History
In the summer of 2003, Dean supporters with an interest in information technology started meeting online and talking about how they could use their skills to help the Dean campaign. Inspired by community-focused sites like Slashdot, IndyMedia, Kuro5hin, and Scoop, they looked for tools they could build or customize that could be used to help promote the Dean candidacy.

They wanted to create a toolkit for people without strong technical skills to use to set up powerful, interoperable websites for of information sharing and community building.

Meeting together through mailing lists, IRC chats, and experimenting with different forums, wikis, and content management systems, they decided that it would be best to build with an open source content management system as a foundation, one that would allow them to deploy distributed sites easily. These sites would be able to share and aggregate content. The sites would be built on software that could easily be extended. To the extent possible, they would use open standards for interconnectivity.

Underlying software
After experimenting with several products, the group decided to use Drupal, an open source content management system written in PHP, a widely-used server-side scripting language. Drupal works with several different databases and can run either on Apache or Microsoft IIS servers. While there were some test sites set up using IIS with Microsoft’s SQL Server, ultimately almost all of the sites were built using Apache with MySQL.

Another key goal of the project was to synchronize with its Drupal foundation and avoid forking off from the main Drupal development. When the project first started, Drupal was at release 4.1. Over the following months, release 4.2 and release 4.3 of Drupal came out. In most cases, the extensions to Drupal for DeanSpace were upwardly compatible, but in some cases, extensions required minor code revisions.

How the components fit the goals
Drupal has many modes for creating entries. One such mode creates weblog entries. Weblogs list entries in reverse chronological order on a single page. They often allow other users to write and post comments about any entry. Called “blogs” for short, weblogs are a popular, relatively simple way to publish news or personal journals.

Drupal also allows multiple users to edit the same entries, similar to wikis. Another important aspect of wikis is the ability to use a simpler formatting language than HTML. Drupal has a Wiki module that can be used to facilitate such quick formatting. However, this module did not work as well as hoped and did not interoperate well with HTML formatting.

Drupal also supports forums, however in this context Drupal’s forums didn’t add enough beyond the normal blogging capabilities to be all that useful. On the other hand, Drupal’s ability to both publish and subscribe to RSS feeds has proven to be very useful in supporing information-sharing by DeanSpace sites.

Community building
Community-building was a key DeanSpace goal. There were already some tools for this purpose deployed by the Dean campaign or volunteers, beginning with the first Dean blog, hosted on Blogspot, (http://dean2004.blogspot.com), which came to be known as the unofficial blog. As the campaign progressed, an official blog was set up using a content management system for weblogs called MovableType. Content posted to both the official and the unofficial blog was syndicated via RSS, therefore easily accessible to users with news aggregators. Hundreds of Yahoo Groups with mailing lists were also been created, and these, if set up properly could also provide RSS feeds. Many local groups also set up their own websites.

SIDEBAR: RSS stands for either Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, depending who you talk to. It’s a standard machine-readable XML format for encoding text according to the relatively simple weblog format, where content items are posted in reverse chronological order. There can be multiple content items for any given date, and each item can have a title. RSS identifies these components of a weblog item with xml tags. RSS items are published as “feeds” that can be interpreted by software packages called “aggregators.” The software allows a user to aggregate RSS feeds from many sites and read them with a single interface. News aggregators provide increasingly popular functionality for tracking and reading weblogs. RSS is also a way to share specific news items with many sites; DeanSpace leveraged this capability.

The campaign was exposed like no other campaign before. Users posted many comments on the blogs, especially the official blog. In fact, it was common for the official blog to receive thousands of comments a day, and there was nothing to prevent those who would disrupt discussions, commonly referred to as trolls, from adding their distracting comments.

Among other tools, Yahoo Groups were particularly popular and effective, however, many people expressed concern about reliance on a commercial service. Yahoo Groups were effective as platforms for mailing lists, but other tools within the Yahoo Groups tool set, such as syndication and databases, were little used.

Local sites supporting Dean were often set up as static pages, and were useful in getting out general information but difficult to update.

Easy to roll out state and constituency group sites.
Perhaps the greatest challenge was to come up with an easy way to set up a site. The DeanSpace team wanted to make the process simple enough for someone’s grandmother to create a site. The first issue in building a site is coming up with a name and registering the relevant domain, fairly straightforward for experienced technical users but potentially difficult and confusing for non-techies, including grandmothers. To help resolve the problem, the DeanSpace team registered the domain “fordean.net” so that anyone could easily set up a subdomain, e.g. “http://california.fordean.net/.” Over a 100 sites were set up this way. This also saved people the expense of registering their own domains.

