Open Source Politics

Wonder why Dean has gained so much momentum and made so much progress? Someone asked me where he came from the other day. The old-school response would be grassroots. The new response would be open source. Doc Searls, co-authur of Cluetrain, spent some time with the Dean team. Here's what he heard:

During my time with the Dean team, I heard Cluetrain quoted a number of times. There was my "markets are conversations" line and David Weinberger's "hyperlinks subvert hierarchy." But the one that made the most sense for the campaign itself was Chris Locke's "networked markets get smarter faster than most companies". Exactly that principle, they said, applied in electoral politics today. That's why they were building or applying technologies that embraced their own networked markets.

Doesn't just apply to politics. It applies to business as well.