Open Source Political Campaign
For updates, see http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/P2P-Elections, http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/P2P-Politics, http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/P2P-Activism
Context
This is from the Wikipedia article, which is informative, but not very precise:
"Open source political campaigns, Open source politics, or Politics 2.0, is the idea that social networking and e-participation technologies will revolutionize our ability to follow, support, and influence political campaigns. Netroots evangelists and web consultants predict a wave of popular democracy as fundraisers meet on MySpace, YouTubers crank out attack ads, bloggers do oppo research, and cell-phone-activated flash mobs hold miniconventions in Second Life.
In print, open source politics was first used by political operatives in the lead-up to the 2004 presidential elections. It is unclear exactly who coined the phrase, but the earliest reference to the term in major media was a September 5, 2003 story in Salon.com in which supporters of the Draft Clark campaign and of Vermont Governor Howard Dean both claimed that their campaigns represented the ideals of "open source politics."[citation needed] The term was meant as a reference to open-source software such a Linux, which is designed to allow users to alter its code to make improvements. The idea was that new technologies would allow similar participation and the attendant benefits in the political realm.
The term was further refined in its current usage by a story in The Nation by Micah Sifry which appeared days after the 2004 election. Sifry wrote that open source politics means "opening up participation in planning and implementation to the community, letting competing actors evaluate the value of your plans and actions, being able to shift resources away from bad plans and bad planners and toward better ones, and expecting more of participants in return. It would mean moving away from egocentric organizations and toward network-centric organizing." Since Sifry's article, the term has appeared on numerous blogs and print articles.
Since the 2004 United States elections, the internet has become much more participatory and interactive with the popularization of Web 2.0 technologies such as Myspace, YouTube, Second Life and Wikipedia. This participation, the idea goes, lends new currency to the notion that these technologies can be employed to allow citizens to "reprogram" politics. One example is the way that the Macaca video spread virally through the internet on YouTube and contributed to the electoral defeat of Sen. George Allen of Virginia during the 2006 U.S. midterm elections. The old "source code" of politics allowed candidates to get away with making off-the-cuff comments if journalists did not pick up on them, but services such as YouTube have changed that, and now politicians must be more careful not to say things that will come back to haunt them. In short, the idea is that citizen can rewrite the old codes of politics by using these new technologies to promote change. The term "open source politics" was heavily employed in this context in the July/August 2007 issue of Mother Jones Magazine, where the definition appeared in a format that was modeled on a Wikipedia article." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_political_campaign)
More Information
- The Rise of Open-Source Politics, at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20041122/sifry
- Politics 2.0, http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/07/fight_different.html
- Web 2.0 gives birth to Politics 2.0, http://gigaom.com/2007/03/19/web-20-gives-birth-to-politics-20/
- Interviews, http://www.motherjones.com/interview/2007/07/