I wrote Rapid Response: Memetic Engineering in the 2004 Presidential Campaign, my assessment of a new project from the John Kerry campaign. It's a recap of the political Rapid Response model, an analysis of the John Kerry Media Corps version of that model, and a checklist of things for the JK campaign to work on.

Not included: the idea of the grassroots web site network.

When you blend:

• "all politics is local" with
• "the edge of the network has the power" and
• "nobody trusts campaign commercials" 

You turn to free media.

John Kerry HQ is doing it with Media Corps, but not to weblogs.

Both the Dem and GOP professional staffs are resisting publishing decentralization.

Otherwise they'd host the biggest network of blogs in the world. Blogs for each county, each precinct, every meetup, each working committee. Aggregators that tie local groups together. Both content and event/activity syndication. And promotion of those sites to the local news media, community groups, and political clubs.

The ROI? Better communication, coordination, cohesion, and collaboration. We need it as groups form, as citizens swell their ranks, as we commit time and energy to making momentum. Tools to help them follow the campaign's lead while making local sense of issues and messages.  

But they're not. The people who understood and supported this vision are no longer part of the Kerry staff. Instead, we're seeing incremental marketing. 3 of 5 Cluetrain Points.

Maybe next time.

[aka public policy]

Dan Gillmor wonders about blood lust as searches for the executed Nick Berg top the major search engines.

So you're asking, why does traffic slow down at a car accident, why do people crowd a murder scene, who pays for boxing matches and hockey games? That's one trigger.

Another. We've just fought a war where none of the violence was televised. We're hearing death announcements but no coffins, high school snaps, but no bodies. This video is unfiltered truth about the conflict, our conflict. Bloody, wretched, simple. 

And. We trust our federal government less than before. They admit to screening what we see, hiding "morale damaging" evidence from the general view. We trust our media less than before, wimps when we needed courage. So we scavenge for facts, for truth, for context and interpretation. For sense.

Click. Click. Click.

p.s. Almost no mention that Nick Berg is a Jew. He's not the first Jew executed on TV by Islamic terrorists after being captured working in a dangerous zone. Talk about derivative cinema.

I received this email from Anne Collingwood this morning.

Phil,

I am frustrated about the lack of attention the Internet is being given by the national campaign.

I see the need, but I am clueless. I am interested in your thoughts about both the following questions and about how to improve the Kerry Internet Effort.

Best, Anne

I’m working in Ohio with a grassroots organization called Cleveland for Kerry. My friend Matt is working in California with East Bay for Kerry.

The following issues came up during a phone conversation we had tonight. Would you be able to help us think through the solutions?

1. Is it too early to see the (state-of-the-art) potential of the Internet realized? How significantly can the power of the Internet diminish the need for television ads in this election? In 2008? In 2012?

2. Are bloggers more rigid in their thinking than others? Would you equate it to letters-to-the-editor in real time? Can there be actual debate online?

3. Are moderated discussions valid? Can a moderator censor some comments and still claim that they are listening to the people?

4. Did the Internet help facilitate the apparent cult of personality with the Dean folks? If so, was that kind of emotional investment wise; did it alienate folks not previously on the bandwagon?

5. Do bloggers feel betrayed if their advice is not used? Do they tend to extend trust to the candidate? How can a trustworthy candidate gain trust with new folks through use of the Internet?

6. What were the differences between young people attracted to Dean during the primary and attracted to Kerry during the primary?

7. The Internet offers campaigns the posting of data, mail, conversations, live broadcasts, tax revenue (just kidding :), and…?

There is no paid staff in Ohio. There is no staff that Matt knows of in the East Bay other than professional fundraisers. We see the Kerry Internet team working on live webcasts, fundraising drives, and the website. There are, however, "local websites" popping up all over the place, and we have no clue about what we can do with them.

If you don't have time to respond directly, we certainly understand. If you can refer us to someone or to websites, we'd appreciate it.

Thank you for your help.

Sincerely,

Anne Collingwood

What are your answers to these questions?

Out of the millions who blog, a handful do what professionals call journalism. Would more be better? Should we actively promote citizen journalism?

We could.

