Beyond Horse Races and Boxing Matches

Let's simplify things a bit.

Democracy basically is about two things, elections and governance. One
is seasonal, the other continuous. And nothing sucks up more attention
in a democracy than our quadrennial presidential election seasons here
in the US. The playoff nature of presidential primaries turns politics
into a sports event, with metaphors adjusted to the populations involved.

For all of 2003 and the first two months of 2004, we had a
horse
race between eight Democrats, while the lone Republican--the
incumbent in the White House--ran unopposed. The "field" of
Democratic "dark
horses", "thoroughbreds" and "mavericks"
lined up at the
"starting
gate" and "ran" a "race". The media talked
about Dean's "early
lead", while Dick Gephardt and others "faltered"
or "fell
behind" as they all headed for the "final
stretch". After voters removed Dean as the "frontrunner"
and nominated Kerry instead, 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.

But something else was happening while we all watched the sports
pages: open source was making headway in government. That's
what I learned from Tom Adelstein, the veteran Texas activist
who has written extensively on open source in government for
Linux Journal (see here and
here, in addition
to his eight-part
series on "Linux Access in State and Local Government").

As an example, Tom pointed me to Core.gov, a government source
for business process and technical components. It's a place to
search for the components you need or to submit components for
use by others. It's a way to leverage work that's been done, either on code or on ways of putting code to use. Obviously, it's
a system that not only favors open source but is in alignment with
the open-source value system. Core.gov is a private-public effort
that grew out of the Federal Enterprise Architecture Agency (FEA)
Project Management Office. It was developed with the assistance of
Collab.net and uses Collab.net's
SourceCast
tool. Tom says Core.gov is an example of good work by open-source
advocates and interested federal officials and agencies--work
that is off to a good start but only beginning:

I work in the trenches with state and local governments as well
as federal agencies. Overwhelmingly, we're seeing a shift from a
proprietary model to open source, open standards. The key triggers are
interoperability, security and consistency. The federal government
will fund interoperable, standards based development on every level
of state and local government if we're talking about GOTS. But, we're
seeing funds dry up for proprietary, vendor lock-in type systems. This
is killing the existing vendors.

We're not over the hump yet. We have something like 88,000
communities that need to deploy the new applications and protocol.
You'd be totally surprised to see what the Feds are funding--like
NSF's "open source" middleware initiative.

Tom also says Core.gov is evidence of real support for open source by
the Bush administration, which has received scant credit for that
support:
I think it really speaks to how this Administration wants to save tax
dollars, create jobs, invent a new industry and improve the economy. I
mean, this is the sourceforge.net of government--federal, state, local,
municipalities. It fits your Do-It-Yourself IT
model.
I ran some calculations and we're talking about budget savings of $56B
per year for about five years.

Here's the NSF Middleware grant: http://fedgrants.gov/Applicants/NSF/OIRM/HQ/04-555/Grant.html.
Notice the sentence, "The program encourages open source software
development and distribution approaches, as well as the development of
necessary middleware standards.
Keep in mind that the Republicans sponsored and supported the open-source
bills here in Texas and in the other southern states. In fact,
everywhere I work, it's Republicans and the religious right pushing open
source.

That may not be true in the northeast and in California, but it's true
where I'm seeing open source being adopted: Florida, Alabama, the
Carolinas, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma. Now guess who our biggest
money sponsor turns out to be? A very senior Republican in the US
Senate.

Almost every vendor I know doing work for the DOD using Linux is a
conservative Republican, too.

The first Bush presidential campaign already was using list-servers,
e-mail and newsletters to garner contributions. GW has an intimate
relationship with and clearly understands the power of the Internet--he
made funding eGovernment one of his first initiatives. That's what
bothers me about some of the guys who don't realize he's really one of
us.

I went through an extensive search when I did the Texas
Open Source Bill and found a lot of Microsoft money being donated to
Democrats--hardly any to Republicans.

And let's not forget that David Boies, SCO's attorney, used to work for Al Gore.

When it comes to hackers and politics, guys like Tom are exceptions. On
the whole, hackers have long been relatively apolitical, as
constituencies go. That changed in 2003. To gauge how much it changed,
go back to the summer of 2002, when Larry Lessig gave a keynote titled
"Free
Culture" at the O'Reilly Open Source
Convention in San Diego. He came down
hard on the audience for its apathy toward political issues.
(Leonard Lin has a recording of
the speech, with visuals, that he made on his laptop at the event.)
Toward the end, Lessig said,

I have spent two years talking to you, to us, about this. And we've not
done anything. A lot of energy building sites and blogs and Slashdot
stories; nothing yet to change that vision in Washington. Because we
hate Washington. Who would waste his time in Washington?

If you don't do something now, this freedom you built--that you spend
your life coding--this freedom will be taken away; either by those who
see you as a threat and then invoke the system of law we call patents,
or by those who take advantage of the extraordinary expansion of control
that the law of copyright now gives them over innovation. Either of these
changes, through law, will produce a world where your freedom has been
taken away.
And if you can't fight for your freedom, you don't deserve it.

People hung their heads and nodded along.

