I’m at the Howard Dean HQ in Burlington where Josh Koenig has just walked me through DeanSpace (verson 0.95), a facility that launched yesterday. It’s further evidence that this campaign isn’t using the Internet so much as it’s been shaped by the Internet.

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.

So far that’s pretty cool in my book. But here’s what really impressed me. If you were running a typical business, you’d think first about how you’re going to manage the groups that get set up. If you were an enlightened business, you’d let groups do what they want, but you’d figure that a big part of the appeal would be the way you could quietly gather anonymous marketing and demographic data. But if you were really webby, you’d think first about how you could get yourself out of the middle so that the system could truly empower the people using it.

Welcome to DeanSpace.

It’s designed to give these community spaces true autonomy, and it assumes that these autonomous communities will want to share their work. So, every bit of content on a DeanSpace site can be served up via RSS. If your site, Mimes for Dean, sees something interesting on the Hassidic Baton Twirlers for Dean site, you can RSS it directly on to your site. The Dean campaign is entirely out of the loop, although you can (don’t have to) register your site with a page that lists ’em. And the campaign is busy RSS’ing not just their site but their associated tools, like DeanLink (the social network for supporters).

This is exactly how grassroots campaigns can be transformed by the Internet at its best: not (just) a fund-raising machine, not a way to blast out campaign messages, but a tool for letting people form the groups they want and talk. And act.

Josh says that future releases will be wizard-based and spaces will come pre-loaded with useful defaults and Dean stuff like a banner with a photo of the Governor.

Also,at least some of the official Dean state organizations will be using DeanSpace. (Keep in mind that DeanSpace is independent of the campaign. The Federal Elections Commission cares about that.)

Categories: Uncategorized dw