The next issue was who would host what sites. Many options were considered. What sites could be hosted by the official campaign? What Federal Election laws would apply in such a case? Could a special company be set up? Could people pool money together for this? Would there be requirements about setting up a PAC or a 527, and how would these requirements affect the ability of DeanSpace sites to interact with the Dean campaign?

The Dean campaign, which had been cautious about election law issues, would host only officially sponsored state sites. Forming a PAC or 527 could prohibit communications between the campaign and website volunteers, so that idea was discarded. Ultimately DeanSpace referred volunteer site administrators to hosting services that had worked well with initial sites.

The hosting services selected were limited to those who could support PHP and provide easy access to MySQL. This ruled out quite a few hosting services, and others were ruled out for poor performance or support.

SIDEBAR: PHP is a popular general-purpose server-side scripting language often used by software developers to create applications and systems for the web. Open source software such as the Drupal content management system, which is the core of DeanSpace, is often developed for the “LAMP” platform, i.e. Linux (operating system), Apache (web server), MySQL (database system), and PHP or Perl (scripting languages). Because DeanSpace was built with PHP and designed to work with MySQL, support for both was required.

Drupal allows multiple sites to use the same set of application files on a server by creating a configuration file that specifies different databases for the different sites. One person set up a hosting account that allowed a high volume of throughput, multiple database and multiple domains. Using this account, he was able to host many DeanSpace websites in the fordean.net domain quickly easily and without any additional expense

Easy to get non-computer people adding content.
One of the great advantages of a DeanSpace site is that users with no knowledge of html can easily add pages,. so that state communication directors, for instance, can immediately add content up as soon as a site, as opposed to waiting for some web developer to take the content add it to the website.

However, as it becomes easier to add content, it becomes more difficult and important to determine the best way to organize that content. Drupal has many different forms that contributions can take, so there were many discussions about which forms would be the best.

As noted earlier, forum entries never gained popularity. Unless there is a fairly large population of contributors, forums can fragment the community so that it never achieves critical mass.. If all the contributors to the official blog moved over to a single Drupal space, there would have most likely been enough contributors in each forum to reach critical mass, have enough posts to keep people involved, and maintain a sense of community. However, DeanSpace itself was designed to be a collection of smaller communities, and breaking these smaller communities into even smaller units wouldn’t have been beneficial. Forums would also have required support by hosts or moderators.

The most popular form of content has arguably been the blog entry. Dean Supporters were already comfortable with blogs from their experiences with the official and unofficial Dean blogs, and many Dean supporters were regular blog readers and publishers. The blog format allows users to find easily all the posts by a single poster. Each entry often has a link to all the other entries by the same contributor In the more informal sites, this has been used to give people a sense of who the different contributors are. However, for the official state sites, the emphasis was less on individual contributors in favor of the campaign as a whole. Because of this, the Official State sites used stories instead of Blog entries.

Stories are similar to blog entries, but they’re moderated by default and lack a link to other entries by the author. However, most sites haven’t used moderation, except occasionally for items picked up from other sites via RSS syndication. Users of a site would rank these items, and the most highly ranked items would appear on the front page.

Another type of content is what Drupal calls a ‘static page’. The only notable difference between Static Pages and other entries in Drupal is that Static Pages can be written in PHP. Since they change programmatically, static pages are actually more dynamic than other entries and facilitate having fixed links on the front page.

Events, another form of content, are similar to blog entries and Static pages but have a time associated with them and are used for promoting upcoming events.

Use of Taxonomy.
Once the team determined content types, there was the larger issue of taxonomy – how the content is categorized and organized – to consider.. Anyone could easily add new content, but where should that content go? For some sites, the default is to put everything on the front page, which works only if there is a small amount of content. However more content grows requires more, and better, organization.

Within the taxonomy, a user can set up different vocabularies,. each of which includes a different set of terms. The most common use of the taxonomy is to set up a ‘category’ vocabulary as we see in other blogging software such as Movable Type. There is also a ‘location’ vocabulary. Entries can be in any combination of terms from different vocabularies. For example, an item might be in the category ‘fundraising’ and the location ‘Stamford’.

The ability to aggregate.
One of the most exciting aspects of DeanSpace is its ability to aggregate news, blog entries and other items from various sources online, especially where DeanSpace sites share content. This would form a network of DeanSpace sites. For example, an entry on a city site could percolate up to a state site, an entry on a state site could be propagated out to different city sites, and constituency sites could easily be tied to sites based on location. So far this kind of sharing has not evolved, but the evolution of such a network will take time,

During the Dean campaign, headquarters in Burlington published RSS feeds. DeanSpace sites could subscribe to events scheduled with the ‘Get Local’ tool which at the DeanForAmerica website. Also available via RSS feed from the official site were icons for DeanSpace site administrators to use.

