RatcliffeBlog - Mitch Thinking Out Loud

Where's the political chasm?

David Weinberger posts on the Technology and Politics session at FooCamp:

Doc says that the Dean campaign is the implemention of the Cluetrain Manifesto in politics. Here's a relatively random run through the thread...

Do we see the top listening to the grassroots on policy? Not so much. At the Dean campaign it's more about enabling the grassroots to connect and self-organize. Should it be more like the Open Source community in how it evolves positions?

Is the Dean campaign a real phenomenon or are we still first adopters who are miles from crossing the chasm? It may depend on how you look at it.

David goes on to raise a number of questions about the technical and social development of this phenomenon. He discusses whether everyone gets their own blog, what happens when there are tens of thousands of comments on a candidate's site each day and reputation systems. All very interesting questions, but I think David touched on the real issue right off: Is the campaign listening? The answer is, as David acknowledges, not really, though through the efforts of the Web team the campaign is hearing ideas from the grassroots -- the chasm is the decision to listen and, once the election cycle is over, to keep the channel open and to keep listening. Not just to blogs but to people, however they express themselves. Granted, there will be a lot of noise to signal, but reducing that noise to meaningful input from constituents has always been the function of various approaches to representation. We just don't know yet how to make representation meaningful.

Reputation systems strike me as the antithesis of representative communication, since early participants will, if their comments are rated on their volume or the number of replies from others without allowing people to "vote" their agreement or disagreement. But just voting on postings is simply a remix of pundit politics, too.

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.