For all of 2003 and the first two months of 2004, the upcoming presidential election was a horse race. Literally, that was what the mainstream media called it. A "field' of Democratic candidates lined up at the "starting gate"." Howard Dean had an "early lead" while Dick Gephardt "faltered". Others "fell behind" in the "final stretch". After John Kerry was the only horse running, the media switched metaphors and began talking about a boxing match. Bush and Kerry were now "in the ring", "nose to nose", "throwing punches", hitting "below the belt" and so on.
The horse race produced a different kind of hacking than the boxing match. A lot of this is covered in "Hacking Democracy," which I wrote for the June issue of Linux Journal. This was a subject that would have made little sense four years ago. This year it makes sense for three reasons: 1) It's now a fatal mistake for a candidate to ignore the Internet; and 2) Hackers not only made the Net, but also Linux and most of the other platform tools that allow candidates to take advantage of the Net; and 3) Now hackers are involved in political campaigning. What's more, they're essential.
The involvement of hackers in politics is somewhat of a New Thing. Two years ago, Larry Lessig was giving hackers a hard time for not participating. (Leonard Lin has a recording of the speech, with visuals, that he made on his laptop at the event.) By late 2003, Larry's tune had changed almost completely. He was still harping on the need to free culture from the tyranny of monopoly-forever copyright interests, but he was easing up on the hackers a bit. This is from an interview with Christopher Lydon, the former New York Times political beat reporter (he was one of Tmothy Crose's famous Boys on the Bus), Berkman Fellow at Harvard and one-time candidate for mayor of Boston:
Eight months ago the name Dean belonged to a candidate who had no shot in hell of being elected President. Now we're at a point ...where Al Gore, the quintessential establishment candidate, has come out and endorsed Dean. Why? Because Dean has invigorated a grass roots movement. Now how did he do that? ... (Through) ideas that got ramified through structures like the blog, where people talked about and organized around a set of passions and ideas, and raised money around them. That's an extraordinary change... Nobody knows who Dean the candidate will be three months from now.... The point is, a year ago nobody would have predicted this was possible. Nobody would have imagined that an organization could be built from the grass roots up. And every single major Democratic leader was betting on exactly the opposite, as the future. And we've proven that they were wrong. Whether we were right about this candidate or the next candidate is not important. They were wrong about what makes the future possible. And that's exciting. I'm a pessimist by profession. That's my brand, is pessimism.
We have to remember why this was possible. It was only possible because of the Internet. That's what made this happen. And that will be how this campaign is remembered. It's the Internet that maybe lost against the establishment politicians, or the Internet that won against the establishment politicians; but it is the Internet that engaged political action that will be remembered as the most important moving part in this election.
The year 2003 was when hackers began to follow the advice so Scoop Nisker:" If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own". The Dean campaign made a lot of news for a lot of reasons. Not the least of those reasons was that it energized and engaged a lot of hackers.
Some of that hacking took the form of facilitating organizations like MeetUp and MoveOn. The former facilitated grass roots political activity in "meet space" while the latter gathered large numbers of people around single-issue advocacy. Both were built, to significant degrees, with Linux and other open source tools. But most of it involved candidates. Chief among those was Howard Dean.
I first heard about Hack4Dean in the summer of 2003. That was when my friend Britt Blaser, the former pilot, real estate developer and open source advocate (his own project is Xpertweb) started calling me up and feeding me news about What Was Going On. Britt's Manhattan apartment soon served as an ad hoc meeting space for all kinds of fun stuff (including a base for my study of wi-fi in Manhattan in the same time frame). That Fall, Hack4Dean became DeanSpace, which used Drupal as the framework for a kit that allows anybody who wants to create a rich and current political advocacy site to do exactly that. A pile of sites were spawned. There was parallel work being done at the Wesley Clark campaign, by Tony Steidler-Dennison, Cam Barrett and friends. (Cam has no doubt leveraged some of the energy, if not the code, for the Kerry campaign, where he now consults.) And the DeanSpace is now morphing to DemSpace (stay tuned), aiming at release 2.0.
Here's Britt's summary of the first well-hacked party presidential playoff season:
Many spent 2003 hacking code because they thought it might transform politics, and they were more right than wrong. They are the open source entrepreneurs of the governance tools space. Like all entrepreneurs, they are artists who create because they're incapable of not creating. They will spin out a hundred disappointments for every blockbuster they produce and, like Linux for the desktop, the user experience will be frustrating to most users and especially for the neophytes who run campaigns. Like many entrepreneurs, they have no clue how they'll turn their zeal into money. Adam Osbourne once wrote that the microcomputer revolution grew out of the closing of NASA's Apollo project. Those talented young engineers just knew there was some way they could keep doing what they liked to do, so they took the notion of an integrated circuit and ran with it. They had no grand scheme but they knew they could make a difference."
