Creating change through Community

Creating change through Community

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the different technology campaigns could be using. The GOP’s new WebVoter, http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/4828804.html and the progressive’s www.voter2voter.org have been discussed. People have talked about the efforts that both the DNC and the RNC are doing to get better voter files and better mailing lists. People have talked about houseparties such as http://www.GeorgeWBush.com/Party, http://www.johnkerry.com/fundraising/ and http://www.PartyForAmerica.org

The talk is mostly about logistics of getting money from the donors and voters to the polls. It reminds me of David Weinberger’s rant at the Politics Online Conference about not wanting to be treated like a consumer.

When my wife decided to run for State Rep., we tried to decided on a good campaign slogan. The tag line that we ended up with on her website is ‘Creating Change through Community’. In her first public speech as a candidate, she said, “I remember being in parades and being proud to be from Bethany. I grew up believing that a community sticks together and helps each other out. This campaign will foster that sense of responsibility and community.”

This isn’t only about the community of neighbors, it is about the world community as well; “September 11th happened, and then it seemed possible, for a brief moment, that we would come together as a nation and rally once more. We had the world’s sympathy and support. But that only lasted for a moment, and then we slipped even further into economic downturn and world isolation.”

Today, I read the article in Business week: Dean: "People Are Ready for Kerry" ( http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/jun2004/nf20040616_4067_db008.htm)

There are two important quotes from that article I want to highlight:

He [Nadar] doesn't understand, most people don't understand, the full power of the Internet. You can't use it exclusively. But the power is much more than fund-raising. There's a real community out there.

I'll give you a great example of this. I just gave a speech, and there were a whole bunch of people holding Dean signs. They didn't know each other. Yet, they were as close friends as you could imagine, they had come from all over the country, and they had met on the Internet through the power of the campaign.

Dean goes on to say:

It was the two-way communication. There must have been 50 Web sites we had -- African Americans for Dean, Irish Americans for Dean. It's expensive to do it right. We spent a lot of money on the Internet. But you really can build a virtual community. That's not enough to win an election, as we found out. But it really is an important tool.

And it's a way to bypass the mainstream media, to give your message in an unfettered, direct way. It's a free marketplace of ideas, and you hope people are educated enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, and they do it with their own ideological filter. But that's the genius of democracy, the unfettered access to information that may or may not be true -- and you gotta somehow figure it out.

Gov. Dean underestimates the number of websites that were out there. I was probably involved with more than 50 of them myself. But his comments are very important. It is about the two-way communication. It is about a free marketplace of ideas.

My wife gets it. Dean gets it. The folks at Meetup get it, and the DNC seems to be trying really hard to get it. It is about people bringing about change through community.

Posted by Aldon Hynes at June 17, 2004 1:21 PM | TrackBack