I'm not sure this is at all an answer to the question Aldon was asking. Kerry has simply released a bit of source code. DeanSpace has been available as source since the early days. You can also jump in and get a CVS account and see the current development going on. Or join the open IRC channel to see where we're going in the future.

If I understand Aldon right, he's more interested in the question of openess in the sense of operability. At least two of the campaigns have non-coordinated volunteer tools being built as open source. Aldon's advocating making tools now that either camp will be able to take advantage of with open protocols (FOAF, RSS, etc) depending on who wins this fight. The goal for those of us working on these tools now is to find a way to get Bush out of office. To the extent that these tools can help the final nominee, it's worth all of us making them open and available.

Of course, it's not just about this presidential election. DeanSpace and Bloop are tools that can change the way Senate, House, even local races take advantage of the Internet. And the easier and more open they are to build and extend, the better we off our democracy is.

Kerry releaseing a little MT module's source is not news at all, and certainly not anything worth talking about when compared to what's being done by the other campaigns.

Great comment, Ben. Deanspace is a groundbreaking Open Source campaign technology with broader applications, and Wesley Clark's campaign has an Open Source tech focus, as well. It's also important to recognize that this is not really giving back to the Open Source community, since Moveable Type's license is not truly Open Source.

It is great, finally, to see some creative response to Aldon's post -- too long ignored.

Let's keep this conversation going. And let's work on the issues Aldon and Ben discuss.

It is important that give credit where credit is due. Can anyone point to a public OS contribution by other campaigns? I hope so. But I have not seen it.

Regards,

Jock

List the campaigns, such as Kerry, Dean & Lieberman, the "community", that use MT. Kerry gave back to that community, even if some members are competitors. That support for the Democratic political community is what I want to give credit for.

I should have called it the Democratic MT Community, not the OS Community. Just goes to show that I am not a geek. The spirit, I think, tho, is the same. Coopetiton.

Thanks,

Jock

Jock's on the right track, imo. My first response to Ben's post was to think, "OK, yes, it's great what the Dean people are doing, no doubt, and, no, MT is not open source, BUT it sure seems like the whole flippin' world is using MT. Developing and sharing MT tools is a laudable thing, even if it isn't open source and even if it isn't as far-reaching technologically or socially as DeanSpace."

It doesn't diminish DeanSpace to acknowledge the coolness of sharing tools with the community. Maybe what this is really about is that DeanSpace ought to get more credit on the open source front than it does, although, to be honest, there's veritable media saturation on the Dean campaign's use of technology. Seems to me like you may be fighting that more than any far-reaching and false claims by other campaigns about their technology.

Maybe the challenge is to make new again, somehow, the pathbreaking work of the Dean campaign, so that it's not just "wow, Dean is using the Internet really well", which is what most of the stories seem to come down to, now.

peace
j

I wasn't trying to argue that what the Kerry folks were doing wasn't good, or even good enough. From what I can tell about moveable type, plugins can be licensed as the developer sees fit, so even if MT isn't "open source" itself, it's pretty cool that the Kerry folks are making their plugin OS.

But instead, I think we should focus not just on how campaign tools will help a specific project, but how pieces based on standards and openess, pieces designed for one purpose or tool, become useful for other things, as well.

As an example from DeanSpace, since that's what I know better than the other projects, I discovered support for .ics feeds today is already built in. Someone wrote a piece of code that takes a DeanSpace event calendar and creates a .ics feed. This feed, based on standards that other calendar programs are starting to use, can then be used to syndicate events.

In my DeanSpace install, the event calendar comes from the Dean Commons, hosted on the Dean servers where people can sign up for their own events. It's then syndicated from there to Virginia for Dean, and from there, I've syndicated that events feed to Apple's iCal program.

From iCal, I can post events that I'm going to to on my personal homepage at mac.com with a few extra clicks of the mouse button.

Those kinds of open standards allow the Dean Commons, Virginia For Dean, iCal on my computer, and Mac.com homepages to share the same data quickly and easily. I'm fascinated by this inter-operability, and think that if we continue to focus our work on these sorts of standards and openeness, campaign functions have even more potential to adapt and further the causes we believe in.

Ben -- I'm totally down with that. There are all sorts of tools that are useful to people, but obviously the ones we all are most interested in are the ones that take advantage of open source for interoperability (not just system but organizational) in a way that gets us all involved in the process in active ways.

It makes me wonder about the "activist" and political tools of the dotcom heyday, and the way that some of us, at least, were working on open/pan-partisan political fora and politically-oriented tools. Watching all this happening now makes me think we were on the right track, but hadn't gone far enough. That is, we *were* trying to put easy-to-use political tools in people's hands, but we weren't putting tools in their hands that they could really use in ways we couldn't more or less predict. These kinds of tools can really be used by anyone for pretty much anything, and in much more exciting and interactive and communal ways than the higher-level type stuff (easy newsletters, sites, discussion, email someone, etc.) we were offering a few years ago.

This isn't simple nostalgia. Partly I wonder whether what's happening now would have been possible in 1999 or 2000, and partly it's deja-vu . . . that is, will we feel the same way about these tools three or four years from now?

I'm not trying to put a damper on things. I think it's all great, and it does seem to be some kind of genuine progress from a few years ago. I'm just thinking out loud and trying to get my head around it.

All of this commentary on whether the Kerry Camps' efforts were truly OS or not seems to miss a potentially simple reason -- could it be that the Kerry Campaign, while not as equipped with technology denizens as found in the Clark or Dean campaigns (as mentioned in VoxPolitics), might have the ideal of sharing what they could with the other campaigns? Instead of "we have a problem, can you help" (as quoted in the Wired story announcing the Clark TechCorps), could it be interpreted as "we had a problem, you might as well, here was our solution"?

Andrew, Do I know you?
Have you ever been to St Louis?
If yes, hit me up on ICQ: 136547585.
If not - sorry you just remind me of someone.
regards,
Chris