Dean volunteers created around 2,000 Yahoo groups. Since RSS is part of the Yahoo Groups toolkit, Some DeanSpace sites aggregated relevant Yahoo Groups news feeds, and newsfeeds from weblogs of interest to the audience for the specific DeanSpace site.

The ability to develop additional tools
Beyond the simple community building using tools such as blogs and RSS feeds which are core components of Drupal and DeanSpace, Drupal also provides a strong platform for developing and deploying new tools. Issues of screen layout, data access and user authentication are already handled by the core technology, allowing developers to focus on building specific tools or modules. DeanSpace is focuses on campaign-specific contact management tools.

At the simplest level, Drupal can be configured with portable user ids. That is, a user registered at one DeanSpace site can log into any site in the network. For basic authentication this has proven useful. However, this authentication doesn’t provide additional information, such as email address, or full name, and as such is limited in its functionality.

One important part of a campaign is enabling volunteers to find one another. Through FOAF, the Friend Of A Friend protocol, information about supporters from the official campaign site can be retrieved from within DeanSpace. Additional work is being done with FOAF to use it to link other Drupal based sites, and potentially other non-Drupal sites as well.

Beyond this, DeanSpace needed tools for contacting volunteers , including better email handling within Drupal, the ability to send emails to people based on grouping according to criteria such as their user roles in DeanSpace, or (for volunteers not registered with DeanSpace) data entered via a webpage or uploaded from other sources, such as Meetup participant spreadsheets.

DeanSpace developers also built tools to facilitate writing and sending letters to newspaper editors, and technology to support Get Out the Vote activities, including tools to enter voter information gathered through phone banks and door to door canvassing, and by volunteers talking with their friends, family, and neighbors. Such tools have been around for a while, but through DeanSpace tools were adapted for use anywhere over the internet, not just at campaign offices. There were also tools for virtual phone banking, and loading new voters from vCards in a viral marketing approach.

Once voters are identified, it is also necessary to get them to the polls, so developers created. rideboard software with which voters could request rides, and volunteers could offer rides.

Beyond DeanSpace – CivicSpace
DeanSpace grew out of the campaign to elect Howard Dean President. However, the software could be used to support any campaign. Developers continued fixing bugs and enhancing the system after Dean dropped out of the 2004 presidential race, and the DeanSpace Team raised funds to continue development of CivicSpace.

Many of the DeanSpace volunteers have expressed interest in using this software for other campaigns., especially local races; gubernatorial races; congressional races; etc. Already a few such sites are up. The software may also be adapted for use in other countries like the United Kingdom, Austria, Canada and Hungary. CivicSpace is now being used for advocacy and philanthropic sites.

In 1982, I took a computer consulting position at Bell Laboratories. I spent my working hours writing programs to help optimize the design of telephone circuits. I also spent a lot of time playing speed chess during lunch, and exploring new electronic worlds after hours. Some of the time was spent playing Rogue, an early computer game. More of the time was spent sending emails and Usenet posts.

A computer I had an account on, was connected over the phone lines to a computer twenty miles away. It, in turn, was connected to another computer a little further up the line. By following the links properly, I could get to Arpanet and send emails to people around the world.

In October, 1982, I sent a post to the net.singles Usenet newsgroup. Several people that I had known online but not face-to-face showed up and I experienced my first Meetup.

Ten years later, I became interested in the presidential campaign of Paul Tsongas. I put a Tsongas bumper sticker on the back of my car and wrote my first check to a political campaign.

On New Years Eve, 1998, I went to what I would consider my second ‘Meetup’. Members of an online community had a New Year’s Eve party in Washington DC. I took a train down to Washington and spent New Year’s Eve with a bunch of people that I had met online, had shared interests with, but had never met face-to-face.

I have always been a news junkie of sorts, and when I started working on Wall Street in the late eighties, I had the good fortune of being able to access news wires through various trading systems. Instead of relying on an edited down version of the news that I would find in the local papers, or on the evening newscasts, I could explore the news that was interesting to me and form my own opinions.

The ability to get news via Yahoo! and then later via Google News was wonderful and by early 2003, I was getting most of my news online.

