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Hive Minding the Store
The blogosphere is humming with
the Dean post mortems, but
the Dean people are giving money in record amounts. What's going on
here?
This morning, as Jim Moore
reports,
Dean's List received a message from the
Guv:
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The
entire race has come down to this:
we must win Wisconsin.
We must launch our new television advertisement on Monday in the major
markets
in Wisconsin. To do that, I need your help to raise $700,000 by Sunday.
Please
contribute $200 today so that we can reserve the air time:
http://www.deanforamerica.com/wisconsinad
A Wisconsin bat went up
at 2 this morning, and, as I write
this, the Dean faithful have sent in $693,000 as of 11:15 pm. This is a
live
bat, so YMMV.
Jim describes this as a perfect
swarm
and wonders
what it means:
Is
the DeanforAmerica community transforming itself
into a community that goes well-beyond its original mission to create
multiple ways to make itself heard and to be powerful--using the web
as centerpiece and platform.
I
think perhaps so.
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Later, Jim reports:
The rate of contributing is off the charts. This is DFA’s second largest single day of
fundraising in the entire campaign–and may pass the single day record.
Wow, reflect on that. Implications?
Giving is the sacrament that brings the Dean community together.
More revealing is Jim's
description of how groups find their
common rhythm:
What
is going on? Swarm power, emergence,
something larger than ourselves. Here is a fun thing to do:
Take
a large crowd--perhaps you are giving a speech--and ask them to clap
together to an aligned beat. But don't give them a lead
beat. Just
ask the crowd to find a beat, by paying attention to their neighbors,
and syncing up as they can. I've done this dozens of times,
and
the amazing thing is how fast a group can come together when it wants
to.
The
Dean community is coming together. It is starting
to experience a new
level of emergence, of power.
The
Dean community will make itself felt and heard
at a new level.
Last summer, Doc
asked my why people give money to the Dean
campaign and the ready
answer
was that
they're
buying
hope,
one
month
at
a time. Today they're buying hope, one ad at a time. Those of us most
interested in how social networks form are trying to figure out
why Dean can attract so much money but hasn't received more votes.
I'm more interested in how we can use this ideal laboratory, before
the
urgency
dissolves in 9 months, to answer that question. The answer will be the
rosetta stone of politics, whether or not it's discovered in time to
save
the Dean candidacy.
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I suggest that the secret
is to provide a way for the hive mind to grow its own relationships.
We see this all the time in nature, whether it's the insect hive, a
nervous system growing its dendrites, or plants which spread by runners
or roots, like strawberries or aspens.
For about four months,
I've been encouraging the Dean
campaign to formalize what I call strawberry roots. Grassroots grow
from individual seeds, sending a few blades out. Strawberry roots
are planted by the runners that come from another clump.
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Strawberries propagate by sending out
runners. In special cases, like
this one, the runners can be productive without putting down roots.
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The metaphor is that it takes
a gardener to plant grass,
but a healthy strawberry bush can create many other productive clumps.
I suggest that the secret is to
provide a way for the most
dynamic political nodes to grow their own relationships.
With just a little structure,
it's probable that the Dean
movement can operate self sufficiently yet with organizational forces
that
approach the efficiency of the Linux or Apache movements. That idea
defies
conventional wisdom,
since open source projects typically need a central figure who brings
the
code to a point and who continues to lead and inspire the volunteer
programmers.
That way, the versions are reasonable and coherent.
But for political action, where
successful techniques can
be forked as desired and there's a need for millions of actions but no
need
for a single code base, there may be only one criterion for successful
organization.
That would be something like the school telephone tree. Many
organizations,
and all schools, have a telephone tree, by which one family alerts 3-6
others
to a snow day, and the message propagates rapidly, like DNS data across
the
Internet. The enabling technology for all these systems is the explicit
connection
between an originating node and a satellite node.
This structure may appear to be
hierarchical but it's actually
chronological. The first parent in the calling tree is simply the first
one
to be assigned to a task that any parent is adequately skilled to do.
The
enabling tech? A POTS line and a calling list. Synchronized group
clapping,
says Dr. Moore, all you need is the will to clap. Or, in the NFL,
merely
the idea of
doing
the "Wave".
Tim
O'Reilly is the instigator of
the Digital
Democracy Teach-In on Monday
(San Diego. Joe Trippi live. $100. You
really should go). He describes the central
dynamic of operating an ISP,
using yet another biological metaphor:
During
my tenure at UUNET, I described the real business
as operating a giant Petri dish -- we kept it warm, we pumped in
nutrients,
and we made it bigger when it filled up. And people paid us money to
sit in the dish and see what happened.
Dishing the Movement
So what's the ideal petri dish
for a net-enabled political
movement? Here's an email I sent to Jim Moore late last night:
Why
not try a "Draft Dean" approach?
Allow the grassroots to take charge and to prove what they might about
peer-to-peer
outreach. Let them demonstrate that a pure grassroots effort can work
this year, when the tools aren't right yet, rather than waiting until
2006 or 2008.
In
other words: a true end-to-end approach, based on
total transparency, a hollowed-out campaign. Expose the budget to the
people and ask them to give what
they want on an
a la carte basis. Let them decide if we want state offices, how many
programmers
to pay, etc.
...In
the 1986 AFC final, with a couple minutes to play,
Denver was behind 20-13, on their own 5 yard line. Dan Reeves sent in
the play with a lineman, who kneeled in the huddle, looked up and said,
"Now
we got 'em where we want 'em!" Everybody breaks up laughing, stunning
the Browns' defense and loosening up the Broncos. 15 plays later,
Denver
scored, sending the game into overtime, and winning with a field goal.
Get
creative. Make a big deal announcement that's so creative, humorous
and endearing that we glimpse an entertaining way out of this.
I suggested today that we ought
to keep a fundraising graph
up all the time, showing upcoming uses of funds, inviting just-in-time
sources
of funds. BlogforAmerica could track the contributions to Kerry's
campaign
and invite the Deansters to raise, say, 125% of Kerry's funds, as a way
of
demonstrating where the passion lies.
In other words, perhaps the
function of "the Campaign" is
becoming more of a support function, like accounting, ad placement,
data
management, shipping & receiving and logistical support. The real
sales
and operational arm of the real
campaign
may
have to migrate out to the strawberry roots, as Zephyr has been telling
us
all along.
11:38:08 PM 
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