July 25, 2004

I'm going to be blogging the Democratic Convention over at the Boston Globe's site...

March 22, 2004

Stirling Newberry at The Blogging of the President is insightful discussing the Politics Online Conference I blogged last Friday (starting here). (And, no, I'm not saying that because he says something nice about me.)

March 19, 2004

This was supposed to be a debate, with Zack Exley (MoveOn.org) and a guy from RightMarch.com on one side [Sorry, I didn't get his name! Ack!] and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (Daily Kos) and me on the other. Predictably, we all agreed that campaigns need both, although Kos and I did push the decentralization side harder.

We each gave a 5 minute intro, moderated by the natty Sidney Blumenthal of Salon and general media fame. Zack made an impressive, coherent case for the power of centralized control, while admitting that decentralized community-forming does have a role. But, to win the damn election, we need to be as disciplined as the Republicans, he says. I don't disagree with that, but I also see benefits to campaigns allowing and encouraging decentralized, bottom-up self-organization: It creates enthusiasm that then can lead to action. And, without it, campaigns tend to become top-down machines marketing a product or brand to us "consumers." I guess I ranted a bit about this during my five minutes. I was up to my demographic earlobes with all the talk of "consumers," "marketing campaigns," "branding," and, most of all, "messages." I told them that they were debasing our democracy. A highpoint of the campaign so far was when Kerry uttered five words off-mike because we got to hear his real voice.\ I want more off-mike comments! And, by the way, campaign blogging is off-mike, which is why it works and is important. We need to hear a human voice now and then. The lesson of the Dean campaign and of the Internet is (I said) that control kills scaling, and control kills voice. And that's why we need decentralization. We're about to begin 8 months of relentless, saturation advertising of the most offensive and stupid kind. It will to wear us down to nubbins of indifference. Only by connecting with others, in our own voices, will we find any passion or enthusiasm. Finally, I said, the campaigns ought to be thrilled when we take over their "messages," change the words to ours, apply them to our lives, go off in a thousand directions with them, because that's what it means to make an idea our own. By connecting with one another and by escaping from the controlled messages of the campaigns, we can make those campaigns ours. End o' rant.

The right-wing guy was good. Feisty. And it was a delight to meet Kos in person. Wow. It was, of course, pretty funny to be pitted against Zack, who is one of my heroes. I am a MoveOn automaton: If they tell me to send them twenty bucks because Zack's dog needs aroma therapy, I send 'em $20.

Joe Trippi follows Ken Mehlman as we eat our bad desserts in the packed room. He says [notes, not transcript! As always.]:

I agree with Ken that the party that puts the resources into the new medium usually ends up dominating that medium. It's a little worrisome that we may have just awakened a sleeping giant.

I want to talk about something bigger than any campaign. The Net is a new medium that's different: it empowers the average American. TV doesn't. TV may have been the most powerful appliance in the American home, but the power was for the networks and the advertisers. The Internet is about to change everything. It's finally matured and come of age. It's the most powerful tool ever put in the hands of the American people. It allows them to make their own networks, let their own voices be heard. It's not top down but bottom up. The changes it will bring will be even bigger than the early visionaries suggested.

The naysayers are generally right for 10-15 years — people said no one would want sound in pictures, etc. The Net is maybe where Nixon was with the Checkers speech.

For the past 40 years, we have had broadcast politics. Politics has been about collecting big fat checks and putting ads on TV. The American people got left out. Retail politics becamse making sure you got to that guy who can write the $2,000, not talking with the voters. The Dean campaign set out to change that system, not just changing presidents. Hundreds of thousands of Americans contributing less than $100 put together $50M+, more money than any Democratic candidate has ever raised...that was because 100s of thousands of people used the Internet to communicate with each other. That's the main difference between broadcast politics and the new politics of people actually getting involved in their democracy again.

This change is going to come and it's going to be mind-blowing.

When TV came in, the visionaries said what was going to happen, but they couldn't conceive of what the changes would actually be. We needed millions of people to use Amazon, to use eBay. That got people used to the Internet. We needed MoveOn.org and MeetUp. That got people ready for DeanLink that let people find others in their zip code, create their own event. They did this without any command and control from the Dean campaign. It'd be a mistake to underestimate the bottom-up power of the Internet. There are a lot of people in the recording industry today who wished they hadn't underestimated Napster, etc. For Washington to believe it's immune that it's immune to the bottom-up power of the Internet is a huge mistake.

What was really different about our campaign?

We started with 7 people and 432 known supporters nationwide on Jan 31. I found out about MeetUp from a blogger, Jerome Armstrong. By the end of the campaign,l we had 190,000 Americans signed up to meet up on the first Wednesday of every month and then go out and work for Dean.

There's a misunderstanding about blogs. We decided to launch the first presidential campaign blog in history. It changed our campaign radically. [He tells the 50-posters anecdote and the red-bat anecdote.]

The real change in America will come from people using the Internet, using the tools we all build...

