Zephyr Teachout-Dean-NetPoliSci101

In the first of what WIFLblog will post as NetScans, is an article on the net innovation that is taking place right now where two relatively unknown people, Howard Dean the governor of Vermont, and Zephyr Teachout-Dean's Director of Internet Organizing are demonstrating to the world the effective use of the Internet for political purposes. Hence the part of the title about NetPoliSci101.

The idea of this first "NetScan" is simply to use the Internet to search out the key articles on any given topic I am interested in, list their keypoints, but more importantly for the reader is to list the key article's URLs, so that they can check them out for themeselves. So without further adieu, here goes:

I will start out with a Net only news entity,

 CNET's Declan McCullagh's article: "The cyberbrains behind Howard Dean":

Political Power:

• Zehphr in this interview introduced the idea of the Internet as a "redemocratization" of politics, in that there is "a real shift of political power to people that we treat as people".
• # Volunteers Involved Through the Internet: "Meetup lsit of Dean supporters shows about 180,00"

How To: the information on specific how to do this that is introduced in the above interview, included the following keypoints:

• Meetup.com and "Get Local":"Dean was the first politician to take full advantage of the self-organizing networks for supporters that sites like Meetup.com and an army of web loggers can provice."
• Hardware/Software: "whole community of over 100 people working in open source on Dean-related projects."

Felix Shein's "Behind Dean's Win on the Web" article adds the idea of DeanSpace, where Dean's orgnanizers have created a way for their supporters to create supporring websites.

Dan Gilmor's "Dean Puts Web Into Politics":

Dan is one of my favorite tech writers, right up there with Jon Udell, so I was curious to see how Dan reported this story. One of the points that Dan made, and just as a reminder to everyone, Dan posted his article on August 10, 2003:

"Hundreds of online mailing lists, fundraising sites, Weblogs and support-Dean Web sites have popped up without active involvement by campaign officials."

Blogs: some of the key comments being made by bloggers on the Dean Net Campaign are:

Joho the Blog comments on DeanSpace

from Joho the Blog:

DeanSpace is an open source tool, built on Drupal by a community of volunteers independent of the campaign itself, that lets anyone set up a site for a community of Dean supporters. The community might be topical (e.g., Pilots for Dean), demographical (Seniors for Dean), local (Albany for Dean) or just plain peculiar (Girls Gone Wild for Dean). Setting up your own site is straightforward enough for someone who's edited config files before — techier than you'd like, but the documentation walks you through it — and now you have a site with the ability to blog, create a shared calendar (including events from the Dean Get Local registry of local events), hold a forum, invite users, register them and give them each a home page, load up a shared picture gallery, manage a mailing list, run polls, manage a group task list, and send users messages.

RadioFree Blogistan has its take on it

So this ends my little "NetScan" experiment, for more detailed information please consult the referenced artilces. This article was researched on January 18, 2004 by Ted Ritzer of WIFLblog.

© Copyright 2004 Ted Ritzer. Last update: 18/01/2004; 1:04:32 PM.