• Local Civic Journalism clubs.
• A full blown track in public school starting at age 8.
• An awards ceremony like the Pulitzer for best CJ reporting, best analysis, best thread, best catch of something missed by major media.
• Grants to develop curriculum for Business, Science, Public Affairs, Sports reportage.
• A professional guild helping CJers get press credentials and access like any news network.
• Legal services for bloggers to protect sources, file FOIAs, use sunshine ordinances, and defend IP.

And this is just for plain old text.

What will citizen journalism look like in 2009? My wild ass speculation: (like anyone will remember this post)

1. Moblogging comes into its own. Photos at a campaign stump speech by attendees outnumber those taken by photojournalists. And some aren't in bad light, of the back of someone's head, of the floor, with a finger over the lens, or from 10,000 feet away. Some will capture the spirit of an event and a defining moment. Long bet: By 2010 I'd be very surprised if ubiquity alone doesn't find us with a cell phone photo (or whatever we wind up calling them in 6 years) winding up above-the-fold on a major newspaper story, featured on the evening news, and gracing the cover of Time Magazine. A generation ago, big media adapted to electronic news gathering. The public continues that trend as the diffusing technology follows Moore's Law (more, better, faster, cheaper, smaller).  
2. Campaign coverage.
• A blogger on the presidential campaign bus.
• Designated bloggers at each meetup, taking photos and posting the minutes.
• Campaign aggregators, by location, topic, and affiliation go up 5 minutes after the home page.
• Local reporters become editors for local bloggers, compiling their accounts of the campaign.  
3. Personal video blogging becomes a staple of the portals and ISPs, a reason for customers to adopt broadband. And buy shiny tiny new digital video cams. Even laggards will have Logitech cams delivered with their just to be in on the conference call at work or to talk with family. First evidence: surging video camera aftermarket.  
4. Video syndication. We'll be moving more video en masse. RSS enclosures, anyone?.  As we're seeing in China's blocking of weblogs and other news sources, people route around censorship. P2P news distribution offers that alternative. Even for text news, P2P distribution of RSS and cached feeds let the network scale up.
5. News discovery systems, like Google News, will expand reach from the thousands of traditional news publishers to a broad selection of personal publishers. At first it's to weed out P.R. pros and to find reliable streams of general interest subject expertise. Eventually, they'll learn that the sixth-grade blogger has something meaningful to say about Outkast, worth sharing.
6. Blog juice. TV news and online editions of newspapers will explore ways to co-opt cheap content. Bloggers as stringers? Look for a play from the Classified Advertising department to annotate listings with fresh context from blogs, especially in smaller markets. Maybe even sharing revenue with popular bloggers. Example: citizen reportage on housing, neighborhoods put in with real estate listings.  
7. Stringer status. I'll bet hundreds of bloggers earn stringer accreditations from national news services and local news media. Not for everyone, but those willing to subscribe to journalism's standards will find this an edge.
8. Do you want it fast or good? Most blogging is about fast, slashing the distance between idea and paper. But video is inherently more interesting after post production. Home studio software adds polish. Voice overs, teleprompters, transitions, stock music, green screen backgrounds, titles. Nonlinear editing tools like Final Cut Pro will emerge in free/cheap format.
9. Extension. News isn't homogeneous, it's specific. Chess reporters have standard ways of representing game play. As do those who cover soccer/futbol. Or obituaries. Or police blotters. Or movie reviews. Watch for structural extensions to standard blogging, new blanks in the forms tailored to the application. And for clever ways to share new extensions.
10. History. Opposition research teams will hire specialists to comb campaign, activist, and lobbyist weblogs for dirt. Every weblog post from this election cycle is fair game. Would this help or hurt Kos's election chances?
11. En mi primera lengua. News translations on the fly, continuing a reverse cultural imperialism where English absorbs ideas and words from around the world. RSS and Atom will face semitic times of day and non-Gregorian calendars.
12. VNRs. Video News Releases will come along with citizen journalism. Citizen flackery and propaganda.
13. My News Station. We saw a handcrafted version of this in the Dean campaign. HowardDean.tv used DishTV, cable news, and hacked TiVos to collect news. They also collected video from the field, from students and volunteers, and cut it into a daily TV news program. That will become automatic. News aggregators (Bloglines) and discovery systems (Google News (clusters by topic), Technorati (clusters by reference), Daypop (what's hot)) will group and cut together syndicated videos based on location, time, and subject; create a montage of related footage; and stream a custom video channel just for you. 
14. Community stations. Following Hoder's advice on regional blogosphere building, we'll see "people's news" become a trusted alternative to state and corporate media. Military professionals will prioritize community blog servers right after radio and television stations. It won't happen in this decade because John Kerry should be able to keep the peace for the next 8 years, but the next time a country fears an attack by the US, watch their blogosphere come under attack from within.
15. Big screens enter. What do you do with a 250 megapixel monitor? Something 5 feet tall by 8 feet wide at paper resolution? Could you create a dynamic montage of video and stills that reflected your interests over time, relative popularity and proximity of news stories. The World Wide Wall® of News: a must for every corporate Chief, political war room, and mayor.  

