[DigDemo] What I would have said

I'm on the organizing committee of the O'Reilly Digital Democracy Teach-In that will start in a couple of hours here in San Diego, and on Friday's final conference call, I managed to talk myself out of a spot. I gave up my 45 minute slot on e-campaigning so that we could have a Q&A session with Joe Trippi. And I'm thrilled we're going to have that opportunity.

So, here, briefly, are the points I would have made:

1. There's a paradox at the heart of voting. We are each reduced to what we have in common with others - one person, one vote - but voting is an assertion of our individuality. What other simple, binary choice engenders such endless discussions?

2. The architecture of broadcasting gets the "we are all the same" part of the paradox but misses the "we are all individuals" side. The Dean campaign's Internet strategy didn't reverse the broadcast metaphor, so that messages flow from the bottom to the top, so much as allow the people at the "bottom" (citizens and supporters) to connect directly to one another. It thus became not about messages but about relationships.

3. This enabled the campaign to do something that large businesses mainly fail at: Scale conversations. You can't scale them up the broadcast tree because the president of P&G, or Howard Dean, can't engage in a million personal interactions. But they do scale if you let the conversations spread among the people who make up the "market."

4. Because this is about relationships, not information, groups of supporters may legitimately get together to provide encouragement and comiseration. It may look like an echo chamber if you only watch the information content, but that misconstrues the social role of the online group.

Ack, have to go run to meet Doc! I'll fix this up later.