In February, 2003, I felt I should become educated about the different Democratic Presidential candidates. There were a lot of them running and I believed I should educate myself about these candidates. I had heard of Joe Lieberman, he was from my home state, John Kerry, from the next state over and Richard Gephardt who had been speaker of the House for many years. None of the particularly excited me, and I felt that John Kerry was probably the best of them. However, there were a bunch of other people, Gov. Dean from Vermont, Senator Edwards from North Carolina, Senator Graham from Florida. I didn’t really know much about any of them.

I started searching online for information, and I found that I really liked the policies of Howard Dean, socially liberal, fiscally conservative. In my mind he carried the mantel of Paul Tsongas quite well.

Not only was there information from various news sources about Howard Dean, but people were writing in blogs about him. In March, 2002, I started writing online journal entries on LiveJournal. I started using Blogger and Ecademy in August of that year. It was great to read what other ordinary people were saying about Gov. Dean and his campaign.

Through LiveJournal, I discovered a site called Meetup.COM The goal seemed to be to get a bunch of people from a shared locality with a shared interest to meet one another face to face, the way I had met people from the net.singles Usenet group in 1982 or from the online community in 1998. I had signed up to go to LiveJournal Meetups in the fall of 2002. Unfortunately, there weren’t enough LiveJournalers in my immediate area to have a Meetup, and it didn’t seem worth it to travel down to New York City for a LiveJournalers Meetup.

On February 20th, there was an article in one of the weblogs that “Dr. Dean is scheduled to attend the March 5th Meetup in New York! The New York Meetup is the second-largest group after Washington DC, with 92 supporters, so this will be a very exciting opportunity for Dean to see for himself just how strong his netroots are”. It went on to say, “Dean has 1590 supporters signed up, whereas Kerry and Edwards have 499 and 298, respectively (as of this writing). Dean has pledged to try and attend as many Meetups as possible, so it is clear that he understands and appreciates his netroot support”.

By this time, I had already made my first financial contribution to the Dean campaign. My wife and I decided to go to the Meetup. We had no idea what to expect. I think it is useful to keep in mind that most people going to their first Meetup, whether it was in March 2003, or today, have no idea what to expect.

The Meetup was taking place in what sounded like an interesting restaurant so we decided to make dinner reservations an hour ahead of the Meetup. That way we could have a place to sit and something good to eat.

So, we ended up with a great place to sit and a good meal. However, we didn’t end up interacting very much with any of the other folks attending the Meetup. The crowd was overwhelming and they cleared most of the tables from the restaurant so they could fit more people in. Still, the room was packed and there were long lines outside.

I was struck by the twenty-somethings who had gotten inside and were talking on their cellphones to their friends outside. “Yeah, I made it in. I’m standing near the back wall. Where are you?” I was also struck by the same people talking about the importance of balanced budgets. I had always thought balanced budgets appealed to an older crowd.

My wife and I had never been in a crowd being addressed by a Presidential candidate. The energy was overwhelming. Was it because Gov. Dean is a particularly powerful speaker, or was there that sort of energy in a crowd anytime a Presidential candidate addressed a crowd? My wife and I didn’t know at the time, but left deciding that we wanted to be more involved with the Dean campaign.

We read the blogs and signed up for email lists. Through this, we heard of another interesting event, house parties. Although I had given to a presidential campaign once, a decade earlier, the idea of organizing a fundraiser for a presidential campaign never occurred to us. That is, until we read about house parties on a blog or mailing list.

We decided we would have a house party. We contacted David Salie up in Burlington and agreed to host one. We received information about how to host a house party. I talked on a mailing list with other potential house party hosts. Just as we had never hosted a presidential fundraiser before, none of our friends had ever attended one, so we weren’t sure who to invite or how to get a good crowd.

It was around this time that I discovered the Federal Elections Commission listing of donors to former presidential campaigns. I started gathering names from this list, and posted to the mailing list what I was doing and how I was doing it.

Before I knew what had happened, the mailing list was shut down and David Salie was on the phone telling me that I couldn’t have the house party. It turns out that it is against the law to use names off of the FEC listings for fundraising purposes. I protested that I hadn’t actually used the names yet, but had just started gathering them.

No good. The lawyers in Burlington wanted to play things incredibly safe. They didn’t want to risk anything; better to just cancel my house party. So, I sent out notes to everyone whom I had already invited, mostly on the assorted mailing lists that I was on saying that something had come up and I had to cancel the house party.

It was a heartbreaking disappointment; our first chance to really be involved with a presidential campaign, dashed because of a technicality. Nonetheless, I let David know that we still wanted to be involved and let us know when the next set of house parties were being organized and we would help.

