters think hackers are criminals)
5. Widgets to put on our web sites/blogs
   1. I like the GOP Words, Totalitarian Deeds concept:
      A daily quote from Ike/Lincoln/Teddy Roosevelt, etc. (non-Democrat statesmen), provided to subscribing sites so visitors see the same quote several times a day, with the date and venue of each quote and a link to a statistical example of the quote’s relevance to this world we’ve inherited. (Links could be from http://www.nationmaster.com:
            Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
                             —Dwight D. Eisenhower, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 4/16/63
      Military expenditures
      
      Prosecution rates
      
6. Seemyvote.com:
   A database of voters who have abdicated their secret ballot to advertise their responses to current issues. The database would match issues and outrage with politicians and their current actions:
   

   Sample SeeMyVote Report:
   “The Fleemer amendment to HR 419 has caused a plurality of Mr. Fleemer’s voting constituents to commit to vote him out of office in November. Based on commitment data from 73% of registered voters, it appears that Rep. Fleemer will lose his seat by a 9% margin unless his amendment is withdrawn. Those voter commitments have been communicated to Mr. Fleemer’s staff, the Republican and Democratic National Committees and major media outlets. View details at http://www.seemyvote.com/fleemer."

The Root of Ideal is Idea

Elections are grand ad hoc communications projects, which is why they’re so expensive. Communication Ideas are cheap and now, implementing them is cheap, thanks to the open source mentality. The political parties have never conceived of self-organizing groups, smart mobs, moblogging, and have barely heard of blogs.

Just Do It

Mitch and I discussed geek activism at length yesterday and he raised the concern that the kinds of efforts that Josh Koenig and Zack in Pittsburgh are promoting could run them afoul of the campaign finance reform laws, which prohibit individuals from donating more than $2500, cash or work pr
oducts, to a single campaign. The way around the limit is to make our web apps in support of a cause, such as the progressive politics. (It might be cool to have enough faith in the electorate to make the tools available to all campaigns, but that’s another conversation.) Mitch just wrote (while I’m typing this up):

Britt, Doc,

I was on the phone today with someone close to the Dean campaign, talking about creating some tools using Technorati, etc.

He agreed with me that creating a set of tools is important and should be tied not to a campaign but to progressive organizing. He suggested looking at OrganizeNow.net, which is an open source campaign database, as an example.

We would not face any campaign donation questions if we made tools and made them available for campaigns as open source applications. We’d have to report in-kind donations only when asked by a campaign to build something, and could even be paid for that.

Who will inspire and implement the inevitable smartmob takeover of the American electoral process? When will it start?

4:32:46 PM    

Frank Patrick [1] sent this email to you through the Radio UserLand [2] community server, re this page [3].

Most bloggers are teenage girls…

…and most of the paper/time used in “real journalism” are devoted to ads, weather, sports, movie reviews, celebrity “news,” comics, stock quotes, fluff features, and pass-alongs from wire-services.

(Just something that came to me reading your recent posting about Orlowsky. It doesn’t fit in my blog.)

[1] http://www.focusedperformance.com/blogger.html
[2] http://radio.userland.com/
[3] http://www.blaserco.com/blogs/

 

9:52:36 PM    

My first blog last summer was titled “Outted by the Doc” since he was my blogging mentor who convinced me to post my speculations. Today, in a post about No-Fi in Boston, he notes that, compared to Manhattan, Beantown is a 2.4GHz wasteland:

Here in Boston? Zero. Nada.
 
From Britt Blaser‘s apartment window in Manhattan I got 12 signals. From here on the 15th floor of the hotel, with high buildings nearby all around… Nothing.
 
Not sure what gives. Must be around here somewhere. It looks like a civilized place.
 
Of course, I’m writing this from the bed, before crashing using my own little portable wi-fi access point, which is hanging off the hotel’s broadband.

The subtle message sent by Doc’s subconscious is the interesting subtext here. The link (as I write this) doesn’t point to this blog, but rather to an article by someone named Andrew Orlowski in the Register, Most bloggers ‘are teenage girls’ – survey:

Those raging–hormones… capricious tantrums, those endless hours devoted to navel gazing … the helpless feeling that world is conspiring against you … the frustration of trying to use grown-up words, but failing … popstar fantasies … toe-curling slang … those nightmarish swings between binge eating and dangerous, faddish diets. It’s all there. And don’t even mention the first, awful encounter with alcohol.