I spent a lot of time talking to developers and campaign people during the horse race stage of the season. One thing that became clear to me was that the open-ness of software tools tended to be a subordinate concern in the pressure-cooker context of a political campaign. I ran into Dave Winer at the Dean Campaign headquarters, hacking hard on Channel Dean, an RSS feed he described as "...a clipping service for people interested in U.S. politics". Although Dave has made more than his share of open source contributions -- to RSS, XML-RPC and SOAP and other projects -- he's a veteran commercial software developer who publicly advises campaigns to remain apolitical about technology:
Build on what the weblog development community has accomplished, and will continue to accomplish through November next year. Be open to users of all platforms. You can get the leading weblog tools vendors to help your candidacy and to help the election, but not if you exclude them from participating in your campaign!
The Dean campaign accepted Dave's advice, which was why Channel Dean happened.
Yet the ideas behind open source are deeply useful in politics, especially over the long term. This was one of the observations that guided Joe Trippi, the campaign manager who made Howard Dean into the "Internet Candidate". It's not just coincidental that Joe called Dean's an "open source campaign", and said "It's like Linux. The more people collaborate, the more likely we'll build a better thing." Trippi's long career path included a tour of duty with Progeny, working with Ian Murdock, the co-originator of Debian.
Nicolas Rushkoff's Open Source Democracy: How online communication is changing offline politics (London: Demos, 2003) gathers articulate takes on what open source and democracy are coming to mean for each other. Here's Douglas Alexander, Member of Parliament in the U.K.:
The Internet is both specific to the needs of its users and inherently a collectively engineered phenomenon. What makes this network succeed is a series of common protocols which facilitate but do not dictate the way in which the Web works. In the same way distributive democracy requires strong relationships between participants to ensure a feedback loop which allows innovation in policy-making to be diffused throughout every institution.
As Andrei Cherny argues, the information age seeks political entities which are built on conversations, not monologues. Thus participation is no longer about listening to a hierarchical decision-making process but instead a cooperative experience for all citizens. In helping to advance the ideals of the egalitarian society, this form of 'offline' extension of the principles of online action is to be welcomed. Yet, we must not lose sight that the driving force of this interactivity and its concomitant potential for extending egalitarian values is not the Internet itself but the voice it gives to our civic disposition.
Cherny was a senior speech writer to Al Gore at age twenty-one (the youngest in American history), author of the 2000 Democratic Party Platform, and founding Editor of Blueprint: Ideas for a New Century. Among other things, Cherny says we need to "Return America to our bottom-up Jeffersonian roots and turn away from our modern top-down Hamiltonian rule."
If you want bottom-up evidence, look no farther than the blogs of the two democratic candidates who did the most to cultivate their grass roots: Clark's and Dean's. Clark's blog is no longer linked from his official campaign site (in fact, all navigation links are now inactive there). Yet the blog lives on. The most recent post is from Clark himself, titled We have to help Kerry win. At last count, 191 comments followed. Dean's campaign is now rebranded Democracy for America, which is also the new name for the campaign blog. Comments there sometimes run in the hundreds as well.
Joe Trippi says the television era in campaigning is coming to an end, and the Internet era is just beginning. Substitute "privileged few" and "everybody" for "television and "Internet" and you can see how far-reaching this change will be. How much more time will pass before we all realize that mass mediated democracy isn't democracy at all, but a form of entertainment? The length of that time got a lot shorter this past year.
When the horse race ended and the boxing match began, a lot of energy naturally shifted from campaigning to governance. Today the challenge isn't just winning elections, but equipping democracy itself with better tools.
Nobody I know is more energized about making "connected governance" happen than Howard Dean's former top hacker-advocacy volunteer, Britt Blaser. His new project is Open Republic (no site yet). He calls it a guide to the new activism, "Dean done Right", and he aims to make it the indispensable site to "help activists grow their communities, their support, their contributions and their political power" and says that it will be "both an entry point for the tech-averse political novice and a back-room operations guide for the tech-savvy political pro". Either way it serves as a place to find and develop open source tools for making democracy work (plus other good things, still to be determined). Today Britt told me that the steering committee includes Ethan Zuckerman (another Berkman Fellow and founder of GeekCorps), Brian Behlendorf (of Apache and Collabnet) and Jeremy Allaire (of Cold Fusion and Macromedia), among other familiar figures. As always, he's sounding excited about where things are going.
"The founding fathers could hardly imagine the media culture we've had for the last seventy years -- a machine where information and opinion had mass producers and mass consumers," Britt said. "But they could imagine a culture where everybody had the power to print and distribute information, where the consent of the governed was self-informing, and where every citizen had the power not just to vote, but to participate. We're just starting to see people wake up and detoxify themselves from the narcotic we call television, and start to see how they can make the real world, rather than watch an artificial world make them. We want to help them make the kind of democracy citizens really want."