Meanwhile, we helped lead Meetups. In May, Joe Trippi wrote in a blog entry that “in 4 1/2 months Dean Meetups members have grown from 432 to over 24,000 and still growing”. We joined various groups, such as a statewide group of Meetup hosts and a national mailing list of Meetup hosts. Another group that I joined was called hack4dean.

Hack4dean was a group of programmers, mostly young guys still in college, interested in coming up with the one great tool to which would revolutionize the way campaigns work. We would develop online portals for interconnected groups tied together with RSS, bit torrent, FOAF, and every other kind of cool tool that could be imagined. It would replace the reliance on Yahoo Groups that had become so common place in the early days of the campaign. They decided to rename the group DeanSpace and to settle on using the open source content management system, Drupal, as their framework.

I set up some test websites using DeanSpace and ended up setting up the Connecticut for Dean website. Connecticut for Dean was not an official organization and a lot of things were done on an ad hoc basis, including the website. However, it was a very successful website and for a period it was getting more traffic than Joe Lieberman’s national campaign website.

In June, we traveled up to Burlington to be with the crowd of five thousand people who had traveled from many different places to celebrate Gov. Dean officially declaring his candidacy. It was part of a grand trip. We started off by dropping my middle daughter off at summer camp. Then, we spent a day with Kim’s brother who lived in Hanover NH. The day of the announcement, we drove from Hanover to Burlington. On the way, we saw many cars with Dean bumperstickers. We felt like we were part of some grand convey. Looking out over the landscape of Vermont, I thought of the famous Ronald Reagan advertisement, Morning in America. It felt like a new morning, full of hope and joy.

It was hot at the announcement. People passed around bottles of water. One man lent a bandana to us to cover Fiona’s head. We saw a few friends from Connecticut. Afterwards, we wandered around Burlington, trying to find the campaign headquarters. The headquarters had moved from downtown to South Burlington, and we finally found someone who could give us directions to the new offices.

We showed up in the afternoon after the announcement. The offices were fairly empty, everyone was either home recuperating or off at one event or another. The names that we knew at that time were Zephyr Teachout and David Salie. Neither of them were around and the volunteer passed us off to Michael Silberman. Michael showed us around the office and we chatted for a little while. Then we headed off back to Connecticut.

During the summer we did everything we could to help with the campaign. There was a large fundraiser for Governor Dean at George Soros’ house. Soros lives a short drive from our house. I have worked for years on Wall Street, and it seemed like a great opportunity to support Governor Dean, visit a very interesting house, and do a little networking as I tried to find my next permanent job. Kate O’Connor took a great picture of us with Governor Dean at the event. When Governor Dean gave his stump speech we pretty much knew it by heart.

As the summer rolled on, Governor Dean came to New York City for a big rally in Bryant Park. I volunteered to help register people as they showed up. I sat at the side of the event and took down people’s names and contact information and entered it into a spreadsheet on my laptop. Kim went with my older daughters up front. Since we were there early, Kim ended up in the front row. Kim and the girls ended up in some of the broadcasts of the event. Afterwards, we went backstage and talked with a few different people from the campaign.

A personal interest of mine is the Association of Internet Researchers. It had become clear over the months that the Internet was having a large effect on the Dean campaign, and that the Dean campaign was having a large effect on the way people used and understood the internet. I proposed to present a paper at their annual conference which was scheduled for October. I set up a survey online. I sent out emails, posted to websites, blogs and bulletin boards, talked in chatrooms, and in every possible venue to encourage people to fill out my survey. Some people asked on the mailing lists who I was, if I could be trusted, what I wanted this information for, etc. Others vouched for me and talked about their interaction with me in various online venues.

Many of the results were unremarkable. The respondents were pretty closely split between male and female. A third of the respondents had attended graduate school, which seemed particularly high, but fit with the stereotype of Dean supporters being highly educated. The income distribution tracked national averages, as did the percentage from different states, with a few exceptions. There were disproportionately high number of respondents from Connecticut, which made sense, since I was from Connecticut and got a lot of people from Connecticut to respond. There were a lot of respondents from Vermont, where the campaign was headquartered, and states like Oregon and Washington had a high percentage of respondents, which I assumed reflected the strong online organizing activities there.

In the survey, people reported that they were online to gather information about Gov. Dean. They also reported being online to organize. Meeting people socially was another important reason people were online. This appeared to be a significant part of what was going on with the campaign.

A quarter of the people said that they had met a lot of new people or developed a lot of new friendships face to face as a result of being online with the Dean campaign. This certainly rung true for Kim and I. Our social life had shifted to being very focused around the Dean campaign. Our social activities were Meetups, house parties, steering committee meetings, and that is where we spent time with our closest friends.

