Britt Blaser is giving a Berkman Tuesday lunch talk. Britt’s bio is difficult to summarize — from fighter pilot to a force behind the development of interesting software by the Howard Dean campaign. (He’s blogged what he intends to say.)

Today he’s talking about The Open Resource Group‘s ORGware, i.e., “Dean Done Right.” ORGware is a “mall” of software that is useful for citizens engaging in democracy. It has blogs, wikis, a little project management, etc. The aim isn’t to come up with new tools but to make them so easy and so flexible that it’s a “mall” for citizens. It is aimed at governance, not campaigning.

Britt says that the organizational tools for open source software are perfect for software development needs. Now we need organizational tools for democracy, Britt says.

He says : “Smart = busy = distracted = stupid.” So, the tools need to be designed for smart, busy, distracted people.

“Strawberry root activisim”: You need hierarchies to get things done. E.g., a group comes to Britt’s group and they get ORGware that provides a home page, a blog, a wiki, etc. Now some members of that group want to do a project. They can use exactly the same software. Multi-group-to-group goodness happens. (The blog software lets you say that a post is an action to be tracked — “simple project management.”)

Q (me): How does this scale socially? If you have 2,000 people commenting on your blog, commenting won’t work even if the software is up to it.

A: This is where the fractal nature of the software is important. You can spin off a new discussion or group.

Q: You want to turn people into “fire breathing activists” by taking them through a set of stepping stones. What are those stones? Comenting on a blog?

A: We don’t know yet. “Deep inviting” is important: Lots of places draw the reader in.

Britt points to PodSlam.org as the first public use of ORGware. [Tags: britt blaser politics howard dean]

Categories: Uncategorized dw