He mentions Dean's new org, DemocracyForAmerica.com, and his own, ChangeForAmerica.com

Q: Does this bottomup technology really play well for the Republicans?

A: We're at this weird moment, like the Nixon-Kennedy things. The Internet is just one tool among others now. Over time, it won't be a tool for the campaign. It'll be a tool for the American people. They'll organize themselves whether the politicians like it or not. It could be this year. An organization could come from the grassroots and totally take over one of these campaigns.

The most bizarre one was the Disney fight. Roy Disney has a guy on the phone who has a web site that talks to 1.5M Disney shareholders. You're starting to see these little hiccups that don't make a lot of sense on their own, but collectively it's pretty clear that bottom-up change is coming. Which part raises more money under $100? $1,000? Republicans. The one category the Democratic Party leads in is over $1M. The Internet just changed this. The Internet let people say We want to be involved in our government. The Dean campaign didn't make it, but the genie is out of the bottle. It's gonna happen.

Q: Would you advise Ralph Nader to be more respectful of the new medium? He said he doesn't have time to spend on line.

A: There are studies that say more and more people spend more time online than in front of their television sets. Over time, they'll become the same box. You cannot ignore this or just get in the bunker and pray that you're alive when it's over. The American people now have this tool. The Dean campaign was just the very first babystep of what's coming.

The political press by and large doesn't understand the Internet, and the Internet press doesn't understand politics.

Q: Will the Internet get out the vote in November?

A: Yes. The real debates over the issues is occurring on the Net.

Q: Are you seeing disruptive campaigns in other countries?

A: We tried everything, including SMS. It just didn't work; we had 5,000 people. Korea is an example of a government changed by the Net.

We put up a list of undecideds in Iowa and suggested that supporters write letters. But the Net is transparency, so the Clark and Kerry campaigns sent people to our site and used the list to send their own letters.

[I came late to this.] Influentials are more Republican and less Democratic than the general public, but less likely to be undecided.

The top concerns of the influentials are terrorism, foreign relations, but they are less interested in terrorism than the general public and more interested in foreign relations. Terrorism is trending up. The breakdown of the family is trending down. The only domestic issue trending up is health care.

Who are the online influentials? They did a a phone survey of 1,000 poeople and an online survey of 1,400 people. 7% of the phone surveyees counted as online political citizens (OPC) while 35% of those surveyed online were.

62% are male
59% have college degrees
42% have incomes over $75,000
36% are between 18-34
81% are white (compared to 86% in gen pop)
44% have never done any political work or contributed
49% are Democrats
29% are Republicans
46% have made a donation
24% have made a donation online

Compared to the general population, the OPCs are far more likely to have attended a meeting, written a politican, etc. The numbers franged from 2x to 8x.

Q: What's the relative importance of the media?

Guy from Slate: The blog community is real important here, extending stories indefinitely.

Another guy: The influentials watch a little more TV than everyone else. They're the biggest consumers of media. So, yeah, the media are important.

Cam Barrett, ex of Clarke, now consulting to Kerry, starts. At Clarke, he built an infrastructure for online community. Everyone got to have their own voice and point of view.

Gary Kebbel, News Director for AOL, says that only online news is growing. It's not just the medium. It's the audience. [We are not an audience!] That's why at AOL we've created an election site that hits all the audiences. We're most proud of our "SideShow" page, a partnership with Comedy Central, the Onion, Bill Mahr and others. He reads some cynical definitions from The Onion. It's got audio essays.

Vaughn Ververs is the editor of Hotline (a for-pay offering from The National Journal). He says some stuff about how he uses lots from the Internet but doesn't trust everything. E.g., he doesn't trust Drudge.

Stirling Newberry says that the Net is becoming mainstream. It's like TV in 1952: it can break stories but not drive the discussion. And pay attention to the rhythm of the news cycle. Push messages out from your center — your community.

Q: How do you find that influential center?

A: Technorati.com and other such sites.

Morra Aarons, moderator and director of Internet Communications, asks "Is it our message?" but the audience seems to think, yeah, it is our message.

Q: [Me] You're all using the language of broadcasting: consumers, audiences, messages. Is it possible that that vocabulary is getting in the way?

Stirling: Yes. Cam, what do you think?

Cam: Yes. At Clarke, we built a community.

Gary: What sort of terms could we use instead?

Me [snottily, sorry] The marketing vocaabulary comes from the industrial revolution and the military. We don't need a specialized vocabulary because we have ordinary language to talk about who we like talking with.

Stirling: We do have a technical vocabulary: "Flaming," for example.

Q: How do you pitch to an Internet news source?

Cam: Don't pitch. Let them come to you.

Q: How do they find you?

Cam: Google, industry news partners...

Gary: I use the word "community" instead of "blog" because communities are bigger things. Blogs are just another word for home pages.

Q: How do we create news?

Morra: Personally, I still believe in traditional PR.

