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made early and creative use of direct mail, a tactic that not only
didn t elect McGovern but was also quickly adopted and ulti-
mately co-opted by the Republicans, who to this day have
made far better use of the medium.
Yet there may well be reasons to think that the Net is better
suited to progressives. First, the Republican rank and file tend to
stay on message maintaining a coherent party line despite
disagreements on peripheral issues. Republicans are also a party
of centralization thoroughly in bed with Big Business and all
too happy to use government power to regulate the most pri-
vate kinds of behavior.
The Democratic Party s lack of unity may have provided
one of the openings for Net politics. There s more genuine
debate, I sense, in the left-wing blogs than on right-wing blogs
more willingness to allow comments, for one thing. Republi-
cans have a more cohesive caucus, conceded Moulitsas, but
we hash out the issues.
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we the media
open source politics
I have no doubt that the 2004 campaign will be seen, in retro-
spect, to have shown the first glimmerings of open source poli-
tics. What does that mean? Open source politics is about partici-
pation financial as well as on the issues of policy and
governance from people on the edges. People all over the
world work on small parts of big open source software projects
that create some of the most important and reliable compo-
nents of the Internet; people everywhere can work on similarly
stable components for a participatory political life in much more
efficient ways than in the past.
The Dean campaign is hardly the only example of people
using the Internet to take action in innovative ways. Perhaps the
most intriguing idea, from an open source perspective, was an
experiment by MoveOn.org.129 This left-of-center nonprofit was
formed during the Clinton impeachment drama Censure the
president and move on, was the mantra that launched one of
the Net s most powerful political organizations.
The experiment was a contest staged in the spring of 2004,
called Bush in 30 Seconds, 130 in which MoveOn invited reg-
ular people to create their own anti-Bush commercials. The 15
finalists were an incredible display, not just of activist senti-
ments but of the power of today s inexpensive equipment and
software for making videos. It was a demonstration of how per-
sonal technology had begun to undermine, as Marshall
McLuhan had long since predicted, the broadcast culture of the
late 20th century. Tools that were once the preserve of Big
Media were now in the hands of the many.
Wes Boyd, MoveOn s cofounder, told me that he and his
colleagues were deeply impressed by the passion and creativity
that went into the Bush in 30 Seconds spots, as well as by
their technical execution. Whether one agreed with the ads or
found them appalling, they compared well, at least in terms of
impact, with spots by the pros. I m excited about turning the
broadcast medium back on itself, Boyd said.
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the consent of the governed
Open source politics was integral to the Dean campaign,
which relied on open source programmers who flocked to the
cause and wrote software that ran the campaign s online
machinery. After the Dean campaign shut down, some of the
programmers moved to other campaigns, and some decided to
work on new platforms for the future.
Members of an unaffiliated group called Hack4Dean, later
renamed DeanSpace,131 contributed tools including social-
networking software designed to connect volunteers. Their
work, itself based on an open source project called Drupal, is
continuing. Zack Rosen, one of the programmers, later received
venture-capital funding from a California firm that looks for
public-interest investments. He and his team would build a
groupware tool set that included content-management, mail
lists and forum posting, blogging, and much more. Initially, the
goal was to create an analogue to Yahoo! Groups, the online
service that lets nontechies set up mailing lists, but to aim its
functions strictly at political campaigns. In the long run, the
goals were much more ambitious:
To establish a permanent foundation that can spearhead
social software development projects for non-profit organiza-
tions. Unless an organization is committed to hiring full time
engineers to do Web development, the only and most fre-
quent solution is to pay tons of money hiring firms to provide
proprietary black box Web application products. These
firms have a conflict of interest they live off the monthly
checks so they have a huge interest in owning the organiza-
tion s data and locking them into their services.
We want to create a much cheaper, open, and powerful
option for these kinds of services. The goal is to have a full-
time development shop that spearheads projects inside open-
source communities working on the applications these organi-
zations need, and a consulting firm that can support the
toolsets. This is a much more efficient and productive way to
do this kind of development.
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we the media
A safe prediction: Net-savvy campaigning will be the rule by
2008, and it will be lower-level candidates who do the next
wave of innovating. The Chandler campaign in Kentucky was
just the start.
If 2004 was a breeding ground for what s coming, it s clear
that the Internet will be integral to every campaign, not just an
add-on. For example, every candidate, or at least campaign, will
have a weblog or something like it. Keeping supporters up to
date and involved in the campaign s activities, will be as much a
part of the routine as keeping the media informed. In most
cases, there will be little difference. Campaign web sites will be
far more interactive than they are today, and will host a gen-
uine discussion instead of the pseudofolksy lectures we are used
to. All insurgent campaigns, and some incumbents, will raise
most of their money online.
If they re especially smart, campaign managers will take a
page from MoveOn s textbook. If I were running a political cam-
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