Where do you think citizen journalism be in 2010?

[aka community]

Grassroots  journalism, meet grassroots fundraising. It took 1 form and about 5 minutes. Now I'm on my way to raising $10,000 for John Kerry by inviting other bloggers to join my Citizen Journalists Kerry 100 Club: 100 people at $100 each.

Take a moment to grok this.

A handful of volunteers in the beach resort of Santa Cruz, California, adopted an offline fundraising practice. Work your circle of friends. Colleagues from work, fellow students, the gardening club. Ask them to match your $100. It worked fast and easy on the ground.

So they took it to the web. A quick Deanspace installation, a little screen scraping of the JohnKerry.com donation site, some writing and graphics, and they're helping people give.

What they're not doing is just as important. No money kept; money goes straight to the campaign. No incorporation. No federal election rules to worry over. Frictionless. And two weeks from idea to go-live, maybe?

What can we learn from this?

1. Test human behavior before designing tools.
2. Free platforms that do 90% of the job speed everyone's time to market.
3. Open code platforms invite innovation and adaptation that create new kinds of value.
4. Campaign architectures can become hubs for innovators, leveraging prior financial, regulatory, branding, and systems investments. I can't wait for the DNC APIs.

While you're pondering, pull out your credit card and click here, why don't you. It's for a good cause and in a good name. Or create your own club.

Virality, anyone?

[aka community]

Tonight is the first night of Passover, the night when we tell stories. For the kloggers among you, storytelling is part of Jewish tradition, one way our memes propagated and persisted through millennia.

The stories we tell on Passover are as political as they are spiritual.

Speak truth to power. Moses telling Pharaoh "Let my people go" despite being young, of common blood, on bad terms with the emperor and a speech defect.

Social networks aren't new. Get the word out to mark your doors tonight. To everyone in your community. Without the Internet. Without email, or Orkut, or AIM, or SMS. Just people telling neighbors to pass the word, spare your firstborn.

Freedom is worth a fast march out of town. When we had the chance, we ran out of Egypt. We ate crackers on the go. And it was worth it. Freedom from a state favored religion. Freedom to gather and assemble. Freedom to teach your children to read, to write, to know their heritage. Freedom from state approved murder and torture and rape and all the other trappings of slavery.

Are you more free now than you were in 2000? in 1990? in 1776? Is your government broadening and protecting your freedoms?

Invest in your future, not your fears. The lifetime wandering in the desert was worth it. For their children and the preservation of all they believe in. How are we repairing the world? How are we leaving it a better place?  

Some people just won't listen to biological warfare. Ten plagues. Countless deaths and deformities. And still the Pharaoh would not relent. In our time we've seen anthrax used on American soil, and other WMDs used in Iraq. So today's Paharaoh's and downtrodden have bioweapons. Asymmetric warfare with power in mankind's hands, not God's.  

Remember the little guy. Rabbis of 1800 years' ago set the seder plate with bitter herbs and a sweet mixture. You eat them together. The mixture to remind you of bricks our enslaved ancestors made. The horseradish to remind you of their sweat and tears. So we make the connection between ourselves and those still in physical and spiritual bondage. And if we're lucky, we act on that connection. What are we doing to assure that every kid gets an education? What are doing to eliminate hunger in our country? How are we forcing our criminal justice system to protect a poor person's civil rights? How are we protecting women better than we did last year?