Cam: One of the most successful ways to get it done is to have the community talking about your news.

Hotline: The traditional methods are still the best. Call the reporters.

Stirling: Create a story and people will cover it. [My advice: Be interesting.]

I'm at the Politics Online Conference, put on by the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet. It seems to be te place to be. With 400+ paid attendees, it's the biggest conference the IPDI has put on.

The attendees ain't no Internet hippies. The guys dressed informally are the ones whose navy blue suits don't have pin stripes. Well, there is a Net brigade here, including Cameron Barrett, Mathew Gross, Joe Trippi, Dick Bell, Scott Heiferman, Joe Trippi. I've heard Zephyr is coming, too. (Yay!)

[NOTE: Much of what follows is in the voice of the speakers.]

Phil Noble (PoliticsOnline) is the moderator: It's a revolution. Are you having fun? Even TV didn't change politics as much as the Internet will. We've come so far so quickly: It was in 2004 that the first home page for a candidate was created, for Diane Feinstein. Two years later, Bob Dole, "the most unwired white man in America," talked about his home page in a debate. Then Jesse Ventura, then John McCain. The digital revolution is here.

Panelists: Charles Buchwalter (Nielsen ratings), Ed Kellerr (RoperASW), Mathew Gross (Dean blogger), Scott Heiferman (MoveOn.org) and Jimmy Orr (Internet News Director, The White House...yes, that White House).

Charles Buchwalter (Nielsen Net Ratings). People use TV because it's what they've done. The Bush and KErry TV campaigns are the ultimate brand campaigns, trying to distill their brands into just afew words. [Which is why they're evil. Oh, wait, that's my conclusion.]

There's definitive evidence that online is going mainstream. Whether you're talking about seniors, or Hispanics, there are groups across the board going online.

Do online media offer unique opportunities to reach new voters? Yes. [He shows some slides of data, but there are props on the sage obscuring my view.] Web users seems to be about 15% more likely to be interested in politics than a typical American. Web users are less likely to say that TV is their main source of news. Web users also vote at much higher rates. Overall, in the US population: 28% are Dem, 32% are Republican, and 40% are independent; the Web population significantly skews Republican. Buchwalter suggests that this is because of the digital divide. The conservative sites are more homogeneously conservative; the liberal sites have more independent visitors.

He ends with a pitch for using Nielsen to figure out which sites to advertise on.

Ed Keller (RoberASW) is a co-author of The Influentials. Who are these influentials? [He uses the rhetoric of "conversation," maybe because the theme of the conference is "The Conversation is Changing" — Markets are conversations and so are elections...at least they should be.] "Decisions are conversations," he says. From 1977 through today, word of mouth has become the dominant factor in conversations. The Internet enables word of mouth. The influencers are 10% of the population. [Ed goes through his standard slides about the demographics of the influentials. I sort of stopped caring, for no particular reason.] The influentials are connected to groups. ["The Influentials" is starting to sound like a bad Harold Robbins novel. "Gig Young and Kim Novak are The Influentials...in Panorama!"]

Scott Heiferman (Meetup). Scott shows photos of recent MeetUps, starting with a Bush MeetUp in Florida. Scott dispells myths about MeetUp: It's not just Dean, it's not just young, it's not just for "decideds," it's not just bottom-up, it's not just about raising money to buy TV ads ("Cut out the middleman"). and the idea that people want to get together is not new. Scott holds up a placard from an event sponsor and says: "This is not good." It's from a company that sells video-enhanced banner ads. "This is not what it's about." [Go, Scott!]

Mathew Gross (Dean blogger). I love Ed's numbers because a year ago it was hard to convince people that the Web sphere matters. Blogs let you do communication and community. Simply having the tool won't change politics; it's how you use it and what you say. The Web is and will continue to be a written medium. Home pages may start to disappear in favor of weblogs. Weblogs won't succeed if it's just press releases posted in reverse chronological order. The challenge is to make the site engaging. We did that in part by engagingi n the conversation alaready going on in the blogosphere. People read blogs looking for a filter. And weblogs and commenting gives everyone the ability to interact with the campaign.

Scott Orr (Internet News Director for the White House) was advised by White House counsel not to show up.

Q: David Halberstam says that the Internet isn't as transformative as TV. It's good for outsiders coming in, but not a big deal otherwise.

Charles: Yes.

scott: The lines are blurry. Suppose a campaign promotes its MeetUp campaign via TV.

Keller: It's too early to tell.

Q: Mr. Keller, what are the age demographics of the influentials?

Keller: They're found in every age group. There are more boomer influentials because there are more boomers.

Q: [Micah Sifry] Charles, what makes someone count as a "net user"?

Charles: It's a wide spectrum.

Q: Ed, are you saying that influencers are the same whether you're talking about SUVs or voting. I've never seen anyone genericize influencers across all categories.

Keller: If you step back from the individual point of view, that's what we look at. [?]

Q: [Henry Copeland from BlogAds] What percentage of influentials are online political citizens?