For people in their thirties, this was especially pronounced with forty percent of the respondents talking about having established a lot of new friendships as a result of being online with the Dean campaign. One blog had an interesting parody of the campaign:

“Welcome to Howard Dean's Meetup! The first Wednesday of every month has now become the source of exciting new social opportunities that will open up your lifestyle to everything true romance has to offer!

There are maybe 79,999 people out there just waiting to "meet up" with you. You're hot, you're sexy, and people find it appealing that you're involved and positive about an individual's ability to influence national elections at the grassroots level.” http://tomburka.com/archives/2003_08.php#000230

Yet this parody was not without some basis in truth. The official blog announced, “ Congratulations Are In Order ... for Laura Elaine Katzive and Daniel Lee Ackman, who were married today. According to their wedding announcement, they "met a year ago at a talk given in New York by Howard Dean."

How important was this social aspect, this meeting people face to face at Meetups, and the potential of a meaningful relationship? To me, the most interesting statistic I observed was that the highest correlation to the amount of money donated was not income level, how committed a person was to the campaign, how active they were with mailing lists or blogs. The highest correlation to the amount of money donated was frequency that people attended Meetups. While we cannot say for certain that going to Meetups is what caused people to donate, it is clear that there is a strong relationship between financial giving and meeting people face to face. I am sure that an experienced fundraiser wouldn’t be surprised by this, but it seems to be something that too often gets forgotten when people talk about the Dean campaign.

This is not to say that all was rosy with all the relationships that occurred online and face to face with the Dean campaign. The New York Times Magazine did an article on the Dean campaign that portrayed many of the volunteers in Burlington as college aged boys that couldn’t make it with the girls so threw themselves into computers and politics. Needless to say, the article was not well received by many Dean supporters.

Around September, an email appeared on an international Dean supporters mailing list. One person was threatening to sue another over who should run Meetups, could register domain names with the Dean name in it, and speak to the press.

Having spent a lot of time extinguishing flame wars online, I sent an email to the mailing list suggesting that this sort of stuff didn’t belong on a public mailing list. I suggested that if people needed to work this out they could contact me and I would attempt to mediate the dispute. Contact me, they did! The amount of hatred and bile was astounding. They appealed to anyone in authority they could find, and as a general rule, everyone in Burlington said that for a variety of reasons, they couldn’t be involved. Slowly, they reached a point where they agreed to disagree and as much as possible stay out of each other’s hair.

Other online organizing activities were much more enjoyable. One morning, reading various news, and comics, online, I found the Doonesbury cartoon where Alex was planning a flashmob at the Space Needle. In the cartoon, she was sitting at the computer typing in the instructions. Everyone should gather at the Space Needle in Seattle at 10:25 Saturday morning and hop up and down chanting Howard Dean. They should then disperse. Alex’s mother looked over her shoulder and commented how she just didn’t understand her daughter’s political activities anymore.

I sure understood it. Here was an event to raise Gov. Dean’s visibility, to get people together in face to face community, to have fun. Using tools created by the Dean campaign, I scheduled the exact event Alex had described in the comic strip. I sent emails to anyone I could find in Seattle. I posted to the blog about it. Other people picked up on it. They spread the word. Some people complained that it wasn’t a real flash mob. It was too planned. Others complained that it wasn’t really addressing the issues of the campaign. Some folks for Seattle questioned why some guy from Connecticut was organizing the event, and not the people in Seattle.

To that, I had a quick and easy reply. I made them co-organizers in the system, and handed the ball to them. In the end, around 150 people showed up. Many of them then went on to do other Dean related activities. During the Dean campaign, many people wanted to promote the view of Dean supporters as people that really cared about what was going on around them by contributing to food banks, donating blood, or doing other important civic actions. People brought food for a food bank and went and helped clean up a beach afterwards. The event got national news coverage and was deemed a great success. One person even emailed me a video of the event.

Another key aspect to building successful grassroots organizations is public recognition. For Kim and I, we received public recognition for our activities by being asked to participate in a couple events with Governor Dean.

It proved to be a very interesting week. Tuesday, November 4th, 2003 was our third wedding anniversary. It was also a special day for Kim and I in many different ways. Kim’s mother would have turned 61 on Tuesday. Kim’s mother had died of cancer four years earlier on Kim’s birthday. I never got a chance to meet Kim’s mother, we had only been dating a few weeks when her mother died. A year later, Kim and I got married on her mother’s birthday. Eleven months later, Fiona was born and we baptized on her grandmother’s birthday and her parents wedding anniversary.

