Open Sourcery
I'm privileged to be the Senior Lurker and Occasional Contributor
to the team that's building AmericansForDean (A4D)–Zack & Josh and
all the rest. After having my open source sensors tuned up at OSCon last
week, it's fascinating to watch these guys re-inventing democracy out in
the open.
These
truly are
the best
of times, because our tools have become permission-free. Just as there
is no way to stop us from Purchasing
the Dean Campaign by buying
our own votes,
there is also no way any force on earth can keep citizens from giving themselves
the tools to contribute money, ideas, talent and shoe leather to
the political activity of their choice. A4D is building an open source toolkit.
I call it Campaign-in-a-Box (notice that little RSS Feeds widget in
the center):
There's an interesting aspect to all open source
tools: These are commodities that,
like Google or the 'Net itself, stop working if passionate
people don't show up each day, as Tim O'Reilly pointed out in his OSCon
keynote.
You may have all the money in the world, but unless you invest yourself in
the results you promise to the world, there's no there there.
The scarce resource is NOT capital,
but rather the ideas and energy to make commodity tools do insanely great
things. Once there's a resource scarcer than capital, are we still practicing
capitalism? I'm not sure.
Mistake-based Talent
Different organizations treat mistakes differently. When I
flew airplanes for Uncle Sam, we always talked about fuck-ups. They
are the raw material for all aviation stories, since aviation is hours
of sheer boredom punctuated
by moments of stark terror. We all agreed that aviation rules are just
a collection of be-nos.
Yeah, be-nos. As in "There'll be no more of this
and there'll be no more of that." Every action you take in an
airplane is surrounded by the hundred ways you could screw it up with spectacular
results. You're never on course, you're correcting back to course. You're
never on time,
you're adjusting to make your ETA. And bombs dropped by humans are never
right on target.
I saw that kind of approach in my consulting to a couple of
university medical departments. Every week, they hold an "M&M"–Morbidity
and Mortality
Conference about what went wrong the previous week. Doctors
talk proactively
about mistakes for the same reasons pilots do–their mistakes are so obvious
and so significant. Perhaps Dr. Dean will talk about mistakes as well as
successes,
for how can
anyone enjoy success without committing errors?
The same is true for engineers and programmers. Programmers
write code and immediately list all the things that are wrong with it. A
group of programmers
talks about what's wrong, ways things can be done better and then they go
away and do real work to improve performance the next day. Here's the kind
of thinking you get from a programmer:
I did this in perl, and I can probably port the code,
but I don't quite know what
sort of modules are available in php for mail header construction/deconstruction.
I
added these notes here:
[URL for the Dev wiki]
Please tell me if I'm way off base here.
(from
an A4D volunteer email just in)
Perfection-based Companies
But that's not how most companies
behave. Companies never tell you what's wrong, though it's obvious that
things are
haywire. Instead they minimize problems and deflect criticism and
suggestions. We've built a business culture focused so much on appearances
that reality
is
nowhere in sight.
Most corporations only know how
to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement,
marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same
old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect
for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.
— Cluetrain
It should be no surprise that, when a President campaigns
as our CEO, his spin can outweigh his facts, causing some people–curmudgeonly
sticklers for detail–to mistrust the spin behind the recent hostile
takeover bid for a long term, low cost oil lease in the middle east.
Mistake-based Democracy
You don't collect Internet clues if you're in denial about
your mistakes.
"The clue train stopped there four times a day
for ten years and they never took delivery."
— Veteran
of a firm free-falling out of the Fortune 500
There's a current notion in the body politic that it's unpatriotic
to discuss problems. Finding faults in America is equated with finding fault
with the American experiment. Of course that's just silly. We're making mistakes
every day because this nation is a human enterprise. People with an America–Love
It or Leave It bumper
sticker apparently can't live in an imperfect world, preferring to be coddled
in some theme park America where you're surrounded by uncomplaining, politically
passive citizens.
Doc writes today about the Dean Meetup he attended last night
in Santa Barbara:
The main attraction for the event, from what I gathered
from a few conversations, was a pitch passed among friends by email and
phone: Maybe Dean has the best chance of dumping Dubya. The assumption
seemed to be that Dean was the one Democrat who was not only taking clue
train deliveries, but laying as much track as possible. This, of course,
is why I'm so interested in what the man and his campaign are up to.
On Tuesday Doc quoted his
Cluetrain co-author:
Go back and read what Dr
Weinberger says
about "management."
Every company already to one degree or another is a
hyperlinked organization, although management may not yet know it.
...(get) out of the way. It's not your job to create
conversations, to create voices. It's your job to listen to the conversations
and voices already there.