Keller: 7% of the population are OPCs.

Henry: That means half the influentials are OPCs.

Q: The Dean campaign raised $22M. Why did the campaign spend so little on Internet stuff, and most of it on Iowa and NH TV ads?

Mathew: We invsted far more in the Internet than any other campaign in history. We're not at the point at which the Internet can solve all problems. When you're 4-6 weeks out from Iowa, it's TV. The online communities are tremendous because they help you put the resources on the grouhd or on the air. The Internet is more powerul, at this stage, at the initial stage of the compaign.

Scott: Because most online advertising doesn't work.

[My point of view: Good panel. But not enough about what makes the Net special. Or, maybe I'm just wrong. Noooooo!]

March 14, 2004

Joe Trippi begins by pointing to a non-Net reality that shaped the campaign: After Jimmy Carter was elected, the Democratic Party's Hunt Commission changed the rules to work against insurgents. Since then, the rules have been tightened further. The only way for an insurgent to win, Joe says, was to win Iowa and New Hampshire.

We are now at the point TV was at 40 years ago, he says. The Dean campaign was the Kennedy-Nixon debates. But TV is a one-way medium. "The Internet is the singlemost powerful tool ever put in the hands of citizens." It allows us to network together, and we're just learning that we can change the country if we take action in common cause with others. Corporations and campaigns won't be able to keep secrets any more.

The Dean campaign was just the tip of the iceberg, he says.

He talks about how the Internet took an obscure governor and made him into the front funner, raising more money than any Democrat in history. How?

Blogs. That's where the debates about WMDs were happening in the blogosphere, not in the mass media which had embedded its reporters. Likewise, the blogosphere really pushed the awareness of the problems with electronic voting machines. He talks about how he first heard about MeetUp on the mydd.com blog.

Also, giving up some centralized control.

"There are 2 million Americans who would borrow $100 to get rid of George Bush, and it's going to happen this year." That, he says, will change American politics forever. "There's only one medium in the world that allows this to happen."

We did have to give up some control. But what's wrong with that? What's wrong with allowing people to work for their candidatee in their communities the way they want? MSNBC after 12 years has 250,00 viewers. In just a few months, the Dean campaign had 600,000 members. That's the power of giving up control.

"A guy like Dean [an insurgent] isn't supposed to get to where he got to. It's a dot com miracle."

"You're not going to tear down a system as corrupt as this one that's been built up over 40 years, it isn't going to be torn down in 13 months." But, he says, it will happen.

It's not just about defeating Bush: "If Howard Dean had gotten elected, there's practically no way his health care would have passed."

In 2008,lwe'll all look at the Dean campaign and laugh at how primitive it was.

Eli Pariser and Zach Exley, names probably familiar from your inbox — Eli has a disconcertingly consistent pattern of vowels and consonants — are talking to a packed crowd of about 400, explaining how MoveOn.org got started and how the Internet is enabling us to rebuild some of the community that's been lost over the decades.

They humbly stress how they stumbled into success, and make the good point that, when something succeeds, inevitably people look for geniuses which is "terribly disempowering" to everyone else.

They stress that we're just at the beginning of the Net-izing of politics. "In a few years, we won't be talking about a 2 million person email list. And we won't be focusing on MoveOn. We'll be talking about 40 million people and hopefully lots of groups."

They say that the report of 6M names on a Republican list is an exaggeration, and if they have that many, it's because they bought 'em and thus the names are less effective. "The Republicans are doing a good job on the Internet, but don't be intimidated by that 6M number. It's more like 400,000."

"And they haven't yet learned the power of having a two-way dialogue."

What will the connective platform in 2008, they're asked. Who knows, they answer.

The unsinkable Molly Ivins introduced them. She loves the Net and the way it's connecting us. I'd take issue with her call to find "some way" to get rid of the bad information on the Net — get used to it, Molly — but what a treat to hear her talk, if only for a few minutes.

March 13, 2004

I'm at the 5th annual Grassroots Use of Technology conference. There are maybe 200 of us — an overflow crowd — packed into an MIT lecture hall. The crowd is dominated by hardcore organizers who know about tech, rather than techies who think they know about organizing. Many are the voluntary poor who work fulltime, every day, on making life noticeably better at the most local of levels.

The conference proper begins with a panel of case studies and field reports. Andre Leroux tells of community redevelopment efforts in Lawrence, MA in which low tech is more valuable than high because too many people in the community just don't have Net access. On the other hand, they send people out with PDAs loaded with a Lawrence map; they click on the map and enter notes about locations. (GIS is everywhere — actually, not such a bad motto for a GIS organization.) Khalida Smalls tells how integrating databases enabled various transit-rider action groups (including the Transit Riders Union) to affect the hike-the-fares/lower-the-quality strategy of Mass Transit. Judy Brewer of the W3C makes a plea for accessible websites so more than 10% of your constituency won't be cut off. And Cliff Graves of Groundspring and Deborah (no last name given) talk about how the eBase database can help organize groups. All hands on, skinned knees, aching feet activists. Great to be in a room with them.

