Lessons on open source politics from the campaign forge
November 4th, 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
On June 6th, 2006 Serg (not verified) says:
Now is not observed of such problems. Thanks
comment deleted?
On November 8th, 2005 jan (not verified) says:
I thought i wrote a comment here yesterday, has somebody deleted it?
When why? Or is it a technical problem?
greetz
jan
howdo
On November 14th, 2005 Anonymous (not verified) says:
howdo
comment deleted?
On November 9th, 2005 Keith Daniels says:
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
Its a pity that it didnt work.
On November 7th, 2005 ckn (not verified) says:
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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