“What am I,” asks David Weinberger, adjusting himself to the medium, “a 12-year-old??”

Cute but pointless. I hadn’t spent any time reading Orlowski and wouldn’t have read this if Doc hadn’t turned me into an accidental tourist. If the rest of his stuff is as parlous and soft-headed as this, Orlowski’s clearly a waste of time. Perhaps everybody else in the blogging mini-world has already tarred him, but I arrive with a clean slate, sort of recognizing the name but with no particular bias.

And then I read this foolishness:

The reason that 99.93 per cent of the world doesn’t blog, and never will, is because people make simple information choices in what they choose to ingest and produce, and most of this will be either personal and private, or truly social. Blog-evangelists can fulminate at the injustice of this all they like, but people are pretty smart and make fairly rational choices on the information they process.

Interesting people run interesting blogs, but it’s remarkable how few of them there are.

Clearly, this guy assumes he’s interesting or smart or informed or some combination thereof. But let’s take his pompous little absurdity apart. He proposes that only .07% of the world will ever blog because no one cares about what they have to say. Aside from the obvious fact that only idiots make predictions about new phenomena, he’s saying that blogging is a function of reader demand, rather than writer reflection. Of course that’s just silly. People have always written to work out ideas for themselves, and bloggers seem to appreciate the appearance of being a global voice more than we expect it. What surprises most bloggers is that anyone reads us at all.

(Hoo-Ha! I just now googled Orlowski and discovered that everyone knows he’s blowing smoke. Sorry to be so shut away here. I feel like a kid in middle school who, minding my business, has been convinced to look at something in the dumpster by Andy the class clown, followed by screams of infantile delight: “Neener-neener, made ya look! Ha Ha Ha!” There are a lot of journalists like that who, since they are paid to write for the calendar rather than the intellect, often put out nothing dressed up as something.)

So I won’t waste any more time taking Orlowski apart, and wouldn’t have gone this far were I more plugged in. Orlowski’s just a smoking clunker driving 45 in the fast lane, loving all the attention. Such writing has no purpose other than circulation, and the Register should know better.

There’s an old warning against challenging anyone who buys ink by the barrel. Mr. Orlowski may understand, when his 15 minutes of fame is past, that you shouldn’t fight anyone who buys ink by the bit.

 

12:08:05 PM    

On Friday, June 6, 2003, at 05:51 PM, David [1] sent this email to you through the Radio UserLand [2] community server, re this page [3].

Good story about the golf ball, pebbles, sand and beer. Where does it come from? Were you in the class? Great writing. You snagged me with the very first sentence!

[1] http://radio.weblogs.com/0105833/
[2] http://radio.userland.com/
[3] http://www.blaserco.com/blogs/2003/06/06.html#a145

Actually, David, it’s an email distro. Your appreciation for language may explain this lucid piece I found on your site:

What?

Bunker? What bunker?
Be quiet.

Treasury report? What Treasury report?
Be quiet.

Amnesia? What amnesia?
Be quiet.

Debt ceiling bill? What debt ceiling bill?
Be quiet.

WMD? What WMD?
Be quiet.

Press? What Press?
7:53:30 PM    

Like Mitch, I went to a Howard Dean Meetup last night, and you should when you can. Similar to Mitch’s experience, I found myself in a room full of angry but optimistic people–although our meeting was in the most crowded NY bar I’ve seen since the old days. Probably twice as many as at Mitch’s meetup.

<goodsign>The Republicans have done the impossible! They’re getting out the vote of passive non-Republicans and have solved the post- 9/11 NY bar depression</goodsign>

As I suggested here and here, the part of the blogging world that cares about policy should seek a few specific commitments from Dean on the issues that matter most to us: Fair Use, Unconstitutional search and seizure, Open Governance and a willingness to respond to issues that matter to those who are active in on-line democracy. Not a laundry list, but a focused emphasis on the things that matter to most people who take time to write online or read and comment online.