February 10, 2004

A lot of blogorhea from me yesterday. Sorry.

So, now that the last Birds of a Feather meeting is over, here's what the day looked like.

Granted, I'm on the organizing committee, but I thought it was pretty durn good. Trippi made what I think is the essential case: The Internet portion of the Dean campaign was a dot-com miracle, not a dot-com bust. He was a stirring speaker. I thought he wasn't nearly as good on what went wrong with the campaign; he pinned too much of it on the media for my taste. We need reflection now — and quickly — on exactly what worked and what didn't because we have to push ahead quickly.

The conference tried to stick with specifics and with the practical, which it succeeded at pretty well. I'm sure it wasn't nitty-gritty enough for some, but it was too mixed a crowd (which by itself was a good thing). There was a sense that what the various campaigns have built is bigger than the campaigns themselves. The BoF I went to about unifying the technology brought supporters of various candidates (and the guy behind RightMarch.com) together to plan how to apply the work already done to the work that needs to be done.

The panels were at worst very good. Two, in particular, were stand outs, given my interests: I thought Dan Gillmor's panel, with Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen, was outstanding, and the last panel, featuring Joi Ito and Ethan Zuckerman, splashed some needed cold water in our rosy little American faces.

And then there was my favorite part: The interstices. I haven't been to a conference in a few months, and I always forget, during the dreariness of packing and the glumness of leaving my family, how much I enjoy being with these folks that I admire, respect and love.

I came away reinvigorated, with a sense that we're going to be build an infrastructure that may de-boob the White House in 2004 and over the longer term could help revive a diverse, strong, democracy. So, a really good day.

February 09, 2004

Joi Ito: Today was US-centric. In some S.E. Asian countries, "fairness" comes before "democracy." And there were a lot of white Americans talking about blogs today. Blogs mis elements such as community. And blogs are a lot about text.

Ethan Zuckerman: The Net is doing three things: 1. It's changing where we get info. 2. It's changing how we debate. 3. It's changing how we interact. How does this change when we get out of the US?

Blogs give great perspective on already-reported stories, but not as much in generating stories ("citizen blogging journalism"). As bloggers, we're very dependent on mainstream media. GIGO. Take a look at AllAfrica.com.

Joi: Mainstream journalists were asked: Why don't you cover Africa more? Answer: No resources and we don't care. How do I get myself to care? How to get others to care? It's not just about information.

Ethan: Many of us have the incredible luxury of having free time to blog. Many of the countries I'm in don't have that sort of free time. Is there a way to open ourselves to these other voices. Is there a way to use blogs as an amplifier for voices we're not hearing? Some examples:

IranFilter
Rebecca McKinnon's NKZone on N. Korea
BlogAfrica from Joi and Ethan, finding and encouraging blogs in Africa
Blogalization translation project
GhanaCrisis

Joi: Anyone who goes with Ethan to Africa is forever changed.

Ethan: We tend to think emergent democracy will come out of the highest tech medium. In much of the world, you want to be looking at talk radio. It's had an utterly revolutionary effecti n West Africa. In Ghana, public officials get grilled on the radio by their constituents. What's amazing is when you combine the power of talk radio with cell phones. Can we use tech developed for Dean or whatever so that we can set up an anti-corruption system: Whenever anyone asks you for a bribe, you can register it on a central server.

Joi: Americans mean by setting up democracies: Make it look like a democracy but have America in chharge. Why not just set up a monarchy? Maybe we shoujld talk about digital transparency instead of "democracy" since it comes with a lot of baggage.

Ethan: Voices04.org: letters from the world to America. Not many from Africa, but boy are the Canadians pissed. How could we set this up so that we would actually get letters from, say, Africa?

Ethan: We're trying to put together a trip to Africa, probably in September. Who wants to go?

Q: [Jeff Jarvis] What has to happen to expand the citizen initiative?

A: 1. Better hosting. People don't have credit cards to pay. We need free, high-quality tools. 2. Useful instructions in local languages. 3. It's all about leaders.

Q: Are you integrating machine translation into these blogging projects? And to what extent are you allowing indigenous languages from Africa to be online? And to what extent are you working with the already existing radio infrastructure?

A: In Mali we're doing a big project on local radio. Machine translation doesn't work well enough. But there's a great opportunity for people willing to translate blogs in order to build bridges. The Open Knowledge Network gets people in a community to put their knowledge online.

Joi: What can we do with spectrum in Africa? We should send some of the smartest radio spectrum guys to Africa...

Q: Why do you only talk about Web interfaceds? Computers are expensive in Africa. Why not cell phones?

A: In Ghana it's gone from 150,00 to 2,000,000 phone lines in the past 2.5 years, mainly in mobile phones. There are some really cool tools available. What we really really really need is a voice XML server that we can deploy for free that we can hook into the cell phone network. Not SMS. Voice.

