Those of us interested in democracy run a danger of over-celebrating the Dean campaign’s success in
cyberspace so far. Much remains to be invented and evolved. A valuable
line of conversation for those of us interested in evolving democracy
could be “What next for the Dean campaign?”
Mitch Ratcliffe, who does very thoughtful writing on organizational evolution, puts the following out (I note it here thanks to Doc, who caught it first). Here is an excerpt–and I urge you to read the whole piece:
The
challenge is how to do what wiki people refer to as “gardening” of
information to bring people with common ideas and interests together,
to engage them in what they particularly care about so that their
contributions to the debate are heard and the “top,” since we seem set
on having a “top,” can listen to a coherent metalogue. That’s not to
say wikis or blogs are the solution — people and political process are
where the change has to happen, albeit supported by a lot of
technology, most of which hasn’t yet been invented or reduced to a
useful design.
In
short, the Dean campaign is awfully clued, but not anywhere fully
clued. One thing that I’d like to hear from the campaign is what role
the network of participants coalescing today will play in a Dean
administration; will they dedicate some White House staff and budget to
staying in close contact with the people talking through the campaign’s
systems? Can they do that without moving everyone to a
government-funded system? What would that do to campaign finance
issues? Should every candidate be able to tap a common system (yes) if
a government system is put in place?
Lots
of questions, still lots of time, but we’ll cross the chasm when we
come to a deep connection between the grassroots and the administration
of government, not before.
Mitch’s piece was inspired in part by one by David Weinberger on the Dean phenomena, scaling, etc.