The obvious ones to hold such a meeting with Dr. Dean are Dr. Lessig and Doc Searls, but there’s probably no shortage of volunteers who know they’re qualified for such a mini-summit.

If Dean agrees to a coherent feedback loop, then people who care about the American Miracle (i.e., the Bill Of Rights) should spend the next year and a half making this the first Internet Presidency and the end of political business-as-usual.

Our commitment must be to help replace the money Dean would otherwise receive from the media who will cut him off when he endorses fair use. Further, we must commit to getting out the vote using the Internet, so money stops driving campaigns. When we calculate how that vision affects media’s profitability, we’ll understand how daunting are these demands.

Joe Plotkin

Joe Plotkin and his dad were there. Joe is the irrepressible marketing guy at BWay.net, host to the NYC Wireless meeting last week where Doc introduced me to Drazen Pantic. BWay is an ISP which gives responsive service and charges for it. They also offer DSL packages through Covad and have learned how to hate the phone company, or as Joe puts it: Hating Verizon is too simplistic. We resent their dominance because they hold hostage the public communications infrastructure — built as a regulated monopoly, the RBOCs are privatizing the benefits (promoting it as deregulation) while shirking the concomitant public obligations. It’s as if we built the Interstate Highway system and allowed the concrete contractor to own the tolls.

The real problem is that the RBOCs are allowed to be in a retail business while also being the monopoly wholesale provider of loops and other elements. There are anti-trust actions pending. One possible solution would create “structural separation” of the 2 functions — in which case, competitive providers would be treated as valued customers (to rent network elements) — instead of as competitive (retail) threats.

Joe and I are noodling around the idea of seemyvote.com, a domain I tied down in January:

#fleemer

seemyvote.com:

Politicians who need our votes are acting like they don’t. They’re behaving like the RIAA, pretending they can treat their customers like thieves. Why do we spend so much time worrying about the RIAA and so little time directly managing our elected toadies?

SeeMyVote would be based on our right to enforce full, fair and equal representation, establishing a protocol for translating individual hot issues into votes with teeth.

SeeMyVote would be a database of real people who have abdicated their secret ballot to advertise their real-time responses to current issues and current outrages. The database would match issues and outrage with politicians and their current actions. Voters would link their next vote with their current values and beliefs so that, for instance, a politician’s cynical work against choice would publicly guarantee my wife’s vote against him. Combined with other uppity women, some politicians would see that this particular form of political cynicism is foolish, at least in his district. (Cynical because few politicians give a rat’s ass about abortion. They do care about the votes of people who care about choice).

This is the kind of data which allows politicians to explain to each other why they can’t support each others’ favorite causes. They all know they’re in government in order to stay in government.

Sample SeeMyVote Report:
“The Fleemer amendment to HR 419 has caused a plurality of Mr. Fleemer’s voting constituents to commit to vote him out of office in November. Based on commitment data from 73% of registered voters, It appears that Rep. Fleemer will lose his seat by a 9% margin unless his amendment is withdrawn.

Those voter commitments have been communicated to Mr. Fleemer’s staff, other Republican and Democratic National Committees and major media outlets. The data are presented in detail at http://www.seemyvote.com/fleemer.”

If you have any thoughts or suggestions on implementing this outrageous meme, Joe and I would love to hear from you.

George Morin

George Morin is a my-gen communications freelancer who was a Republican until he read enough history to learn how much blood was spilled to create the 40-hour work week, among other things. As a professional wordsmith, he’d like to help the Dean team craft its message, but he’d be happy to lick envelopes if that’s what’s needed. We huddled after the Meetup and wondered how we might contribute. There’s a lot of talent in this town, and it ought to be put to work on this campaign.

George and I are meeting tomorrow to tease out the idea of a Howard Dean NYC creative brain trust teaming up internet, print and broadcast pros who want to make a difference. The great thing about our political system is that every four years it foments new adhocracies of people who often end up running things. This is the first time the Internet can have a place at the grownup’s table, and it would be a shame if we sat around whining about what might be, when we’re now set up to help it be.

Chaordic Commonality – A Permission-free Zone

Dean’s campaign manager, Joe Trippi, has embraced the Internet the way Harry Truman embraced the whistlestop campaign, which he used to defeat another undefeatable Republican, Thomas Dewey, in 1948.