The web is remaking business in its image. This is
a bottom-up, distributed network of people creating their own loose structure.
You're not in charge anymore. Resist the reflex to reassert your control.
Here's what's cool: What's happening in slow motion
to business is happening rapidly to politics. So far the Dean
people are taking advantage of the change.
Wow. "What's happening in
slow motion to business is happening rapidly to politics." And
then I got it: Politics is like war, where you improvise within a tactical
framework, without the luxury of endless staff meetings.
Unlike past
campaigns, Dean's Campaign Manager Joe Trippi is running one that doesn't
claim to know it all. He acknowledges that he's learning from the comments
posted
on the
campaign's blog. The campaign's bloggers, Zephyr and Matt and Joe and (oh
yes) Howard, are
having a conversation with their supporters, speaking in a human voice:
Doonesbury Getting Local with Dean Again
I haven't been linking to every single Dean-focused Doonesbury because there
are too many -- but I can't resist this one. Dean
supporters organizing with the Get Local tools are featured again.
Technology happens fastest in war and communications technology
is happening fast in this campaign. The campaign has built a rapid
feedback loop that's not going to disappear after the election. These donors
will be just as demanding of the President they bought as any other donors.
And that's where the A4D network comes in. Remember that widget called RSS
Feeds in
the network graphic?
It's a technical breakthrough in campaign organization, a
chaordic disruption of party politics, and another genie freed from
its bottle. This is a big deal:
- The campaign (or resulting presidency) can't ignore the
comments posted to its own blog
- Interesting comments rise through the Dean sites to reach
a broader audience
- More information moves to the campaign than from it
- More initiatives and work get proposed and acted upon from
outside the campaign than within
Consider these two
comments (of 127 so far) to the blog
announcement that
former Senator Howard Metzenbaum (Ohio) is supporting Dean. This is the
kind of ferment that's not unusual in 19 minutes of Blog
For America comments:
__________________________________________
Hi bloggers
etc. -
I have an idea that may sound strange, but I'd like
some feedback. We've been doing a great job of getting the word out digitally,
but
I've become
increasingly convinced that it will be our success outside the digital-world
that will define this campaign. The thing that has been so great about
this campaign, however, has been our ability to use the internet
to do real grass-roots
organizing and keep everyone engaged and excited.
I've been thinking
that we could probably use computers to organize a huge outreach effort
by building a one-to-one non-digital action database.
It seems like
there are plenty of supporters who would be happy to make a few calls
a day or write a few letters a week.
It also seems like we can (as
a group) probably identify a number of the people who would like to
hear from Dean supporters, (from Democratic
mailing
lists, friends, family, folks we talk to who want more information
but can't get online).
If we can employ a Database for sharing
information about who we should call or write to, then we can be more
efficient about using
our people-power
(letting
the people who know a lot of interested people, but don't have
much time, share those contacts with people who have exhausted
their personal
resources
but have plenty of time to help.
I've been moved by the effectiveness
of the one-to-one campaigning, and since we definitely have the people
power we've got to use
it.
I worry about security problems etc . . . What does
everyone think ?
Posted by Anne Bradley at July 17, 2003 04:53 PM
__________________________________________
Response
to Anne: Yes, capital idea. Logistically a bit of a problem, and perhaps
security a bit of a problem also,
but probably
not
insurmountable. The letter-writing campaign is a great
idea, and many hands
make light work. Computers might make a distributed mass
letter-writing campaign possible.
How about it, Joe?
Figure you can ramp it
up? Let's
see;
if 200,000 people each write one letter a week
for six months, that's
5.2 million letters...for Howard Dean and other
Democratic candidates as well. And it's on the cheap. No number of
$2,000 hot dogs
could buy it.
No other candidate can offer that level
of assistance to
state
and local central committees.
Posted by Alan
Barbour at July 17, 2003 05:12 PM
__________________________________________
"Since we definitely have the people power we've
got to use it."
Has that kind of dialogue ever been conducted by anyone but
campaign staffers? Have two voters ever designed a letter-writing campaign
and ragged on a campaign manager to provide the contact data so they can
get out the vote? But it gets better. The campaign staff is surely overwhelmed
with the mechanics of the
campaign.
Will they be able to respond to Anne and Alan's initiative? It's not certain.
Has a campaign ever enjoyed the resources represented by
A4D and thousands of other experts who consider it their obligation to
manage data on behalf of the campaign? Experts with the means to
design the data base, the User Interface, and
acquire the data for their fellow voters to write letters and to report
which letters have been sent and which calls made?
How does a conventional campaign, no matter how rich, respond
to such passion? It's a big challenge in a world where passion and smarts
is the apparent successor to capital as the dominant force in our economy.
10:20:03 PM 
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