Yet by late 2003, Larry's tune had changed. He still was harping
on the need to free
culture
from the tyranny of monopoly-forever copyright interests, but he was
easing up on hackers about the participation issue. Because things had
changed. Here is an excerpt from an interview with
Christopher
Lydon, the
former New York Times political beat reporter (he
was one of Timothy
Crouse's famous Boys
on the Bus when McGovern ran against Nixon), 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, 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 of 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,
but one of the biggest was that the candidacy energized and engaged a
lot of hackers. Even though I was pro-actively covering the campaign for
Linux Journal (look for "Hacking Democracy" in the June
issue), hackers and campaign workers enabled by hackers reached out to
tell me what they were doing--not just for Howard Dean, but for Dennis
Kucinich, Joe Lieberman and Wesley Clark as well.

Simply put, open-source hacking enlarged the entire political sphere
and made it much more friendly to participation by citizens. MeetUp alone facilitated an enormous
sum of grass roots activity. I learned about MeetUp when I met founder
Scott Heiferman at an eThePeople event in New York City
in 2002. That's where I also met Britt Blaser, a retired
pilot and
real estate
developer who wanted to tell me about an open-source project called
Xpertweb. MeetUp, eThePeople and
Xpertweb all, in their own ways, are Linux hacks. It was clear to me
then that Linux and open source lowered the threshold of tool-building
and participation for what we might call "connected
democracy".

One year later, however, open-source tools were proving mighty handy for
the man who came to be known as the "Internet candidate",
former Vermont governor Howard Dean. Managing Dean's campaign was
Joe Trippi, a political
veteran whose long career path included a tour of duty with Progeny, working with
Ian Murdock, the co-originator of
Debian. It's was no accident that
Trippi 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."

Naturally, the Dean campaign attracted a lot of hackers. The first project I heard about was
Hack4Dean, in the summer of 2003.
By that time Britt Blaser was calling me almost every day to report What
Was Going On with the Dean campaign, in which he was now highly
involved. Britt's Manhattan apartment served as an ad
hoc meeting
space for all kinds of fun stuff (even a
base for my
study of
Wi-Fi in Manhattan for the September 2003 Linux
Journal). Hack4Dean
eventually became
DeanSpace, which used
Drupal as the framework for a kit that
allows anybody to create a rich and current political advocacy
site.

Of course, parallel work was being done at the Wesley Clark
campaign by Tony
Steidler-Dennison (who writes frequently for Linux
Journal)
Cam Barrett and friends. The two
built the Clark Community Network, Clark TechCorps and other tools for
organizing grass roots activity. Tony tells me there still are developers
working on those tools, even though the Clark campaign has long since
folded. Meanwhile, Cam has moved over to the Kerry campaign, where he now
consults. And Britt just told me that the DeanSpace will soon morph into
DemSpace (stay tuned), aiming at release 2.0.

Here's
Britt's summary of the what happened to
hackage in the horse-race stage of the current political 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."

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 US
politics". Although Dave has made more than his share of
open-source contributions--to RSS, XML-RPC, 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.

Nicolas Rushkoff's Open
Source Democracy: How online communication is changing offline
politics (London: Demos, 2003) gathers articulate opinions about
what open source and democracy are coming to mean for each other. Here's
Douglas Alexander, Member of Parliament in the UK:

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 21
(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 and
Dean. I'm not talking about
the blogs as expressions of technology here, but rather as places where
the grass roots continue to grow. Even though Clark's blog is no longer
linked from his official campaign
site
(in fact, all navigation links are now inactive there), the activity
continues. 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
also is the new name for the campaign blog. Comments there often run in
the hundreds as well.

Joe Trippi says the television era in campaigning is coming to an end,
while 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. The
re-usability of open source is one big reason.

For example, take the
campaign
of George W. Bush, which
features a blog of the sort modeled by that herd of Democrats. The whole
site was relaunched on April 17, and now puts out the same level of
energy we saw on the Democratic side through the whole horse-race stage
of the campaign season.

I asked Tom Adelstein if he knew what was up with the Bush campaign
site. For example, was it still running on Windows (as a Netcraft query
suggested)? He replied, "The White House uses Apache on Solaris. They
got rid of the outsourced Web Servers. The current site was built by Omniture and runs SiteCatalyst and they
are a Linux shop."

One key point made by the Cluetrain Manifesto, which I co-wrote five
years ago, was "Networked markets get smarter faster than most
companies." When I visited the Dean campaign in Vermont, several
people there told me they were applying that statement to politics.
"We're at the front of a parade here", one guy told me.
"We let the voters take the lead." The voters then rejected
Howard Dean.

But what happens to all the energy that built up during the campaign
season? A lot of it is shifting from activism for candidates to activism
for governance. And naturally, nobody is more energized about making
"connected governance" happen than Howard Dean's former top
hacker-advocacy volunteer, Britt Blaser.

Britt's new project is Open Republic (no site yet). He calls it a "guide to the
new activism" and "Dean done Right". He also aims to make
it the indispensable site to "help activists grow their
communities, their support, their contributions and their political
power". He says 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. The other day Britt told me that the
steering committee includes Ethan
Zuckerman (another Berkman Fellow and founder of GeekCorps),
Brian
Behlendorf (of Apache and Collab.net) and Jeremy Allaire
(of Cold Fusion and Macromedia), among other familiar
figures (including at least one Republican I know but can't name yet--the group is non-partisan).

As always, Britt'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. 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.

Sounds like something about which all the horses and boxers should
agree.

Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal.