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]