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

I met Phil Wolff at BloggerCon and enjoyed him a great deal–now he has launched a local bay area blog for John Kerry. 
I see this as a model that all the campaigns will ultimately follow. .a
blogger evangalist starts a local community of blogs.  Someone at
BloggerCon told the old joke: if there is one lawyer in town, she or he
starves.  If there are two lawyers in town, both get rich. 
We need blogger clusters, local blogger ecosystems, giving platforms to
local community voices helping us understand our world in more
richness, and in real time.  We also need to explore how best to
link together those of us who are already out here..  Check out
Phil’s post Monday about how things are going..

Ah  ha!  The campaigns co-evolve!!

Check out the process description for OneVoice,
an emergent democracy citizens peace initiative that is being supported
by a group of Hollywood stars, young professionals and activists, and a
few old-line peace policy folks..

I know this initiative has garnered some chuckles because celebs
are treading where Bill Clinton and George Bush have failed, but what
folks miss is that the grassroots online citizen polling design of this initiative is about as
far from top-down traditional guns/money/diplomacy as it can be. 
I can’t even begin to predict whether OneVoice will make a difference–but
then, in the early days of the Howard Dean campaign he didn’t seem to
have a shot, either..

Now if OneVoice just added a blogging and a newsgathering component..

from Joi Ito this morning,

Let’s stop picking on journalists who don’t blog.

Although Joseph Urbaszewski’s blog
shows a blogger beating the mass media, I think we should stop picking
on professional traditional journalists. I think that if journalists
need help from their editors to write, (in the case of Japan) want
life-time employment, need someone to protect them in court, need paper
boys to reach their readers and need a brand to provide legitimacy, I
think they should be allowed to do this. I think it’s mean to pick on
them too much…

When the data is in, it may turn out that internet
political fundraising favors the specific over the general.  It seems to
favor Howard Dean over the Democratic party, it seems to favor
investment in specific, targeted political television ads over general
contributions to MoveOn. org.   “Hit targets fast
together”  may be the watchword: HTFT.  People (me included)
seem to like to get invovled in something big with alot of other
folks–together.  We like fast feedback on our investment. 
We like to be able to select targets–even if that simply means
endorsing what someone else has proposed.  We like things that go
“smat!!!”

An interesting anecdote re: being specific.  Josh Marshall yesterday posted a note saying “No More Contributions”
are  needed for his upcoming trip to New Hampshire.  He is
going to blog the primary. He
had asked for specific donations for the trip.  He was rapidly
given more money than he needs.  His note is a model of
specificity:  immediate, tangible, transparent and
personal.

John Markoff’s story
in the New York Times today on a low-cost supercomputer made with 1,100
PCs continues the  liberation of technology and expertise that is
at the heart of the second superpower, and reveals yet another design
for linking many small contributions so that great things can be
accomplished.

Now if my prescient friend John would just start a blog

New York Times October 22, 2003

Low-Cost Supercomputer Made
With 1,100 PC’s

By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN
FRANCISCO, Oct. 21 — A home-brew supercomputer, assembled from
off-the-shelf personal computers in just one month at a cost of
slightly more than $5 million, is about to be ranked as one of the
fastest machines in the world.

Word of the low-cost supercomputer, put together by faculty,
technicians and students at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, is shaking
up the esoteric world of high performance computing, where the fastest
machines have traditionally cost from $100 million to $250 million and
taken several years to build.

The Virginia Tech supercomputer, put together from 1,100 Apple
Macintosh computers, has been successfully tested in recent days,
according to Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer
scientist who maintains a listing of the world’s 500 fastest machines.

Yossi Vardi, our guest speaker today, with John Palfrey,
executive director of the Berkman Center, at breakfast this morning at
Henrietta’s in Harvard Square.   Yossi was both insightful
and jovial, as we talked about common interests in social software. We
discussed how the edge folks will eventually triumph over the hub,
coopting  the hubs (who will decline but persist) into supporting
the ever
expanding edges.  If this seems a bit too abstract, its because I
can’t give away more of Yossi’s talk today.  Personal tip: join us
if you are in the area, we welcome you–and if you
are coming, come early, as we expect a standing room crowd. 