Set a place for the stranger. You leave a cup of wine for Elijah, should the prophet come calling. But you open your door to anyone who is hungry. Hospitality is the least gift we can give to a stranger or to ourselves. We don't ask for ID or check with Homeland Security.

If you're looking for a haggadah for your seder, I like the Open Source Haggadah Project, a spinoff of Douglas Rushkoff's Open Source Judaism. It helps you roll your own from traditional and modern sources. In our civilization's spirit of inquiry and dialog. Chag sameach. 

I've been rationalizing the 30-50 hours a week of grassroots campaigning I've been investing in the local Kerry campaign since last summer. Changing the world is great, and we're doing that. My takeaway is what I learn from it, how the work itself changes me. Here are a few lessons learned.

EQ is more important than IQ.

Everything in campaigns is about emotion. Values trigger emotions, as do symbols of those values. And emotions get you money, volunteers, votes.

Campaigns are tough on the emotions.

A local DFA leader said "Anger Unifies" at the last Democratic Unity Meetup. Lots of adrenalin. Ups and downs. I went to three Dean meetups the night after the California primary, the day Dr. Dean withdrew from the race. I saw frustration, despair, anger, denial, and loss. But I also saw resolve, support, and bonds with their fellow Dean faithful. In a race that lasts six weeks, you can turn up the emotional volume. But what do you do with a race that lasts 100 weeks?

You can't pick your comrades.

We encounter every "people problem" that HR pros prepare for, that social workers encounter, that psychiatrists commit for, in grassroots campaigning. The persistently off-topic person. Trolls. The person who thinks everything is interesting and emails you about it, and your 500 fellow volunteers. Fair weather friends. The craven mercenary. The paranoid. The narrowly obsessed (we almost started a John Kerry's Hair weblog back in September '03). The person who picks fights. The lonely. The shy. It takes centered, socially adept people to work with these people.  

Burnout is a huge problem.

We're lucky to have any active volunteers survive the primary season. It's expensive to volunteer. You're giving up recreation that might have been keeping you sane. You're spending less time on friends, family, and your love life. You may even trade off time you could be working or looking for work, dipping into savings or living frugally. I know volunteers who put off graduation, that lost a job, that neglected their health. So recruiting well rises to the top 5 issues every week.

When grassroots groups pay for their own expenses, they go to jail or embarrass their candidate/cause.

My group, East Bay Kerry, is unincorporated and not a PAC and not recognized by the FEC or IRS. If we take money from an organization to print fliers or buy buttons, we're breaking the law. If we sell buttons at a table, we're breaking the law. If we keep a few bucks from a house party to pay for the party's pizzas, we're breaking the law. It's paralyzing.

We need ways to legally raise and spend money without screwing John Kerry for President or the DNC.

Hoisting: those higher on the scale of commitment recruit those lower on that ladder, and work to bring them up.

There's a clear ladder of political engagement. It runs from "I can vote?" to elected official. At each step of the ladder, we pull up those behind us. If you volunteer for 2 hours every two years, you call someone to vote this year. If you're leading a writers bureau, you recruit new members from those who were previously interested but not volunteering.  

How much does that happen in the workplace?

Rarely.

Self-interest doesn't often lead to such seemingly altruistic behavior.

But if it is in the campaign's interest (or the enterprise's), how can you institutionalize pulling folks behind you up the ladder? How do you make each leader's success dependent on the growth of replacement leaders and fresh blood?

The new labor market features increased competition for great talent, increased employee turnover and shorter tenures. So hoisting becomes a competitive advantage. How well do you align incentives with hoisting behavior? How well do you incorporate

There is no organizing software that thinks of the user as the voter or volunteer.

All the commercial tools for running electoral or advocacy campaigns is top down, center out. CRM for politics. Clueless, in the Cluetrain Manifesto sense.

Keep all that stuff, though. It works.

Add new edge-powered stuff. Let anyone say "Hey, kids, let's put on a show!" Without approval from a hierarchy. Decentralized authority and the tools to act on it. And then help that nugget of energy flourish internally, and in interaction with others.

There are no tools for committee-scale organizations to be productive.

