The Staff of Life
Startups are fun. They attract people who want more than a
job, they want meaning. As I suggested months ago, we all want to be of consequence.
When I catalyzed the Dynamac project in 1987, we had people who came to work
for free just because it was so new and exciting and well-publicized.
The Dean Campaign vibe is the inspiring tech start-up, cubed.
Smart people, so committed to the mission that there's no visible friction
between a good idea and a better idea. The tactics of retail politics and
the overarching passion for a better society are all jumbled together into
a collage of issues, ideas, tech, fundraising, friendraising, organization,
User Interface, Campaign laws, fiscal responsibility, health care, best practices
and everything else that a West Wing viewer could ask for.
It's 2 in the morning, and here's Zack and Gray
and Andrew and Josh being interviewed by Samantha Shapiro of the New York
Times Magazine:
Samantha's trying to figure out all the threads and interconnects
among bloggers, campaign staff, Internet tools and all the rest. How does
Emergent Democracy and Cluetrain and Social Software and free software and
what's open source and what do you do for the campaign, and how is Joi
Ito and Andy Rappaport and Music
for America and David Weinberger and Larry
Lessig and Jock Gill and Michael
Cudahy and how'd you meet Zephyr and Josh and Zack and What are you doing here anyway?
And Josh, could you explain again how you found Britt on Doc's
site and
connected with Zack and the 20 or so people working on DeanSpace and can
this really be the fastest development and deployment of a few hundred dynamic
content
sites?
Pulling the Thread out of the Sweater
Imagine if you were in the dead tree publishing business with
one of the best publications in the world. That's Samantha.
You're smart, educated, connected, and young enough that you use Google and
the web and email a LOT and you've read some blogs but you've not been
following the blogging echo chamber. Or open source software or
smart
mobs or
all the
rest. How
the
hell would
you
even begin to
connect all the dots? I suggested to Samantha that her situation is like
Tom Wolfe's when he wrote The
Right Stuff. He wanted to write about the cultural phenomenon of the original
seven Mercury
astronauts and found that, to those
guys, being an astronaut was fine, but what was really important to them
was that they were Fighter Pilots. And so he had to learn what that meant
and discovered the entire world of the right stuff, which was more important
to the heroes than the cultural event.
It's impossible to understand the Dean campaign without understanding
blogging. You can't understand blogging with out looking at the issues
that bloggers care about, and Samantha's starting cold. I'm glad that's her
problem and not mine.
It's a Quarter to Three...
And there's no one in the place except you and me and a dozen or so high-energy
people doing what most people who sign up on DeanLink say they'll do: "Whatever
it takes."
Time to go home. But it looks like
these guys aren't going anywhere. Miles to go before CPUs sleep.
6:49:34 PM 
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