« Flarf: post-literary semantic babbling as poetry | Main | Farewell to Doc Tom » DemcommJock Gill posted, at GreaterDemocracy.org, a brief history of the collision of politics and social software in 2004, including notes from the Demcomm group that formed to advise the Kerry campaign on the potential to build communities of supporters using online tools. (The Kerry campaign didn't take the advice). I was part of the Demcomm group, along with Howard Rheingold, Nanci Meng, Tex Coate, and several others. We created a draft plan, and We never heard back. We could only watch as Kerry imposed a traditional, asymmetrical, industrial era Master/Slave broadcast communications organizing principal on his campaign. Kerry did not trust the voters to generally do the right thing most of the time. Thus he was basically unable to leverage cooperative gain created by the collective actions of his supporters at the edges of his campaign. Kerry only understood power as it is ceated by asymmetrical relationships. This lead him to treat his supporters as sheeple, not as citizen activists.Joe Trippi posts an interesting comment re. the Dean campaign: There is an implied belief among many that there was tremendous agreement inside the Dean Campaign to take the Peer-to-Peer path over the Master-Slave model -- this simply was not true. It was a fight every day keep the master/slave beast at bay. In hindsight the miracle was that we held it off as long as we did given how many inside and outside the campaign relished master/slave over peer-to-peer.Trippi notes that Jock, who consulted for the Dean campaign, was "instrumental in helping to keep us on track (for as long as we stayed on track)." (Thanks to Jock for the pointer!) jon posted this at 5:55 PM |
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