I want to put on a lecture series for John Kerry. Or host a bowling league fundraiser. Or mentor a Swing State grassroots team. Or coordinate high school students in growing Or coordinate 75 Earth Day activities.

Where are the tools that let me plan, staff, fund, schedule, coordinate, train, account, syndicate, dunn, manage, remind, and otherwise get things done?

Where are the recipes for getting things done? And the place to post my own?

We need team-scale productivity tools.

No grassroots organization is an island.

This is from some analysis I did for ActivistTech or DemTech or whatever it's called: A hypothetical bridge commission.

My speakers bureau in East Bay - West of the Tunnel works with other committees

• Fundraising
• Media relations
• Writers
• Swing state

Both ours, and those of East Bay East of the Tunnel, San Francisco's grassroots Kerryfolks, local union organizations, the Wellstone Club's speakers bureau, the official campaign, venue hosts, etc. More than 200 political and activist groups are players in the Bay Area's East Bay. Each committee in my organization needs to be able to manage the life cycle of relationships with each of the others. To get things done: events, money, recruiting, media, etc.

Where are the tools for identifying potential relationships, making them real, sustaining them, and gracefully retiring them?

Blogging remains absurdly difficult.

And the tools don't make it any easier.

Information overload is a real problem without practices or tools for managing it.

Just before the California primary, I was receiving more than 500 political emails daily. I didn't even get to look at my thousand RSS feeds.

When we got to 10 daily emails on our local Yahoo! group, people started unsubscribing faster than they were joining.

We're experimenting with multiple email channels (high and low volume, broad and niched, ad hoc and scheduled) but it's all confusing to our volunteers.

How much fatigue will the average voter feel in 200 days, if this keeps up? How can we lower the political noise? Does tuning out mean voters stay home?

Ok, so I'm off to a meeting of the Speakers Bureau.

I've heard it said by Dave Winer and many many others: if only Dean had reinvested half the money raised into the Internet, then ...

OK, so you're the Dean Campaign Chief Information Officer in August 2003. The money starts to roll in. $20 million over six months, $2-4 million per month.

What would you spend the money on?

1. What does your monthly budget look like?
2. What is your application and infrastructure portfolio?
3. How much will you allocate to maintenance?
4. You're building from scratch, so what problems do you hope to avoid through wise architecture?
5. What are your big milestones?
6. Who are your key vendors?

How do you spend in consonance with the campaign strategy?

1. How will you use the Internet to bring offline voters into the campaign at the same numbers as radio or television broadcasts?
2. What is your online strategy for responding to attack ads and opposition pundits in radio, television and print?
3. Online community takes time to build and is very hard to organize geographically. What will you do to match the state-by-state primary schedule?
4. What can you do with online services to serve the campaign in caucus states?
5. You are preparing for Bush to launch in Spring 2004. What are your countermeasures to reach out to moderate Republicans online while the GOP uses its advanced voter email systems to barrage 200 million validated email addresses?
6. How will you lower the cost-per-vote vs. the GOP?

I read Editor: Myself, Hossein Derakhsan's Persian/English weblog. Hossein (or does he go by Hoder?) covers domestic affairs for the BBC and metablogs the Persian blogosphere. I don't believe bloggers and politics mesh with each other the same way in Iran as they do here (the consequences of speaking out are a little different), but they seem of a kind.

Last week I dined with Pedram Moallemian who blogs the eyeranian. He wants a secular Iran. I asked him what he thought America's policy on Iran should be. He answered:

• Respect the right of self-determination for Iran and Iranians.
• Condemn any possible military action against the people who are doing a great job fighting tyranny by themselves.
• Acknowledge big mistakes were made on both sides in the past and choose to move on towards a better relationship.

Tyrants ruled Iraq and Afghanistan. There was no meaningful chance for reform, no hope for self-determination. Do the people of Iran, at home and in diaspora, have enough faith in the current system and the system's ability to change incumbents? 

Pedram clearly does. He and others are drafting a new Iranian constitution. This is an ambitious exercise, imagining a new government that fits a whole people. It's an embrace of liberty worthy of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. He wrote:

One of the bases for any true democracy is to accept the people’s prerogative to occasionally make wrong choices and even more often, to make choices that you and I may not like or agree with. But at the end of the day, the choice is completely theirs. By that I mean that if in a free and open election Iranians choose to keep the current regime, it would be vital for people like myself to value and honor their choice, yet reserving our right to oppose it in peaceful fashion and by non-violent means.   