Jon Lebkowsky: Democracy as an operating system. The panel is going to focus on the how of what the panelists have done.

William Green, RightMarch.com, "the conservative version of MoveOn.org"

Adina Levin, who has affected the Texas legislature on a DMCA issue.

Cory EFF Doctorow, say no more.

Jonah Seiger of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet.

Jonah: The most elegant technology in the service of a message that's muddled will do nothing.

Cory: We need to involve real world politics as well. It's not enough to be a nerd-determinist. Forestry designed the commenting system that silently discards some comments as "duplicative" according to a secret algorithm. When MoveOn sends a million msgs to the FCC, and the FCC discards them, Congress cares. The letters may not directly affect the regulators, but it sure has an effect on the legislators.

Adina: Our group has done state-level advocacy. She found mentors at the ACLU who know how the legislative process work. If you show up in a legislator's office with a check, it's worth 20 points. Ten points: No check but you show up physically in the office. Three points: Send a fax or a letter. Two points: Phone call. One point: Email.

William: If you're interested in doing online activism, you don't have to set it up yourself. We outsource our back-end work.

Jonah: Remember 1996's black page protest? The technology was a tiny piece of it, but the message was powerful. It's the message more than the application.

Cory: I want to plug a tool that hackers can work on. Public Knowledge is building a GPL tool for doing something with Web forms [couldn't hear him well enough. Sorry!].

Wes Boyd of MoveOn.org tells the organization's story.

Q: What's your relationship with the palindromic George Soros.

A: He approached us. He asked what sort of matching fund do you want. It cost me flat-footed. I said 2:1.

Q: When will you have a blog and RSS feeds?

A: After 2004. We worry about opposition researchers using it against us. We have an online forum, which isn't a perfect medium.

Q: It's great that you have 2M addresses, but ultimately it's hierarchical: the agenda is set by the person who runs the site.

A: I don't know if this medium is going to be driven towards monopoly or diversity. I'd like to see it be diverse, with many MoveOns. But I don't know which way the dynamics will drive us. After the election I expect they'll be focus on this.

Q: Maybe you could run a contest to find a better word than "grassroots." [Of all the words to want to replace!] And why toasters? [Wes' first company, Berkeley, made the famous flying toasters screen saves.]

A: I agree with you about grassroots. And our lead engineer had to come up with a 4-frame animation one night and was in his kitchen...

Q: Who owns your mailing list? Will you share it with other organizations?

A: We will never sell or rent the list.

Q: Why not fund documentaries and the like? That'd be more cost-effective than sponsoring ads.

A: We're looking into that. But our members appreciate immediacy, whereas documentaries have a longer lead time.

Q: [Jay] Why not put some money for a "reality check" fund. Create a mutual fund for public interest journalism.

A: Good idea.

Q: [Micah Sifry] That'd be fantastic for investigative journalism. 1. How about your embracing Gray Davis. Wasn't that a sign that you don't have perfect pitch? 2. Are you going to do another MoveOn primary? 3. Are you thinking about what to do about presidential debates?

A: 1. We knew it was going to be difficult. The winning side is playing every trick in the book. 2. We haven't done another primary because we had the impact we wanted with the first one. 3. No, we haven't thought about debates.

Q: I was interested in your comments on the importance of listening and creating a broad message. How can we move towards a broader consensus?

A: That's what we're trying to do.

Q: [Tim O'Reilly] You've gotten people who are relatively like-minded to come together. How do you get the dialogue over the divide?

A: I think you do it by pulling people in not through extreme partisan rhetoric but by using yourself engaed in civil discourse. We're a centrist country with an overlay of team behavior. It's tough.

Q: [Tim] Any issues that matter to your base that would appeal more broadly?

A: Freedom. Budget deficit.

Q: How can we, in the audience, help you out?

A: Great question. I need to think about it more.

[Half the audience stands to applaud. Me, too.]

Jay Rosen: [Gives a history of the public, which I come in late on. Damn!] We've come full circle to where now the Internet is giving voters a mouth.

Jeff Jarvis: He refers to his five expectations of what should happen.

[Some powerful good blogging at Jay and Jeff's sites recently, not that that's unusual.]

Jay: The authority of the press matters to us. It's important to our democracy. They will find ways to be more interactive and to listen better.

Dan: Journalists need to understand what's going on, but we also need better tools from the technical community.

Dan: The real threat to traditional journalism isn't blogging. It's eBay, the largest classified ads publisher.

Jay: We need to distinguish between journalism and Big Media. Big Media threatens journalism. Journalists have presented themselves as insiders who know the truth; this has worn away at the authority of journalists. The challenge of the press is to find a form of authority that's more interactive.

Dan: My mantra is that my readers know more than I do. They just do.

Q: What does a digital democracy look like?

Jay: Wrong question. Instead: What does a democratic culture look like? What can digital democracy do for us in creating a democratic culture.

