Through the weekend, I heard Cluetrain quoted a number of times. There was my "markets are conversations" line, and David Weinberger "hyperlinks subvert hierarchy." But the one that made the most sense of the campaign was Chris Locke's "networked markets get smarter faster than most companies". Exactly that principle, I heard, applied in electoral politics today. That's why the campaign was building or applying technologies that embraced their own networked markets.

Sitting in the server room, IT Manager Harish Rao waved at racks of machines and said, "Very little in here is not open-source-based. The accounting system runs on Microsoft, for example. And we have a NAS -- network attached storage box -- that's proprietary, but also Linux based. The back end is completely accessible. We could have built our own box and saved a little bit of money, but I'd rather have my people working on what the box is supposed to do, which is important backups."

Rao's team is adrenalized to make choices that are pragmatic, resourceful and either inexpensive or free. "We recognize two things in our development here," he says. One is that pretty much everything we do has been done before, by somebody, somewhere. The other is that we're here because of our supporters." And those supporters help. While the organization is busy developing a "voter file" system to send out to the field offices, it's also embracing the systems already in use by some of those offices.

The organization also takes advantage of outside commercial products where they make sense as well. Some are open source, such as BestPractical's RT request tracker <http://www.bestpractical.com/>. Some are not. While I was there, Userland founder Dave Winer drove up from Boston and installed Channel Dean, "an RSS feed that's like a clipping service for people interested in US politics". It's based on Userland's Manila <http://manila.userland.com/>, a commercial product that runs on OS X and Windows.

"We're very pragmatic," Harish Rao said. "We do what works. You need a balance. I think for most back-end services and infrastructure, open source is the way to go. For the desktop, we believe in choice. Use what you want. Most of the services you're accessing are off the Net anyway. If you're used to Outlook, hey, it does some good things. So we take a practical approach. But we're members of the open source community, and that's our context."

So is the pressure-cooker environment. "Everything around here is a scaling issue," Harish said. "Even going to the bathroom. Everything here has to do with scaling. We have to do a really good job of doing a lot with a little, in a quarter of the time. We've been able to do that."

How?

"I believe in three principles," he said. "First I always make sure I hire people I can trust 100%. Second, I always try to hire people who are smarter than I am. Third, I give them the independence to do as they see fit as long as they communicate about it to their other team members. We've had a lot of growing pains, a lot of issues; but we've been able to deal with them because we have a high level of trust, skill, and communication."

Of course, a political campaign is a special case. Ir self-selecta people who are at the high end of the motivational bell curve. No pointy haired bosses or lazy Wally characters from the world of Dilbert. Can you expect the same inside less extreme organizations?

I think so. Most enterprises have at least some high-pressure jobs that require high levels of motivation. The extreme examples forge our ideals. Seems to me that the Dean For America experience applies.