Back to the three points...

Kerry is more likely to negotiate with Iran's government than Bush, but no President or candidate worth anything will rule out future options.

Israel is America's friend, and the threat of American force is part of what keeps it safe. Why rule out military action against a country who is still technically at war with a US ally? Some of the terror organizations that operate in Israel are funded by Iran. So there's a lot to work out between us, more than self determination.

Acknowledging mistakes on both sides, well, sure. Why not? Moving toward a better relationship? That's Motherhood and Apple Pie (at least in America). But actions speak much louder than words. Secular government that doesn't position America as Satan; defunding and disarming Hezbollah and other terrorists and turning them in to law enforcement authorities; acknowledging Israel's right to exist; and full women's suffrage would be great starts.

P.S. It seems both of our countries could do with a little more regime change and fairer elections.

P.P.S. Check out iranFilter, a collective blog/mefi system built by... wait for it... Hoder. More links, pithy. Overall source on internal reform, student life, American policy re: Iran. Now in beta.

P.P.P.S. My conviction is much greater than my influence within the Kerry campaign.

P.P.P.P.S. I had some naan with the tandoori lamb.  

[a klog apart]

TechNoir: "I met this man years and years ago and I have seen him repeatedly over the years even had dinner with him. If you really knew your comic history and you were on the con circuit you knew Julie Schwartz."

ABC reported the death of Julius Schwartz, Editor, DC Comics. He "rescued the superhero genre from near extinction in the 1950s. Revived and modernized Batman, The Flash, Green Lantern." Hawkman, Atom, The Justice League of America, and Superman too.

Maggie Thompson: This is the man who, more than any other, can take credit for the fact that we can still buy comic books today. The field continues to evolve — and maybe he’s been better equipped to handle that evolution, simply because science fiction was old stuff to him by the time he entered our field six decades ago. But — no matter how much we do admire the writers and artists who have entertained us — it’s Editor Julius Schwartz who came up with a formula that turned out to be a winning equation for our field.

This was important.

His rework of character, plot, theme, and visual design showed that each stupid little work can be reincarnated. Adapted to the times. Repurposed for other media. Giving power to authors and artists, and birth to entire media industries.

Where do you think West Side Story came from? Hollywood and Broadway made Romeo and Juliet over and over for decades. Then Julie showed that something old can be made new again. 

If you haven't followed graphic novels and comics for the last twenty years, you may not know that Batman has been interpreted and reinterpreted by more than a hundred different creative teams. Schwartz paved the road so we can enjoy the Caped Crusader set in times Edwardian and apocolyptic, as a boy and an old man, broken hearted or beyond vicious, political or anarchic, isolated or a family man. All being true to Bob Kane's central character while infusing their own imaginations and visions.

So what?

When the American masses stopped reading literary classics and listening to opera, the storytellers of Hollywood and Rockefeller Center turned for stories to the franchises of the dime novel, the genres of the comic book. Westerns. Science Fiction. True Romance.

Before Disney opened theme parks, DC Comics proved even little cartoons have enormous market potential. Properties long dead can breathe new cash flow.

So we have media conglomerates. And a war for the intellectual property commons. I can repurpose Beowulf and Icelandic sagas, and Shakespeare. But when does Time Warner's Batman franchise enter the public domain? When can I put on a Batman school play or write a short Silver Surfer story without their permission, without paying for the privelege? 

I love that storytellers renew and reinvigorate modern myths. So when you see Spiderman 2 and the Punisher this summer, or Hellboy, Starsky & Hutch, The Stepford Wives, Man-Thing, Catwoman, Alien vs. Predator, Astroboy, or Scooby Doo, give a nod to Julius Schwartz.

[a klog apart]

Delightful to see the new American politics through such insightful British eyes. Me and Opehlia. A blogger and her cat from the land of the Beatles and Disraeli. A regular read on metablogging, online democracy, and other things I find fascinating. Just a bit askew in unexpected ways.

[aka propagandart]