Jim Moore’s blog: Innovation, Strategy, Public Policy

Consider the advantages of Smart Posses!

An observation on the amazing ever expanding cyber Dean campaign:

The campaign could use a more targeted form of smart mobs, perhaps smart “sub-mobs” that can swarm around more selective opportunities.  These smaller mobs, mini-mobs, might be made up of people who are more intensely complementary.  And that, in turn, up the creativity and the fun..and help the grass grow roots.

To do this the campaign needs a technology service that sits somewhere between Match.com (for smart dates) and Meetup.com (for smart mobs).  I think “smart Posses” might do it.

So—imagine that I fill out a profile and say, “I’d be interested in getting together with people within ten miles of my zip codes, 02138 and 01773, for fun and political activity.”  “I’m interested in [pick one or more] zany street theater, civil disobedience, and tedious letter writing campaigns.  I’d be willing to go to a bar and see if we could sign up cool people for Dean—if you’d go do it with me.”

Then the software would allow any registered member to propose a “Posse” of between five and nine people (Cognitive scientist George Miller’s “magic number seven plus or minus two).  So I’d get an email “From smartposse.com” that would be from some person who had scanned the profiles and thought I’d be fun to have in her or his posse. 

The Posse invitation would include links to the profiles of a bunch of other prospective Posse members that he or she had selected.  I could go check these folks out, and decide if I felt the posse had promise.

A Posse date must have more than five members. This keeps it light, makes it more creatively chaotic, and distinguishes it from a date date.  We email back and forth, and eventually either opt in for this Posse date or opt out for now.  No pressure, just opportunity.

Oh yea, I have no problem with “cool dates for Dean” but that is a different idea…

Another wonderful post from Britt Blaser on The Sound of Democracy and the Dean Campaign’s record setting 6/30/03 fundraising–this one “how to” in a way I think has pretty profound implications for all of us. The point, I think, is that certain forms of online interaction build a personal sense of power and connection, and allow a smart mob to build, and to become a “fun mob” — sort of a digital rave — that calls to others, and that touches all who dance together..

Here’s an excerpt from Britt Blaser’s writeup:

Wisely, the campaign posted the comments of the donors as they described the incredible power of making a difference. This campaign seems trained in Clues. They’ve set up the playing field so that people can talk about governance–money’s just the punch line. As the day rolled on, you could see that the campaign people were not driving the contribution process, they were hosting it. Every half hour, they posted updates that functioned as a scoreboard–symbolic, not financial.

It was performance art. At 1 am, the Burlington crew was wrapping up but their fans, the donors, were urging them to play a few more, at least until the donations came in from California:

12:30 AM Ok, we’ve seen the comments asking us to stay up until 3 AM (”can you guys in HQ please, please keep the posts going until 3 a.m. ET? I’m staying up with you, if that makes you feel any better. ” but we’ve still got a thank you email to send out — so much to thank for — it’s just me, Nicco, and Joe left here, and there are still bags of letters to open. I really wish we could, but believe me, we’re doing everything we can! After 1 AM we’re going to have to check out for the night on the updates. We’ll get you a full report as quickly as we can in the morning.

That’s the sound of democracy.

Oh, I just love this post from Britt Blaser, writing on Steal This Campaign!! Thanks to Doc Searls, writing on Networked Democracy at Work

Excerpts don’t do Blaserco justice, but here goes:

Steal This Campaign

OK, we can’t steal it, but we can buy it. Cheap.

All the campaigns are talking about money, which is what politicians care about. We can put an end to that foolishness with a simple strategy: Buy a campaign by showering it with so many $50 contributions that they won’t have to worry about corporate contributions. Apparently the Republicans are raising $200 million from their closest friends based on a single cynical premise:

You can buy people’s votes

The back story on that cynical assumption is that they need to be bought because they never manifest themselves other than through big time TV marketing.

But someone said recently that, if a million people give $1,000, the Republican’s cynical assumptions go out the window…

..Scale

Everyone seems to agree that 6/30/03 will be written about for years since it was the first spontaneous expression of political will by self-organizing voters talking each other into caring more and donating more through the Moveable Type Comments function. That inspiring day caused the campaign to believe more strongly in its core aspiration: to somehow get nominated and then to give the Republicans a decent challenge. If 6/30 is as important as it seems, the campaign is making a mistake: It should re-calibrate its goals.

If the campaign doesn’t see the potential in the Internet, then the smart mob phenomenon just might. And a smart mob functions at an entirely different level than conventional hierarchical structures. Its force is nuclear and 20th century politics is just gunpowder.

Do the Math

Internet-equipped people caused $802,000 to be donated to Dean on 6/30/03. They did it by chatting each other up as the new totals were posted every half hour, and as the goal, depicted as a baseball bat, was increased as goal after goal was surmounted through the afternoon.

A freely associating mob is forming around the Dean campaign. Its communication tools will soon transcend the Campaign comment archives, by organizing its own tools. The campaign can’t stop them nor should it want to, though there are surely consultants who would just as soon all this went away. Too late.

Metcalfe’s Law says that this mob’s value and power will grow with the square of its population, attracting more people and volksmoney as an accretion disk in space sucks in matter from the systems around it. I believe this phenomenon is a social force too powerful to be stopped, and that historians will be more interested in 6/30/03 than 9/11/01.