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Americans For Dean's Zack Rosen, one of the subjects of this article, in the next ILAW session I post about Blogging and Democracy.

Netizens Rally for Dean Team
By Katie Dean for Wired News.

"It's an autonomous, self-organizing, grass-roots campaign network," said Zack Rosen, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign computer science student who cooked up the idea. "We're giving people a Web tool to organize the campaign network. We want to help get this man elected."

Instead of taking directions from the top down, small groups of Dean supporters can organize their own "campaign node." Each local node, like Milwaukee for Dean or Quilters for Dean, for example, will be able to host forums and post its own news, blogs and calendar using open-source tools assembled by the developers.

Those nodes then will plug into larger nodes, like statewide Dean groups, higher in the network's hierarchy. The larger nodes will keep track of the local nodes and house a repository of Rich Summary Site feeds, enabling the groups to share relevant articles and news.

A collection of campaign-related pictures, videos and audio also will be hosted on the local nodes. All of the media will be licensed under the Creative Commons, and people are encouraged to sample and modify the media, like setting photos to music or creating snazzy new fliers to distribute.

"All the content that will be put up on these nodes will be contributed by users," Rosen said.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59497,00.html

A new site has popped up on the Net to help elect Howard Dean president, using a network of independent "nodes" of supporters to collaborate, share news and even design multimedia campaign materials.

A group of software developers has formed Americans for Dean, a site designed to help organize those who support the former Vermont governor's bid for president.

"It's an autonomous, self-organizing, grass-roots campaign network," said Zack Rosen, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign computer science student who cooked up the idea. "We're giving people a Web tool to organize the campaign network. We want to help get this man elected."

Instead of taking directions from the top down, small groups of Dean supporters can organize their own "campaign node." Each local node, like Milwaukee for Dean or Quilters for Dean, for example, will be able to host forums and post its own news, blogs and calendar using open-source tools assembled by the developers.

Those nodes then will plug into larger nodes, like statewide Dean groups, higher in the network's hierarchy. The larger nodes will keep track of the local nodes and house a repository of Rich Summary Site feeds, enabling the groups to share relevant articles and news.

A collection of campaign-related pictures, videos and audio also will be hosted on the local nodes. All of the media will be licensed under the Creative Commons, and people are encouraged to sample and modify the media, like setting photos to music or creating snazzy new fliers to distribute.

"All the content that will be put up on these nodes will be contributed by users," Rosen said.

Zephyr Teachout, who leads Internet organizing and outreach for the Dean campaign, credits this kind of grass-roots organizing for the candidate's success so far and said the new project will only help spread the message.

"It gives people who would normally be lonely in the political process a way of finding each other -- and a way of being political that suits their interests and their skills," she said.

Rosen said about 15 developers are working to get the tools up and running in the next few weeks, but anyone is welcome to contribute. They're building on Drupal, an open-source content-management system, for the project.

"We're going to leave the system open for anyone to innovate on this network," Rosen said. "Different groups might want different functionalities."

Americans for Dean will set up the hosting service and provide technology support for any of the nodes that need it. One need not be a software engineer to participate, either. Rosen said administering one of the nodes will be as easy as running a community site like a Yahoo Group.

It's a step beyond Meetup, which coordinates local gatherings for people with similar interests. More than 55,000 people have joined the Dean Meetup group.

Rosen has attended two of the Dean Meetup meetings -- including one at Stanford University this week -- and said the groups were fairly disorganized. He hopes the open-source project will help supporters coordinate more easily.

Jerome Armstrong, an Internet activist and political consultant, also says the project could help alleviate the bottleneck of Dean supporters calling the campaign headquarters. It could give those people a new venue for getting involved with the campaign, he said.

"That's the way grass roots works best, when it grows on its own," he said.

Americans for Dean is not run by the Dean campaign. It's designed to be self-governed and self-organized, and both the campaign and the developers like it that way.

"There's so much hunger in this country for people to effect (change) in their local communities," Teachout said. "We are not about censoring you. You don't have to ask permission to be a political actor."

With no direct control over these groups, are Dean campaign organizers worried about people promoting something other than the Dean message?

"There's a tension that's always going to be there, but so far we haven't had any real problems with that," Teachout said. "Everything (Dean) is saying is 'you guys have the power.'"

Support for Dean continues to snowball on the Net. He collected 44 percent of the vote in the recent online primary at MoveOn.org. More than 300,000 people voted on the site.

The candidate raised nearly $3 million online last week alone.

Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, predicted that the Internet will be as influential in this year's campaign as television was in 1960. The Nixon-Kennedy debate revolutionized how television was used in political campaigns.

"The new medium is radically changing the way American politics is happening," Trippi said. "I think it's totally turned the history of American politics on its head."

"This is a really interesting experiment in civic participation," Rosen said. "This is extremely exciting and it's viral, and I think it's our only hope in winning this election."

Katie Dean is not related to Howard Dean.