The talk will be webcast at this location.  More information on the talk is on the Berkman Center website today:

The Berkman Center is proud to present Yossi Vardi, Founding Investor of ICQ, on October 21st, 2003. He will speak on the topic “The Edge Against the Hub: The Struggle for Dominance on the Internet,” at 5:00pm in Hauser 104 on the Harvard Law Campus.   (more)

I know many of your will have seen these notes on blogging, since they are due to Dave. In any case, here, in one place, are two pieces I find helpful in doing and improving my blog, from Jay Rosen, head of the Journalism Department at NYU on What’s Conservative About the Weblog Form in Journalism? and What’s Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism?

Two sugar maples west of town..

Community organizer  Jenn Morazes, Bishop Arthur Walmsley,
cyber-organizer Kevin Jones, community organizer Marshall Gans, and
Bishop Jeffery Rowthorn, Saturday October 18, 2003 at Christ Church, Cambridge.

“Three organizers and two Bishops” 

This weekend was beautiful in Massachusetts–the maples are flaming red,
the sky a darker shade of blue.  A good time to gather a
group.  At Christ Church on the Cambridge Common, a group
of Episcopalians and friends gathered together to explore how to add spark and
tinder to the global consciousness revolution that is rising to
challenge mindless globalization.  I talked about the
web and organizing.  The high point
of the weekend was a several hour session with Marshall Gans, a warm, ebulent, and profound community organizer who worked for 16 years with Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers.  

Marshall Gans’ main points:

(1) Time: You must change your relationship to time.  Institutions
achieve stability by enacting cycles–the annual budget cycle, the
church year, the spring sales push.  To make change you focus on
time as an arrow–you use time to make something happen that will
irrevocably change the status quo.  You move from project time and
ordinary time to campaign time.  Political campaigns embody this
deeply.  The visualization of time as an arrow is in big wall
charts that plot what needs to happen in time.

(2)  A simple goal that individuals can contribute to
directly:  The United Farm Workers had grapes, the 
revolutionaries in Boston had tea, and Gandhi had salt.  A
movement needs a simple goal that all can focus on, that organization
can be created around, and where success can be achieved in measureable
terms.  The group this weekend is taking a pledge to give 0.7% of
their earnings to the developing world–and to work to gain the same
level of contribution from churches and nations.  The interesting
thing about this “grape” is that it raises all the related issues about
money and power and development and happiness.  Some of the
toughest questions:  Are people really made happy by development
aid?  What does it go for, anyway?  Doesn’t most development
aid just benefit the dictators and oligarcs and monopolists in
developing countries? Isn’t it mostly a tool of cynical foriegn policy
plans?  So the discussion leads rapidly to more and more
questions, but good questions…

(3) Capability:  When you focus on a goal and build a group and
linked relationships and networks and individual skills to accomplish
that goal, you build capability to address all the related
issues. 

(4) Constituency:  This capability–this community and
communion–becomes a constituency for change within the first world,
first superpower structures–and to the extent these structures allow
for democractic change, issues start to get addressed in the
mainstream.

For over five years supporting the farm workers was reduced to not
eating a grape today.  But this simple campaign had complex
results.  It helped create a movement among consumers, and it
exerted real economic pressure on the grape growers.  Over time it
changed the discussion in state and federal governments, and led to new
laws and processes to protect farm workers.

In my earlier post on the Red Sox, now corrected, I at first had them
playing not the Cubs, but the White Sox.  Several friendly readers
wrote to gently correct me :)  Thanks!!

Kelly Nuxoll sent me this illuminating piece on Leo Strauss and his influence over the neo-conservative movement and the Bush administration.  Excellent, if scarry!

“..Shadia Drury , professor of
political theory at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, argues
that the use of deception and manipulation in current US policy flow
directly from the doctrines of the political philosopher Leo Strauss
(1899-1973). His disciples include Paul Wolfowitz and other
neo-conservatives who have driven much of the political agenda of the
Bush administration.”