Tuesday was also the date that I learned that my aunt had died over the weekend, the day that we received the invitation to see Gov. Dean in New York, and Election Day for local municipal elections. The next day, Kim and I stood behind Governor Dean as he delivered a speech announcing his plans to ask his supporters whether he should accept public financing or not. If he accepted public financing, he would reach an end of his fundraising, since he had already raised about as much as he could and still accept public financing. However, if he declined public financing, that would mean something like $19 million dollars less money he would have available. This amount would need to be made up for by additional fundraising.

I was a strong supporter of him declining public financing, since the fundraising was an important way in which people could feel involved. It wasn’t about the donors who could give two thousand dollars each. It was really about the donors that could give twenty five dollars or fifty dollars; donors who had never been involved in a campaign and had certainly never given before.

After the speech in New York City, we went to the subway to head back to Grand Central Station, and from there back to Connecticut. On the subway, we ran into Governor Dean’s mother who had been at the speech and was taking the subway home. With all of the issues about Kim’s mother, it was great to talk with Governor Dean’s mother and for the campaign to become that much more personal to us. People too often forget that candidates for national office are regular people with families that love them, just like you or I.

The next day, numerous people talked to us about how they had seen Kim on television standing behind Governor Dean.

During these few days, there was this big discussion about how Governor Dean had talked about needing to reach out to people with confederate flags on the back of their pickup trucks. Many people seemed to misinterpret his remarks and I wrote a letter to the New York Times about this. I was pleasantly surprised when they contacted me to tell me that they were publishing my letter.

The bigger issue for Kim and I came up with what was to happen Saturday. Michael Silberman had invited us to go up to Burlington for some big event. He couldn’t say what it was, but talked about how it was related to Governor Dean’s speech in New York City. He did say that it was going to be a small group of people who were specially invited from around the country.

The problem was that Saturday was when my aunt’s funeral was going to be. We looked at schedules; we talked about what was going on. I spoke with people in my family. In the end, we decided to go to a viewing for my aunt on Friday. From there, we would drive to my mother’s house and spend the night with her. In the morning we would drive up to Burlington.

Kim’s car had been acting up. We had taken it to the shop and it was repaired in time for our trip north. Friday, we drove to my cousin’s house in Greenfield, Massachusetts. One of the first things my cousin said when we got there was that she had seen Kim on the news. We talked about the campaign and my letter to the editor. The family viewing was small and quiet. We shared memories of my aunt and talked about how everyone else in the family was doing and about desires of getting the family together.

We then drove to my mother’s house in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The Mohawk Trail is a beautiful road winding from Greenfield to Williamstown. It is especially beautiful on a clear autumn day. However, we were driving in the evening, after the sun had set. Then, it becomes a dark and twisty road which is much more of a chore to drive.

My eldest brother had come up from New York City, and we spent the evening with my mother; having dinner, looking at pictures, and talking about the family.

We got up early Saturday morning to drive from Williamstown to Burlington. The car had been acting okay, but when we stopped to get gas, it had problems getting going again. We briefly worried about if we would make it to Burlington on time. Yet it was a short aberration, and the car was fine for the rest of the trip up.

We arrived in Burlington around ten in the morning. We looked around for Michael Silberman who didn’t seem to be around. I also tried to find Zack Rosen whom I had met through DeanSpace, and by then was working in Burlington. He wasn’t there either. Finally, someone came along and herded us, and everyone else who had gathered in the lobby into a large conference room.

There was getting to be quite a crowd, and they were all from Vermont, with the exception of one or two that were from New York, just across the lake.

This was neither a small group, nor a group of people from all over the country. I wondered, were we in the right place? Had plans changed in someway? Was this a mistake, and should I have gone to my aunt’s funeral?

Michael showed up and directed Kim and I to a different conference room. We had been in the room with the people from Vermont that have been doing such great work and were invited to be in the audience. We went into a smaller room with the other ‘signers’. None of us, I believe, yet knew exactly what was going to go on. There was a PC Tablet there that we could all practice electronically signing on. Each of us signed our names, and finally the whole explanation came out.

We would be signing our Declaration of Independence from the special interest groups that have been destroying American Politics. We got our briefings. Joe Trippi spoke about the importance of each of us speaking in our own voice about why we were involved and why we felt that it was the right thing to do to opt out of public financing.

