Communities and politics

Mociology refers to how mobile and wireless technology has changed the way we do things: downloading music on to a mobile phone, for example, or getting the football scores texted through on a Saturday afternoon. To Trippi, however, its potential lies in how it can be used for political purposes - just as he saw and exploited the possibilities of blogs for political campaigning while running Howard Dean's unsuccessful bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination.

Blogging and mociology, Trippi is convinced, will revolutionise politics. "When I first started the Dean campaign there were something like 4,000 blogs worldwide," he claims. "There are now 20m and growing. It's an entirely new development - the arrival of the two-way printing press. We have had the one-way press around for centuries, but when you have a two-way press it means that people can actually have a conversation with each other on equal terms. Mobile technology, blogging technology, gives people the ability to connect with each other from the bottom up. It'll do for 21st-century politics what print did for the 18th."

This is an interesting thought piece from the Guardian about how the Dean Campaign of 2003 built a grassroots community based suppport for Howard Dean.

Baby steps Joe Trippi the campaign organiser describes Deans campaign.

But it shows how collecting a passionate grassroots community can deliver a sea change in politics.

As Dean's campaign manager, Trippi ordered the creation of a campaign blog, which he used to communicate directly with supporters. He set up a "Dean in 2004" group on the Meetup Inc website for people with common interests, which managed on one day - November 4 2003 - to mobilise 138,000 volunteers to turn up at 820 locations to campaign for the candidate. And realising that Dean, from a base as governor of Vermont, would never be able to raise the same sums from the accepted routes as Washington insiders, he used the web to ask for donations. The result was a rush of cash that astonished observers.

Controlled media vs. the wisdom of crowds? Or the exponential power of peer production

The people had no power over TV. The power was with the network, the advertiser, or the politician with his political machine behind him. This new technology puts power in the hands of the average citizen. It's a qualitative difference, totally different from all previous democracies. In the Dean campaign, people realised, 'Wow! We can really connect and change the established way of doing things.' And they did. We began with 432 people nationwide. That grew to 650,000 and we raised more money than any other candidate in history. And it's not just presidential elections. Look at global warming. Is it going to be solved because the leaders do something? Or because hundreds of millions of people do something?

Might be something the Tories should consider for their push to regain office? Might be something that the civil service thinks about to acheive its objectives?

Comments

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