Presidential campaigning is being swept into a new era by the Internet, which is emerging as a political power tool. Howard Dean, for example, has risen from obscurity to national recognition on the back of his Web-based grassroots fund-raising approach, and campaign supporters of all types have learned to use a social-networking site, Meetup.com, to arrange political gatherings. Meanwhile, candidates posting messages on campaign Web sites seems to have replaced kissing babies as a ritual.
These are encouraging developments because they share a grassroots, bottom-up approach to electing a president. But something crucial is missing because so far, electronic populism is still largely about getting out the vote. The candidates have excelled at using the Web to organize supporters and raise money in new ways, but the more tantalizing possibility—that ordinary people might collectively help shape the substance of what their candidate stands for—remains a dream.
Voters may have a tendency to think of ordinary campaign supporters as earnest, saintly types who lick envelopes and hand out flyers on street corners—those who contribute labor. But supporters could also contribute ideas to a successful campaign, if they had a platform on which to express them. Consider, for instance, a fascinating precedent in the computer industry—open-source software. Massive applications and entire operating systems like Linux, along with much of the software that powers the Internet, are built collectively and without charge by thousands of programmers around the globe. The open-source world is quick to innovate because the discussion of new ideas and features is public, the very opposite of the smoke-filled back room that old-fashioned politics conjures up. And the software created by open-source advocates tends to be remarkably stable because so many eyes scan the code for bugs.
A decade ago, most software developers would have scoffed at the idea that a collective, distributed network outside a corporate hierarchy could develop a competitive operating system—for free. But today’s software developers are scrambling to learn as much as they can about the open-source process. They’ve discovered that a thousand minds all contributing small pieces to a project trumps 20 geniuses on a payroll.
Using open-source coding as a model, it’s not a stretch to believe the same process could make politics more representative and fair. Imagine, for example, how a grassroots network could take over some of the duties normally performed by high-priced consultants who try to shape a campaign message that’s appealing. If the people receiving the message create it, chances are it’s much more likely to stir up passions.
 | As governor of Vermont, Howard Dean did not use a computer or e-mail until late 2001. But Joe Trippi, his presidential campaign manager, was once a consultant for Progeny Linux Systems, developers of the open-source concepts that inspired Dean’s Internet-driven organizational efforts. |