Jarvis: Yahoo and MSN are like old media. Technorati and Blogdex are better finding what matters to you.

The headline of the Q&A session: "I'm committed to do something on my own [to continue the movement backing Dean] or join one of the movements that's out there. I don't think it should be part of the Democratic Party. "

[NOTE: I did a lousy job keeping up...]

Ed Cone asking questions:

Q: What worked?

A: DeanLink [social network]. Top contributor was 14 year old boy in Alaska. Second was a 47 year old woman. [Sorry, I listened to this instead of blogging it:]

Q: Did you steal or blow the money?

A: We did crazy things. We spent $100,000 on TV in Austin. We made $1M doing that. Now, on the get rich quick theme. The implication that I'm a thief doesn't bother me as much as the implication that I'm a really bad thief. I made about $165,000 from the Dean campaign in 2003 through my media company. Well, how do you get people to stop giving money? You make them think it's a Trippi get-rich-quick scheme. First, I didn't have the authority for budget and spending. The Gov gave it to Bob Rogan, perhaps because there was the possibility of a conflict of interest. The $7M that went to my media company was spent almost entirely on buying ads. The normal commission is 15% and we didn't take that.

Q: How well do ideas percolate up from the grass roots?

A: There were a lot of ideas that came from the grassroots. E.g., Have Dean eat a $3 turkey sandwich while Cheney was at a banquet. Also, when people complained about Dean's Lessig blog being so inane t hat it was obviously ghostwritten, Trippi blogged: "If we were ghostwriting this, don't you think it'd be better." [A great moment, I thought then: Net is Voice]

[Lost a bunch because I got on line (a real line) to ask a question, and then gave up because the line is too long.]

A: Even if you have 100,000 supporters a nd 60,000 contributors in CA, that's not enough to win the state. Eventually you have to start up broadcast politics.

Q: [Dan ?Gillmor] Let's say that the mainstream press did you guys in. What will it take for the people in this room to change that equation.

A: It's already happening. Trent Lott. I tried to get them interested in MeetUps, but they didn't care until we raised more money than anyone else. All of a sudden, the press discovers the Dean Internet thing, and the only way they can write about it is money, I'm telling you: It's the money, stupid. That's why they're saying Trippi got rich out of this: To stop the money. How do we get 2-3M Americans to understand that they each gavae $100 to the right candidate cause, it would change this country forever. Because in the end it's the special interests money versus us.

Q: [Micah Sifry] What happens to the Dean web site?

A: Something, but I don't know what. I'm committed to do something on my own or join one of the movements that's out there. I don't think it should be part of the Democratic Party.

It's surprising that the press, which never understood the Dean campaign's use of the Internet, now believes it's in the position to decide whether what the campaign has done is a success.

Broadcast politics has failed the country miserably. The War, DMCA, Patriot Act, etc., were all passed without debate and without discussion in the mainstream media. The Dean campaign was [yes, past tense] about making a real change, fixing a system that's broken and corrupt.

The change today is like that of 1960 when TV entered politics. But no one expected then that TV would become about money, about providing one-way communications.

You can't expect to turn this around in 13 months. (Dean still has an excellent chance, btw.) There's only way the change will come: Through the Internet. It's not going to happen on CNN.

We don't have health care because interests in Washington will knock it down. This was not a dot com crash. It was a dot com miracle. We started last January with almost no money and 436 known supporters. In Iowa, Dean was a 0. The third quarter record had been set by Clinton when he was president. Dean broke that record handily. Dean didn't do it; you did it. This wasn't about one guy. It's about understanding that no one is going to change America for you. You have to you it yourself. The American people now have the beginnings of the tool and the people. The voice of the people will be heard. There will be debate in this country again.

We tried everything. We started using MeetUp because I read about it on Armstrong's MyDD.com blog. The media never figured out that the campaign wasn't happening on the Russert Show (Meet the Press?); it was happening around the water coolers of America.

We learned a lot from MoveOn.org. They shared their best practices with anyone who wanted them. Zack Exley from MoveOn was instrumental.

The pollitical press doesn't understand the Internet. The Internet community by and large doesn't understand the harsh realities of politics. Take the Scream tape. It played 900+ times on the mainstream media. The media's portrayal, out of context, was really damaging. Now they're apologizing. Those are the same peopel saying that the campaign didn't work. But it did. Dean taught the other candidates how to be an opposition party. Suddenly there was a debate in this country about whether there were WMDs or not. That happened because the grassroots and the netroots gave Howard Dean the voice. Everyone in the party is echoing Dean's themes, including getting rid of the special interests, because the Internet enabled Dean to be heard.

There's a reason Bush is vulnerable today. It's because of the blogs.

The media jumped the shark. First on the war in Iraq, and then with the Dean campaign.

