The Revolution Will be Engineered
There's a lot of buzz around the core players in the Dean campaign about where
we go from here. This has some of the elements of any campaign dealing with
its disappointment. However, the Dean threads are as active as ever, with 7,413
comments on the blog so far on Wednesday.
If nothing else, the Dean campaign has given every campaign the hope that
the right mix of web services and online dialogue can open voter's hearts and
wallets.
Where we go seems to be to develop a set of tools even better than the Dean
team put together and release thgese tools into the public domain for the benefit
of every campaign from PTA President to US President. Although my vision is
for tools that improve the character of governance, campaigns are the place
to start, and only partly because that's where the money is. The electoral
cycle is to governance as the Krebs cycle is to biology: it's the fuel that
makes democracy work.
Political campaigns
engage zealots who try to motivate partial zealots to vote a certain way. (Relative
to the
general
disregard
for
politics
and voting, one must be a partial zealot to vote and a real zealot to be
a campaign activist.)
The required zealotry is a clue to the poor user experience
of American politics. The people who know how to "do" politics
today don't see what's wrong with the current system, in the same way that
Unix geeks
don't see why more people can't learn to live with a command line interface.
My many months of work with the Dean campaign convince me
that our cynical and closed political system depends on its miserable user
experience for its sway over our lives.
There are probably
other ways to improve politics, like better civics classes, public television,
parents' interest groups, responsible party leadership. But I and
the people I know are limited to improving the user experience for
people who might be better citizens, if they were just given the tools.
The Users we're Designing For
There are many potential users for the Net-based tools I'm
thinking of:
- Voters
- Politicians
- Election Officials
- Political Action Committees and 527 Organizations
- Citizens
That's a much broader set of users than we've been thinking of
in this area. In fact, the Dean Campaign and its Johnny-come-lately imitators
were thinking
only of a fraction of the voters, thosequalified and inclined to vote in
a Democratic primary. So let's start with the voters, which is the only thing
the campaigns
care about.
The Voter
While the customer for these open source tools is any campaign that wants
to do things even better than the Dean campaign, their user is the potential
voter and campaign donor-activist.The
crucial design challenge is the user experience of a voter coming upon a candidate's
web site
and discovering
that there is
a
place
for each
voter's
voice in this campaign. The thing the campaigns have to do better
is to solicit each voter's input on the issues, not just to promote the horse
race between two stylized candidates.
This is an inversion of the Dean model, where people could only discuss
issues among themselves at Meetups and in blog comments, for there was no
explicit means for voters to express their policy preferences in a way that
could be
aggregated
as a
coherent
direction for the campaign. I always maintained that this is what the people
wanted most from the campaign, and their admirable efforts would have been
amplified if the issues had not been on the back burner.
The aggregation of explicit voter preferences is the secret
sauce of open source politics. The politicians who embrace specific
and authentic input from their constituents will be the ones to gain and
hold office. It is the only counterweight to the ideologues who trash constituent
messages they don't want to hear.
It will be up to campaigns and their consultants to connote
the sense that there's something worth paying attention to on their site.
Next time, I'll suggest a grassroots-way to expand a core constituency.
11:38:03 PM 
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