Scaling the intimacy.
This is where Howard Dean failed. His online campaign was unable to give new recruits the same intimate experience he was able to give them six months earlier.
His technology platform was wrong. He needed, not a blog, but a Community Network Service. There are many such projects in the open source world. Slash. Scoop. Drupal. All offer multi-threading, the ability to run discussions off other discussions. They offer "diary" service, allowing anyone to create their own posts for the site.
Ironically, two bloggers were hired by Dean in the summer of 2003, made this very recommendation, and were dismissed by people like Joe Trippi, who now acts like he invented the whole Netroots idea.
Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas went back to their own sites, ate their own dog food, and turned their own sites — MyDD and DailyKos — into the heart of the Netroots movement. They have now written a book about this type of politics, called Crashing the Gate.
The problem with this book, in my opinion, is that it’s too much about politics. The key topics — technology and system management — don’t get enough play.
Both are difficult, which is why we don’t have many sites like these two around.
It takes more than software to build a community. You have to be
able to bring the crowd to you, and you have to use your technology to
scale that intimacy as the crowd grows. MySpace
does it, but MySpace lacks a real purpose, and it lacks a compelling
business model. It has a big crowd, lots of traffic, but its founders
were wise to sell-out to a conglomerate (Fox) quickly, because they had
no Clue how to make it profitable.
In politics, power is profit. The
Netroots have not yet won any power, and are thus dismissed as a force.
In fact, I will venture to say that should Democrats win the Congress
in 2006, it will still be too early to credit the Netroots with much —
it’s an historical tide that would have existed even with them.
But the time is coming when this kind of self-organizing will wield
enormous power. Moore’s Law of Training still holds, and there is (as
yet) much to learn.
