Blaser's papers from the Dean Campaign

Dean Documents. A Voice Crying in the Wilderness.

This is a list of papers and documents generated by Britt Blaser during his days and long nights volunteering with the Howard Dean campaign in 2003-4. These and many other, more detailed, concepts have been built into the web platform pending release by Open Resource Group, LLC.

The Revolution will be Engineered (PDF): A chapter written for Extreme Democracy, a collection of writings about the impact of technology on the political process.

Dean Nodes (PDF): A planning document from June, 2003 for the project that started as Hackers4Dean, retitled as Americans4Dean and later as DeanSpace when Zack Rosen was hired by the Dean campaign and now an open source project at CivicSpace Labs, which is currently at version 0.8.1.

New Member Invitation email sequencing: a cascade of personal emails and landing pages on the website to invite a friend to join the campaign, proceeding in tiny, natural steps for maximum recruitment.


Federating the Dean Campaign: An initiative to inspire and equip the grassroots to deal with each other in ways as empowering as if the staff had been involved, and for which they might earn "Dean Points." It rested on a "triplet model" and its extension, a notion I called "the polymer principle," holding that the relationships among the campaign's members are the skeleton upon which the campaign is built.		Dean People: A small Flash app to illustrate the social network that registered members of the campaign could build by inviting friends.

Strawberry Roots Activism: Grass roots on steroids, self-sustaining and propagating.

The Next Administration: A program to tabulate and aggregate the policy preferences of the campaign's 600,000 members to transform the campaign's unwelcome email broadcasting into a vibrant conversation, and base an American renaissance on that conversation. The campaign's professional policy advisers were supremely disinterested in polling the campaign's most committed supporters and tabulating their explicit policy preferences. They refused to have the candidate "tied to the explicit interests of his base." Naturally, they got what they wished for.

Dean Experts: Dean loyalists training others in new job skills and spreading the Dean message.

Dean Clubs: A proposal to invite people to contribute monthly at small levels, but to receive immediate recognition for the magnitude of their commitment: a certificate, suitable for framing, of course:

Democracy's To Do List: A post-Dean review of what's unfinished written in May, 2004 as a preamble to Andrew Rasiej's first Personal Democracy Forum.