New campaign finance market mechanics.
The Dean Campaign's BlogForAmerica points this morning (without providing a link) to Carol C. Darr's USA Today editorial, Internet Donors Can Clean Up National Campaign Financing. She nails it:
Campaigns typically raise small donations, if they bother at all, from direct mail lists of their previous contributors, but costs usually consume 50 cents of every dollar raised. This means that average Americans, unless they have previously given a donation to a candidate, are not even solicited. That's one of the reasons more than 99% of Americans don't contribute.
This is what makes Dean's and Kucinich's success in raising money on the Internet so promising. For the first time, a presidential candidate, Dean, has catapulted into the top tier with small donations. The Internet now holds out the possibility that small donors might successfully fuel serious presidential campaigns — a sea change in American politics.
The way to minimize the corrosive effect of large contributions is to flood the political system with lots of small contributions. This will happen only if huge numbers of ordinary American citizens make modest contributions.
Small money is the only money that is reliably clean. The Internet is the best way to raise it — quickly, easily and cheaply.
According to the Dean Campaign, more than 80,000 people have contributed so far, with more than 62,000 in just the last quarter. The average donation was $88.11. Dean Campaign Manager Joe Trippi rightfully calls this "the greatest grassroots campaign of the modern era."
The mechanics, however, are radically different from all previous grassroots campaigns. They don't just depend on "The Internet." They depend on software that wasn't designed either to manage a campaign or to raise funds — successful as it may be so far at both.
Take the matter of comments.
That last post has 117 comments. Other comment piles below other posts number 40, 76, 101, 21, 71, 136, 156, 152, 98, 132 and so on. These are near-Slashdot numbers.
They are also unmoderated. In fact, there is no way to moderate them (in a Slashdot sense) on a Moveable Type blog. Or on any type of blog, far as I know. Other than by taking them down.
This apparently happened to a post by Richard Bennett to the comment list at a Dean blog entry on Monday. I was later told by email from a friend close to the Dean Campaign that the deletion was a mistake (by a campaign worker, not Dean) and that the campaign has a no-censorship policy on the blog. (One that also applies, presumably, to Dean's guest posts on the Lessig blog, where the largest comment pile currently numbers 183.)
Given that Dean's blog comment piles will only get larger, micro-editing of posts — or attempting to "manage" them in any way — is bound to be a diminishing-return prospect.
Clearly this is a learning experience for the Dean People. As Dr. Weinberger said yesterday,
It'd be easy to read the bluster and invective as a failure of the system. Nah. It is the system. Welcome to the Internet, Governor Dean! You're making history not just with the Lessig guest blogging but with the wild conversation it's ignited. And lots of people are going to love you for it.
This should also be a learning experience for blogware designers too. Moveable Type (which Dean's and Lessig's blogs both use) is excellent (hence its popularity), but the absence of permalinks for individual comment posts — even for whole comments sections — is a huge problem that desperately needs to be corrected.
[Note: Apparently this is an implementation rather than a design problem. I just got an email that says this:
While most of the templates that ship with MT do not include peramlinks to comments, you can use the tag to include a link to each and every comment.
Maybe somebody at the Dean Campaign will do whatever it takes to add those tags.]
Meanwhile, if the Dean Campaign wants to encourage conversational participation of a moderated and linkable sort, I suggest they set up a Kuro5hin-like site built on Scoop, PHP-Nuke, Slash or the like.
In fact, if issues are going to be discussed (and not just stumped as "messages"), that would be the way to go. And not just for Dean. Any candidate wanting to get ahead of Dean's curve on this Internet Thing would be wise to set up a slashsite of some kind.
[The Doc Searls Weblog]
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5:15:41 PM 
