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Lessons on open source politics from the campaign forge

Nov 04, 2005  By Doc Searls

What do we know about "open source" political campaigns? More with every loss. Including a huge one, two months ago.

We all know Howard Dean ran an "open source" political campaign for president in 2003-4. Lots was learned from that one. Many tools were built. Many hackers got activated and involved. Many of those lessons, and others borrowed from the open source movement, were put to use in Andrew Raseij's campaign for Public Advocate in New York City, which ended in September with another loss. A big one, in fact.

Now his friend and campaign manager, Micah Sifry, has written a post-mortem that serves as the most complete and authoritative bug list yet compiled for the purpose of future "open source" political campaigns. In his report, Micah is as thorough and unsparing as a pathologist filing an autopsy report — or a first-class hacker, explaining Why Something Didn't Work.

If you care at all about politics, and how politics borrows wisdom from development communities, this is Required Reading.

While you're there, perhaps one of you can help Micah make his permalinks work. When they do, I'll change the link above to that one.

______________________

Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal

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scripts works

Serg's picture
Submitted by Serg (not verified) on Tue, 06/06/2006 - 07:24.

Now is not observed of such problems. Thanks

comment deleted?

jan's picture
Submitted by jan (not verified) on Tue, 11/08/2005 - 09:37.

I thought i wrote a comment here yesterday, has somebody deleted it?
When why? Or is it a technical problem?

greetz
jan

howdo

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 11/14/2005 - 10:20.

howdo

comment deleted?

Keith Daniels's picture
Submitted by Keith Daniels on Wed, 11/09/2005 - 11:51.

It was a technical problem. I "think" I have it fixed. The regular expressions used in spam filtering seem to work differently in the upgraded spam filter and I am having to rework all of them.

Sorry for the problem

Webmaster

"I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone.
My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone."
-- Bjarne Stroustrup

Its a pity that it didnt work.

ckn's picture
Submitted by ckn (not verified) on Mon, 11/07/2005 - 05:03.

seems to me that the power of the internet and using it calculated could easiliy be overestimated.

runnig succesfully an internet campaign, as you can see every day, depens on more (maybe random) factors than you can forsee.
some storys are succesfull, others not.

Using this power is hard to handle :) if you know how, you can easily make your business or whatever (political campaign) in shortest time (see milliondollarhomepage) witzh great succes.

greetz
jan

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