I think our democracy is really threatened right now in ways the American people haven't grasped yet. You cannot have as sytem that's all about the big money. Look at which party raises more money in contributions under $100: The Republicans. The Republicans raise more money in every price category...except in contributions over $1,000,000. For the party of the people to get to that point is a betrayal of the party. The Dean campaign turned that on its head.

That's sometimes hard for the Internet community to uunderstand. It is about the money. That is what it's about. when you have a bunch of powerful interests fighting over the health care bill and the energy bill, when pharmaceuticals write our drug bills and energy companies write our energy policy...We had REvolution 1.0 in 1776. Now we're at 2.0. The American people finally have the tools to say: Enough. And the people who will give them those tools are the people in this room. This is not over. It is just the top of the iceberg.

It will be the money, though. The day isn't that far off. It only takes 2M Americans contributing $100 to save their country changes the entire thing. Less than 1%. If they decided we're going to change this country, we're going to have real debate, we're going to demand health care. Ean got about 670,000, so we're a long way off from that, but I believe it can happen in this cycle.

This probably couldn't have happened earlier. The Internet wasn't mature enough. MeetUp., GetLocal tools. DeanLink (friendster-like). Those weren't there in 2000. You needed people to buy at Amazon or eBay to get to using their credit card on the Net. Finally, in 2003 we're at a place that's mature enough to later the Democratic Party.

There's one thing I want you to understand. Right after Carter became president and left, the Party pulled together the Hunt Commission. It's sole purpose was to make sure that that never happened again. Carter got there without Party support and without bowing to the special interests. They devised this cycle's calendar on purpose to make sure that no insurgent can ever get this party's nomination. That meant that insurgents have to win Iowa and NH. We did a pretty damn good job of it. Given the Party rules, we should never have been able to get to where we were 3 weeks before Iowa: Ahead in the polls, etc. We did it without the Party. The American people did, using the tools provided by the Internet.

And then we ran straight into broadcast politics. Here's what happened: Al Gore endorsed us. Alarm bells went off in every news room and in every campaign. The alarm said: "Kill Howard Dean right now. Because if we don't kill him right now, he's going to be the nominee." The press corps said we have to put him through the wringer that every nominee goes through, we have to hammer him. The media do it because they think that's their responsibility. They really do. You have Gephardt saying that have to kill Dean. They called it a murder-suicide pact. Scaring old folks about Dean on medicare. It wasn't a dot com crash, it was a dot-com miracle being shot down.

Now they say it failed. Why do they want it to fail? What's so scary about the American people actually getting involved in their democracy. It's an easy story to tell, but it's too easy: Dot coms are supposed to make money, and the Dean campaign made more money than anyone. And, yes, Dean gave them ammunition on occasion. But God help us if the mistakes of Howard Dean and Joe Trippi is used to stop this change. You have done something amazing. The Internet is the most powerful tool ever put into the hands of the average America. The system has taught them that they don't care, their $25 check doesn't matter, that the 4 hours they spent working in a precinct is a waste of time. That's the biggest hurdle we have to get over. We have to get over the average American's disbelief that they can make a difference, The Internet taught people that $25 bucvks by itself, you're right, it doesn't make a difference. But put it together, people working together for the common good — a phrase that's gotten lost — is powerful.

We are just at the first stages of this, if we continue to fight.

There was an email that said someone had sold her bike for democracy, donating the money to the Dean campaign.

We put up 50 posters online, Iowa for Dean, NY for Dean, etc. Within minutes, we got an email from Puerto Rico saying we forgot them. We put one up 2 minuts later. We get 8 thank yous. Then someone in London says he's a Dean supporter spending 3 months overseas; we put up another. Someone writes from Spain ... In a matter of minutes we did what would have taken months before.

Another story: Bryant Park speech. The blog comment say it'd be cool if the Gov came on stage with a red bat to show the grassroots had hit $1M donation goal. Trippi has an aide get one. Dean picks it up as he goes on the stage. The blog contributors knew that it was their idea. This is ownership of the campaign. This is the first campaign really owned by the American people. And now we have to create a movement owned by the American people.

We know, we didn't know what we were doing. We tried everything. Did it all work? A surprising amount of it did. Did SMS text messaging work? Nah. Do I buy this garbage that these 3,500 orange hats going to Iowa were negative? Nah. I ran Iowa for Mondale in 1984 and he sent in 1,000 "Fritz Blitzers" and no one was worried about that. [So what did go wrong in Iowa?]

The one frustration I had was: Given what we were trying to do, up against a system that was rotted and rusted, we didn't have the luxury to say some of us go off and be for Dennis Kucinich or go blog for someone else. That's everyone's right and I'm a big fan of that. But given what we were up against, there has to be some way to get a unity movement going. No one's going to change the country for us. We're going to have to do it ourselves. It's us. The American people. It is the Internet that gives us the power to come together and take outr country back.

[Loud applause. About 25% of the audience, including me, stands.]

The room is packed, there's a fantastic bunch of people here, and the wifi works.

Somewhere there's a live feed but damned if I can find it...

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.