Open source political campaign

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Open source political campaigns, Open source politics, or Politics 2.0, is the idea that social networking and e-participation technologies will revolutionize our ability to follow, support, and influence political campaigns. Netroots evangelists and web consultants predict a wave of popular democracy as fundraisers meet on MySpace, YouTubers crank out attack ads, bloggers do oppo research, and cell-phone-activated flash mobs hold miniconventions in Second Life.

1 Origins of the term
2 Similar terms
3 Objections to the term, usage of
4 Impact of open source politics, optimists
5 Impact of open source politics, skeptics
6 See also
7 References
8 External links

[edit] Origins of the term

In print, open source politics was first used by political operatives in the lead-up to the 2004 presidential elections. It is unclear exactly who coined the phrase, but the earliest reference to the term in major media was a September 5, 2003 story in Salon.com in which supporters of the Draft Clark campaign and of Vermont Governor Howard Dean both claimed that their campaigns represented the ideals of "open source politics."^{[citation needed]} The term was meant as a reference to open-source software such a Linux, which is designed to allow users to alter its code to make improvements. The idea was that new technologies would allow similar participation and the attendant benefits in the political realm.

The term was further refined in its current usage by a story in The Nation by Micah Sifry which appeared days after the 2004 election.^[1] Sifry wrote that open source politics means "opening up participation in planning and implementation to the community, letting competing actors evaluate the value of your plans and actions, being able to shift resources away from bad plans and bad planners and toward better ones, and expecting more of participants in return. It would mean moving away from egocentric organizations and toward network-centric organizing." Since Sifry's article, the term has appeared on numerous blogs and print articles.

Since the 2004 United States elections, the internet has become much more participatory and interactive with the popularization of Web 2.0 technologies such as Myspace, YouTube, Second Life and Wikipedia. This participation, the idea goes, lends new currency to the notion that these technologies can be employed to allow citizens to "reprogram" politics. One example is the way that the Macaca video spread virally through the internet on YouTube and contributed to the electoral defeat of Sen. George Allen of Virginia during the 2006 U.S. midterm elections. The old "source code" of politics allowed candidates to get away with making off-the-cuff comments if journalists did not pick up on them, but services such as YouTube have changed that, and now politicians must be more careful not to say things that will come back to haunt them. In short, the idea is that citizen can rewrite the old codes of politics by using these new technologies to promote change. The term "open source politics" was heavily employed in this context in the July/August 2007 issue of Mother Jones Magazine, where the definition appeared in a format that was modeled on a Wikipedia article.^[2]

[edit] Similar terms

A similar term, "open source governance," refers to overhauling or replacing existing government institutions in order to allow direct citizen input into the government.

Open source politics is often used interchangeably with the term "politics 2.0." Politics 2.0 has been covered by leading sites Mother Jones, the BBC^[3], GigaOm^[4], TechCrunch^[5] and TechPresident^[6], among others.

[edit] Objections to the term, usage of

Some members of the technology world dislike the term Open Source Politics because they feel that the technologies that the term references are not truly open source.^[7] For example, YouTube and MySpace do not reveal the computer codes that were employed to create them, nor do they allow anyone to alter those codes. These technologists feel that the term thus causes unnecessary confusion, and some of them prefer the term "open politics" instead. However, proponents of the term argue that "open source politics" is a preferable term to "open politics" because the term "open source" is an artful way to reference the idea that it is technology that is making politics more participatory.

[edit] Impact of open source politics, optimists

Those who believe that open source politics will have a major impact on elections and government include many former staffers of Gov. Howard Dean's political campaign, many political bloggers, and members of the New Politics Institute, the Personal Democracy Forum, and the Center for Politics, Democracy and the Internet.^[8]

Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales was asked by Mother Jones Magazine about his thoughts on the potential impact of Open Source Politics on old models of political campaigning such as polling and TV attack ads. He said this:^[9]

Hopefully, you start to see a little bit of diminished effectiveness when people can talk back to attack ads. In the past, when you'd see a vicious attack ad, you might find it distasteful, but you might also wonder if that person did that horrible thing. Online, you begin to see some of those things start to unravel, and people responding and saying, "Yeah, this is an attack ad, and this is what really happened." Then you get a more interesting dialogue around that.

A lot of the polling that goes on is push polling, in that the questions being asked are being framed to get answers they want. Those kinds of things get harder to sustain when you have a large body of people who can push back and put out an alternative point of view.

[edit] Impact of open source politics, skeptics

Some people discount the potential impacts.^[10] Skeptics include many people on the American political right, among them the lobbyist Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform. Others include Nicholas Lehman, Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, who has said open source politics may eventually be co-opted by political parties.^[11]