A May 22
ABC News article, Howard Dean raises $1M via the Internet:

Dean hit the $1 million mark in Internet fund raising last week, becoming the first 2004 presidential hopeful to announce he has done so. Dean supporters also are using the Internet to organize volunteers across the country.

Campaign manager Joe Trippi said the Internet has matured to the point where people are comfortable using it to donate.

Trippi concedes that unleashing all those volunteers isn’t without risk; it’s impossible to be sure all will be “on message” with the campaign.

“It’s an almost military structure at most campaigns,” he said. “All the orders come from on high and it’s very regimented and you know exactly how many supporters you have in one state … Most campaigns view the Net as trying to impose military structure on chaos.”

This new chaordic reality forces Trippi to embrace its risks which he seems inclined to anyway. This campaign may demonstrate that chaos is the bright light shining the way to the White House. No longer can a campaign stop George Morin and me from helping in our way rather than the old way. A campaign manager can no longer tell a self-appointed NYC brain trust to lay off, even if he were inclined to. It’s sure to drive the political apparatchiks nuts, but the Internet changes so much that even politics is up for grabs.

Maybe Dee Hock, Mitch Ratcliffe and their fellow trustees can help the Dean campaign embrace chaos as the best way to reel into the present a future we can only imagine.

Eisenhower Republicans for Dean

George Morin was talking to a friend who, calling himself an Eisenhower Republican, said that Dean sounded to him a lot like Ike. Is Ike the bridge this country needs to return to civil discourse? Consider:

You do not lead by hitting people over the head-that’s assault, not leadership.

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

We merely want to live in peace with all the world, to trade with them, to commune with them, to learn from their culture as they may learn from ours, so that the products of our toil may be used for our schools and our roads and our churches and not for guns and planes and tanks and ships of war.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they never existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book…

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

I would rather try to persuade a man to go along, because once I have persuaded him he will stick. If I scare him, he will stay just as long as he is scared, and then he is gone.

Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and co-operation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.

No easy problems ever come to the President of the United States. If they are easy to solve, somebody else has solved them.

When you appeal to force, there’s one thing you must never do – lose.

When you are in any contest you should work as if there were – to the very last minute – a chance to lose it.

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.

We succeed only as we identify in life, or in war, or in anything else, a single overriding objective, and make all other considerations bend to that one objective.

There was a time when politics required the ability to form, question and communicate such thoughts. It was once a virtual requirement to have led men into battle and to earn your humanity, as Dwight Eisenhower demonstrated. He governed well by governing little, and led a life so full that he really preferred not to be president. It’s a shame we must send people to Washington who want to go, but if we need an enthusiastic ambition, Dean may be our best choice.

By then, George Bush may have demonstrated so well what we do not want in a leader that we’ll recognize one when we see one. And that may be his contribution to history.

2:54:05 PM    

Our homegrown digital ID function is the part of Xpertweb that Doc and Eric are most tuned into right now, so here’s some techie background.

Peering for Fun and Profit

Xpertweb users equip each other to use peering protocols. By peering, we mean that every participant has their own Xpertweb server, located on any ISP that offers PHP support. Xpertweb users have tools to set up a new user by using any FTP client to upload a script that sets up a new site. This seemed a pretty dramatic and excessive requirement when we first specified it, but blogging and grandkid picture hosting is making a personal web site less controversial.

Digital ID is very hard when you’re relying on a central server to authenticate people. It becomes trivial when each participant has exclusive control over their own website and easy-to-use forms to administer their ID info.

Peering means Peering

If you and I are peers, we allow each other to peer into our lives more than we allow others (ain’t English a fun language?).

Each Xpertweb user has an ID file (like, me.xml) on their site, containing the usual fields (required) and any other optional fields the owner might want to selectively expose to:

1. the world
2. other Xpertweb users
3. transaction partners
4. “blessed” Xpertweb users with established relationships
5. mentors
6. protegés.

Using the W3C XML Encryption spec, any of the owner’s data may be encrypted at the field level, and even the names of the fields/tags may be encrypted.

