DFA 2.0

Written by: Edward Cherlin on Sep 9, 2008 5:42 PM EDT

Howard Dean pioneered a lot of political uses of the Internet, but we aren't anywhere near realizing the potential of the medium. I pretty much live on the Net in order to coordinate international development projects, working with One Laptop Per Child, Creative Commons, Engineers Without Borders, and many other organizations and individuals around the world in many languages. (I can use a few, and we have people working in more than a hundred.) I'm here in large part because Barack Obama has pledged to seek a doubling of US foreign aid, including a $2 billion Global Education Fund, which would go a long way toward the goals I am working on. And also to restore the Constitution, the economy, our standing in the world, and so on.

Here is what I miss in politics that I use elsewhere.

* More effective social networking.

Sure, we have DFA and my.barackobama.com, but compare them with LinkedIn, where you can search friends of friends of friends for useful ideas, skills, affiliations, and so on, ask for introductions, give testimonials, or ask your network practical questions. Or WiserEarth.org, where more than 100,000 of the world's NGOs can make contact with each other to share and replicate programs.

* Creating a campaign record that is trustworthy and stays in one place throughout the campaign. Maybe into the next campaign, where we can expect many of the usual suspects to return and carry on right where they left off. Or to pretend that's what they're doing, when they have adjusted their message to pander to whomever they think important on this go around.

Look at Wikipedia, which is compared favorably with Encyclopedia Brittanica on coverage and accuracy. One of the essential points about Wikipedia is its insistence on sources for information published there. What better way to nail down the lies and rumors, and the real truth so that they stay nailed? A few people have tried to get this started, at http://obama.wikia.com/ and http://www.obamapedia.org/, but not enough people are contributing. (I am. Let me know if you want to join up.) See also http://impeach.wikia.com/ for documentation of crimes such as lying to Congress, torture, and preventing state Attorneys-General from going after fraud in the sub-prime mortgage market, and thus producing the present recession.

We get a lot of great stuff posted in our mailing lists and the like, but we don't capture it to create and maintain a record that we can use to counter the next round of lies. There are a number of sites that have staff do this, but none that bring in the whole community while maintaining high standards of fact-checking.

* More transparency

That means being able to talk to staff and advisors sometimes and get answers to important questions, or to make suggestions and hear what happens if they are taken up. Now I know that staff are ferociously busy, but they are busy trying to get the message out, and we can help if they get it to us first, or if some among us have new and useful ideas, or even useful questions.

We're doing better than anybody used to, but we need more. For example, I am interested in phone banking to tossup, battleground, swing states. But the states I see listed for this at barackobama.com are not the states I see identified in the polls. See http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/ and http://3bluedudes.com/ for examples.

I lived in Virginia for a time, and would love to talk to people there about the campaign. But I can't find out how to on the campaign Web site.

There is a rumor that the campaign has decided to allow Democratic 527s to form, gather funding, and go on the attack--responsibly, but more energetically than the official campaign can. It is a rimor in part because the campaign can't coordinate with 527s. But they said publicly not to, and they can say publicly, "Never mind." If that's actually what they mean. Don't rush off and start lambasting the Republicans with everything you have on the sayso of this one columnist. But let's discuss.

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