While working at Union Bank of Switzerland in the mid 90s, I was confronted with complex corporate politics. I hired a management consultant who assisted me in learning more effective ways in navigating the international matrix management style.

From this I developed a keen interest in various ways of understanding group dynamics, especially as it occurs online. I was asked to publish a paper about this in the British Journal of Group Analysis: Technical possibilities in a new age, Journal of Group Analysis March 2002. A draft is available online at here

When I first became interested with Gov. Dean’s 2004 Presidential bid, I followed the various blogs and mailing lists. While the number of groups I am on ebbs and flows, it is currently around 140 groups, of which I am moderator of around 15. It is in this role that I have moderated disputes between different grassroots leaders.

Through the blogs and mailing lists, I learned about Meetups and went to the March 2003 Meetup in New York City, which Gov. Dean attended. My wife and I became active with Meetups in Connecticut, organizing and hosting Meetups in Fairfield County and coordinating Meetups with other parts of the state.

It was also through the mailing lists that I learned about House Parties and my wife and I hosted house parties and became the Connecticut House Party coordinators.

With my technological interests, I became active with a group of people who initially called themselves Hack4Dean. They later changed their name to Deanspace and I worked extensively with Deanspace. I set up http://www.ctfordean.com which during the Presidential Primary was getting more traffic than Lieberman’s national site.

This led to me being a member of the steering committee for Dean’s 2004 Presidential campaign in Connecticut. I continued to work with Deanspace and set up several official Dean campaign websites, such as http://newmexico.deanforamerica.com http://newyork.deanforamerica.com , http://oklahoma.deanforamerica.com , http://delaware.deanforamerica.com and http://okalhoma.deanforamerica.com

It is using a national infrastructure to create more powerful sites at the state, and even the local level that I am particularly interested in working on.

I also worked with other online social networks, such as Friendster, Orkut, Tribe, and LiveJournal to spread the message of the Dean campaign. I believe that Democrats need to be more active in all levels of online social networks. I even took advantage of these tools, including the ‘Get Local’ tools of the Dean campaign to organize a flashmob in Seattle, following the example of the comic strip character Alex Doonesbury. This received national media coverage. One attendee sent me a copy of a brief video that he made of the event. You can view the video here.

I used peer-to-peer technology to make sure that videos like this were available in the peer-to-peer space as well, and had many Dean videos downloaded extensively.

All of this led me to conduct a survey of Internet usage by Dean supporters. I presented the results of this survey at the 2003 Association of Internet Researchers in Toronto. I also discussed the results with people in Burlington.

When Gov. Dean ended his bid for the Presidency he encouraged his supporters to consider running for local office. My wife ran for State Representative and I was her campaign manager. Through this, I learned a lot about running local campaigns.

I set up her website as http://kimhynes.smartcampaigns.com. The site was set up using Drupal, the underlying software of Deanspace. I set up the domain and the site in such a way that I could easily set up similar campaign websites. I set up around a dozen, including a few for other Dean Dozen candidates. During the 2005 election I hope to be setting up more local campaign sites, either through Smartcampaigns, or through some organization where I can be more effective

During the 2004 elections I also helped the Diane Farrell for Congress campaign with setting up their technology infrastructure. I would like to set up a corps of technologists that could help various campaigns with their technology needs as well as share information.

One example of where this would be particularly useful is with the much lauded voterfile that the DNC has produced. I used this file to produce phone lists, mailing lists, and turf maps for various campaigns and we need to make sure that more Democrats around the country can take proper advantage of this data.

Also during the 2004 election cycle I received credentials from the Democratic Party to be one of the first bloggers to cover a national convention. I continue to work closely with bloggers and lead a workshop for bloggers at the Democratic National Convention and also at the summit of the Progressive Democrats of America this January.

As I write this, I am participating as a panelist on the Tools For Online Activism for Online Social Networks 2005. I am also preparing for my participation in the SXSW panel on a similar topic.

I also continue to work with the development of CivicSpace, the follow on to Deanspace and support various websites promoting a progressive agenda.

I hope that the preceding brief biography helps illustrate some of my activities and how I would hope to use them on a national level.