We then all drove over to University of Vermont at Montpelier for the announcement. We went off into another room where there were more briefings. We did get a chance to speak briefly with Governor Dean. Kim asked him if he would sign the picture that had been taken of us and him at a fundraiser at George Soros’ house. Later, Gov. Dean posed holding Fiona. One of the pictures came out particular well and we printed hundreds of copies of it on card stock which we sent to all of our friends as a holiday card. Inside, we printed, “In this Holiday season, Let us all work together to help Hope, Joy, and Prosperity Triumph over Fear and Oppression. (Fiona with Presidential Candidate Howard Dean)”

The drive home was uneventful. We stopped to visit the Ben and Jerry’s factory. We had lunch with another Dean supporter whom we had talked with a lot online, but never face to face. The car started acting more and more strangely on the way home. We got home okay, but the next day, couldn’t get the car into reverse. It turns out that the transmission was on its final legs, and that trip was the last time the car was ever driven.

If this wasn’t enough, we then received a phone call from ABC Nightly News. They wanted to do a piece on people who had gotten involved with the presidential campaigns, and figured that Kim would be the perfect person to interview. They came to our house, interviewed Kim, filmed her writing a comment on the blog, sending a letter to a voter in Iowa and then serving dinner. It ended up being a short spot on the nightly news that captured the new ideas of Governor Dean’s campaign and tied it down to the life of ordinary people.

Again, we received many phone calls from people that had seen us on television.

When the caucuses in Iowa rolled around, we couldn’t work things out to go to Iowa. We were disappointed by the results, but we headed up to New Hampshire to help with the primary there. We drove around Hanover dropping off literature. We then went to Manchester to do more literature drops on election day, coupled with visibility events, standing on corners chanting slogans for Dean. In the final hours, we did phone banking and then we went to election night party. The results were better than Iowa, but still not what we were hoping for.

As the campaign wound down, Kim and I wondered what would happen for us next. Governor Dean encouraged all his supporters to stay involved and to consider running for local office. Kim decided to run for State Representative. I continued to blog, and ended up receiving press credentials to cover the Democratic National Convention as a blogger.

The long months of the Dean campaign, and then Kim’s campaign have changed us, we believe for the better. We have stronger voices in the political process now. We have close friends around the country that grew out of the campaign. We have hope. We just don’t have any idea what will happen next.

The survey is now completed and I am analyzing the results. Initial information will be posted here.
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231 people completed the survey. Summary information is posted below as I get a chance to gather it.
If you have specific questions or want to discuss the survey in more detail, please feel free to contact me at ahynes1@optonline.net

In my view, there are:

Citizens who are not registered.
Citizens who are registered, but don't vote.
People who vote, but don't donate or volunteer.
Volunteers and Donors, who don't run for office.
and
Candidates.

It is a lot of work to move a person from one level to the next. We saw lots of voter registration drives this year. However, newly registered voters are the least likely to get out and vote. They need prodding, they need help.

Once a person starts voting, they usually keep voting. That is one reason why GOTV efforts focus on people who have voted in the previous elections.

When Dean came along, got a lot of people to move from being just voters, to being donors. In a lot of ways, he took what political fundraisers considered "transients", people who vote, but don't donate, and made them "Do-ers", people that donate. Before he did this, most people didn't believe that many of these "transients" could be turned into "Do-ers". Yet, like voting, once a person starts donating to campaigns. They are likely to keep at it. Many of the people who donated to my wife's campaign were donating to second campaign they ever donated to. The first campaign they donated to, being of course, Howard's.

Likewise, through the efforts like the Dean Dozen, Gov. Dean took Volunteers and Donors and made them into candidates. Again, once you get someone to run, you will have much better luck getting them to run again. For us, the question isn't if Kim will run again, it is what campaign will she take on next.

With that, I want to come back to some of what snow bored talked about. Volunteering for Gov. Dean's 2004 Presidential campaign was a lot of work. It was also a lot of fun. Fun is contagious. People want to have fun. I think there is even a song about that.

If you think volunteering is hard work, but also fun, you should try running for office. That was exhausting. Yet it was also great fun.

On several mailing lists that I am on, there is a tenor of defeat. You can't get "transients" to become "Do-ers". The Democratic Party is too messed up to try and fix. Liberals don't get any respect. etc. etc. etc.

There are certain people that always have this negative tone. They might as well be working for Rove. I'm now blocking emails from several of them.

During the Dean's 2004 Presidential campaign, many people quoted Gandhi: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." However, many of them overlook how long and hard Gandhi's fight was.

Gandhi's fight is our fight. It is a fight for caring for our fellow human beings, and the includes encouraging even those who are half-castes, Samaritans, down-trodden, or just plain defeatists.

Aldon
"Let not the hope of the poor be taken away"