Trusting the casual visitor

All Xpertweb vendors want the world to know about their skills, reputation, products and, probably, thoughts and ideas on their blogs. Those are all published as broadly as possible, with skills and products organized into an Xpertweb index. The blogosphere is demonstrating that we crave notice more than we fear exposure.

However, Xpertweb vendors only want to transact with others having a proven reputation since, like a waitperson, the vendor’s compensation is subject to the buyer’s rating of their work. So here’s our homegrown digital ID sequence, assuming a vendor whose unique ID happens to be FFUNCH and a shopper with BRITTB as a unique ID (gross simplification in effect–unique IDs are hard but possible).

1. An Xpertweb-equipped shopper is attracted by FFUNCH’s reputation and clicks on a product link.
2. The product page asks the visitor to enter his unique Xpertweb URL.
3. Upon submitting the URL, FFUNCH’s site visits the URL and discovers there IS an Xpertweb site present with a properly formatted me.xml file at the root level and a script that says it’s ready to play nice. Only then does FFUNCH’s script learn that the visitor purports to be BRITTB.
4. FFUNCH’s script still doesn’t know if this visitor is BRITTB, so the script notes the current time, the visitor’s IP number, composes a unique ID for this contact and places a cookie on the visitor’s browser, something like:
        taskid FFUNCH.BRITTB.1054746754; IP 66.65.84.10 + some product info
        (a task ID = users’ IDs + the Unix epoch [# of seconds since 12/31/1969])
5. FFUNCH’s script directs the visitor to the URL presented
6. The script at BRITTB’s site asks the still-mysterious visitor to enter BRITTB’s name and password.
7. If the challenge is passed, we need a stateless way to confirm to FFUNCH’s script that this is indeed BRITTB.
8. BRITTB’s script looks in its buystuff/sellers directory for a subdirectory labeled FFUNCH.
         [If absent, it creates a buystuff/sellers/FFUNCH directory]
         It creates FFUNCH.BRITTB.1054746754.xml in buystuff/sellers/FFUNCH
            … listing the now-current epoch, BRITTB’s IP # and the product info
9. BRITTB’s script returns BRITTB to the FFUNCH site
10. FFUNCH’s script visits BRITTB’s site and notes that the properly formatted file was created in the proper directory at a time shortly after the task ID creation, from a browser at the known IP number.
11. FFUNCH’s script looks in its sellstuff/buyers directory for a subdirectory labeled BRITTB.
          [If absent, it creates a sellstuff/buyers/BRITTB directory]
          It creates FFUNCH.BRITTB.1054746754.xml in sellstuff/buyers/BRITTB
             … listing the current epoch, BRITTB’s IP # and the product info

It may not be perfect, but it’s close enough for FFUNCH and BRITTB to proceed with a transaction, whether it’s reading a blog for $.06, trying a $15 shareware, ordering a $75 Afghani carpet or paying a personally negotiated $10,000 retainer.

Because each product has different requirements, BRITTB’s site can selectively expose needed information, like a physical address or website admin info.

If the Liberty Alliance has something to offer the world, me.xml is where Xpertweb users will maintain their Liberty ID, hijacked as a cooperative effort, as suggested by Andre Durand.

4:22:06 PM    

Andy J. W. Affleck likes the fact-based politician meme:

Facts versus Influence

Escapable Logic may have nailed the answer to my “why do people still buy the bullshit” question:

…we’ve never had a fact-based politician and if you read or write a blog or software code, you’re committed to the outrageous notion that facts matter. For many people, facts don’t matter. The process of discovering, testing, discarding and describing facts is such a mystery to many that they’re not willing to trust it. Most of us, and certainly most people in power, are interested only in what increases our influence, which is rarely factual.

This rings true to me on a number of levels. Recently, the local paper here in Herndon has had a bit of a back and forth about the Bush Administration. The thing that my wife pointed out to me was how the anti-Bush letter writers produced facts and specific points to illustrate their position. The other side threw out things like: “Clinton lied” or “What about Whitewater?” or “Liberals who don’t want to stand up for the brave men and women fighting for freedom” and so forth. All of those are invective. They are not facts. They do not put forth an argument and then support it. They are purely attempts to influence (read: manipulate). Even trying to answer those statements moves the conversation immediately into a no-man’s land where no one can win. If you try to point out that what Clinton did or did not do has nothing to do with what Bush is currently doing (or that two wrongs don’t make a right, etc.) you end up in a long discussion about Clinton, the nature of morality, and why the liberals have no family values or some such nonsense. If you try to point out that being against Bush or the war in Iraq or the like has nothing to do with supporting to people in the military you get sucked into another vortex.

