Samantha Shapiro has written an excellent cover story on the volunteer efforts fueling the Dean campaign for the NYT magazine. It doesn't delve as deeply into the implications of digital activism as others have done (see Rules for Networked Radicals), but it does a great job of describing how the campaign feels:
"The cubicle where Johnson, Rosen and Brooks work looks a lot like a dot-com start-up from the mid-90's: preternaturally pale-skinned young men, crazy hours and slightly messianic rhetoric. The men take turns sleeping in an easy chair with torn upholstery and appear to subsist almost entirely on donated food. A supporter sends over a peck of apples and cider doughnuts, and Brooks soon has seven apple cores piled by his desk; when Joe Trippi returns from dinner with a journalist, takeout containers of his half-eaten soup are deposited on Brooks's desk.
"Brooks, Johnson and Rosen are overseen, loosely, by Zephyr Teachout, 32, the campaign's director of Internet organizing. Teachout is a slight, freckled lawyer; she darts around the office in a pair of silver shoes with the balletic, boyish energy of Peter Pan. ('Have you seen how fast her hands move?' Rosen asks. 'She'll click a mouse three times instead of once. I could watch her operate all day.') Because she runs Dean's Web effort, Teachout finds herself keeping company mostly with the 21-and-under set. She lives with Rachel, 18, an intern. She says that Tim Singer, 17, a volunteer who is still in high school, was 'one of my best friends this summer' and that Michael Whitney, 19, one of the founders of Students for Dean, now known as Generation Dean, is 'like a little soul mate.' ('We even have the same haircut,' she says, accurately, shaking her short shaggy hair out over her face.)
"Teachout, sitting at the very edge of her seat, tells me that 'the revolution,' as she calls it, has three phases; the first is Howard Dean himself, the second is Meetup.com and the third is the software that Rosen, Johnson and Brooks work with: Get Local, DeanLink, DeanSpace. 'DeanSpace,' Teachout says, 'is the revolution.'''
Dean's opponents have begun to mimic the trappings of his campaign. Many of the Democratic candidates now have blogs. Even President Bush has one, though comments from the public -- an essential element of Dean's blog -- are not allowed. The Dean campaign tracks online contributions with the image of a baseball bat (at one point, the Web site added a new bat for every $1 million raised); shortly after the Dean campaign raised its first million dollars, John Kerry's campaign took up the Web icon of a hammer. But Dean's Internet campaign dwarfs those of his rivals. In the third quarter of 2003, Kerry raised in the vicinity of $1 million online; Dean raised more than $7 million. A typical post on the Kerry blog receives, on average, 18 comments, while Dean blog posts generally receive more than a hundred. The Dean Web site is visited with roughly the same frequency as the White House Web site. ...
Get Local is a program that lets supporters organize local events independent of the campaign. The software allows supporters to contact one another and plan gatherings, as well as download fliers they can customize with phrases like ''Dean, this spud's for you.'' Brooks monitors the efforts, making sure no one inserts bad words on campaign signs or organizes for nefarious purposes. He also composes missives to be fired off to Dean supporters' cellphones.
Teachout recruited Johnson to create DeanLink, a version of Friendster for the Dean campaign. On Friendster, users are able to see friends of friends up to four degrees of separation and read the comments their friends have written about them. DeanLink invites supporters to link to one another in the manner of Friendster -- ''Introduce yourself! Make a new friend'' -- and also to invite friends from outside the campaign to join. DeanLink lets supporters know one another as more than an e-mail address or a name on a mailing list; they can check out one another's photographs and interests online. They can also post flattering comments about other supporters, a move cribbed from Friendster's ''testimonials.'' (Julie Reeve, Johnson's crush from Atlanta, for instance, writes on Johnson's DeanLink page that he is ''fun to work with.'') Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins has about 500 DeanLink pals.
Zack Rosen was a creator of DeanSpace, ''the revolution itself.'' He started the project, originally called Hack for Dean, after reading about Dean on the campaign Web site for 20 minutes. ''I just knew this is the guy,'' Rosen says. He recruited an unpaid team of nearly a hundred programmers, including his friends Neil and Ping, to write software for the campaign that would allow the many disparate, unofficial Dean Web sites to communicate directly with one another and also with the campaign. Typically, to reproduce information from one Web site to another, a user has to cut the information by hand and paste it into each Web site, a laborious process. The software that Zack's group built allows any Dean Web site to reprint another's stories, images and campaign feed automatically, as if they have a collective consciousness. It also will provide a ''dashboard'' for the people in Burlington, where the campaign can track patterns on its unofficial sites and observe which content is most popular.
The effect that Teachout says she hopes the software will create sounds like the experience of being in a tight-knit community: seeing people you know, responding to them, being acknowledged. Teachout speaks about these ideas as if she is reinventing the concept. She says that Meetup.com, is emerging as the ''ritual'' element of the new Dean community. ''It's like church, the central place where people go to get inspired.''
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