Can a facts-based politician win in this country? That would be a very interesting thing to see and experience. Maybe Howard Dean is the person to do it?

Andy has many thoughtful posts at Webcrumbs. Check them out.

Mitch, Dean of Misgivings

Mitch Ratcliffe is not so sure that all is swell in the Dean Camp. In Becoming what we don’t want to be?, he describes the attack dog tactics of some of Howard Dean’s supporters, who flame even a hint of negativity about their candidate:

I’m glad to see an aggressive liberal, particularly an anti-war liberal. But a campaign encouraging the attacking of comments made by people with dismissive one-liners is disturbingly like the Republican strategy these past 12 years and that style has reduced the level of public discourse to a flavorless radish paste, it’s bitter when you bite into it and not particularly filling–it will also back-fire with most liberals in the long-run, because we do believe in free speech and free thought (and as many folks know, I am not averse to an energetic debate, but one of ideas, not zingers). Frankly, I don’t want to be led by people willing to be as stupidly anti-intellectual as most of the conservative talk show hosts and commentators. Talk to people, don’t dismiss them–that’s the essence of liberalism.

Mitch is touching on the ancient issue of ends justifying the means, which the neoconservatives have raised to an art form. If one advocates a return to traditional values, why would you adopt politics which every previous administration would consider beneath contempt. I sincerely believe Nixon and his convicted Attorney General John Mitchell would not have stooped to the depths that Ashcroft and crew have, subverting the Fredom of Information Act (FOIA) in the interest of Department policies:

When you carefully consider FOIA requests and decide to withhold records, in whole or in part, you can be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions unless they lack a sound legal basis or present an unwarranted risk of adverse impact on the ability of other agencies to protect other important records.”

Do the Ends justify the Memes?

It’s a tough call. How far should Dean go to “Get my country back!”? How far should his supporters go? Perhaps Dean should treat this as a leadership opportunity to define and enforce a standard of behavior from his fans. But it’s not unusual for campaign managers to develop and defend some extremists to go toe-to-toe with their counterparts on the other side. The evidence that Mitch cites is from this accessible version of Ryan Lizza’s New Republic article from 5/23:

I am concerned about the tenor of the Dean campaign, which is shaping up like a war, and here is why: The New Republic in an article called “Dean.com” (it’s a password-protected subscription site) reports that the Dean camp is using the Web, blogs in particular, to go after critics.

Anyone who writes critically about Dean can expect his copy to be chewed up by this army of zealous Dean Internet scribes. When I wrote a piece recently that contained a few paragraphs about Dean, a member of the Dean2004 blog team filed an almost 2,000-word entry slicing my article up into sections with labels such as “true,” “false,” “inadvertently true,” and “foolish.” Not content with this, the Dean blogosphere recently established a rapid-reaction team called the Dean Defense Forces (DDF)–an e-mail list of hard-core Dean supporters who swiftly push back with e-mails, letters to the editor, blog entries, and phone calls against anyone spreading anti-Dean sentiments. “When he gets attacked, we’ll respond,” pledges the DDF’s organizer, Matthew Singer, a 20-year-old college student in Montana who once blogged about Dean on his own site, Left in the West.

It’s also possible that the referenced sections of Ryan Lizza’s piece were, respectively, true, false, inadvertently true and foolish. The New Republic is big J journalism, after all, as Mitch points out, and hanging on to its fragile franchise.

The Leadership Thing

I’d love to see Howard Dean go public to assert that his campaign should be superior in every way to the hegemony of small minded capitalists he is fighting on our behalf—in demeanor, logic and heart.

Then I’d like to see his team go forth among the people wielding calm logic and patient, reasonable dialogue to knock the livin’ shit out of the people who took our country away from us. On that point I’m archly conservative.

7:20:22 PM    comment [commentCounter (142)]