I'm taking off tomorrow morning for London, England, where I'll be speaking along with techPresident blogger Michael Turk at "Politics Web 2.0," a two-day international conference hosted by the University of London, Royal Halloway. The conference features 120 papers organised into 41 panels, with more than 180 participants drawn from over 30 countries, and is probably a bit more academic than most of the events I tend to go to these days. Nevertheless, I am really looking forward to the trip and expecting to pick up a lot of interesting insights into our internet-powered election, as well as those of other countries experiencing this transformation.

Mike and I are keynoting one after the other on Friday, and we've talked in advance about trying to mesh our remarks in some useful way. I titled my talk, "The Revolution Will Be Networked: How Open Source Politics is Emerging in America," and I'm planning on rolling out a series of examples of how political power is shifting away from centralized bodies to networks of individuals. When I was first thinking about this talk, I had in mind everything from voter-generated messages to voter-generated fundraising to the ways that blog-driven conversations about campaign strategy were reducing the power of consultants.

Now, with Mayhill Fowler's inspired stroke of citizen journalism shooting from Off the Bus to Meet the Press in two days, it's hard not to simply focus on voter-generated content as the wild card in the 2008 election. From Phil de Vellis's "Vote Different"/Hillary 1984 mashup to will.i.am's "Yes WE Can" music video to Fowler's reporting, outsiders with something important and compelling to say have been as important in shaping the political conversation as any insider ever was. But I don't want to give short shrift to other equally important developments, like the rise of small-dollar fundraising and open fundraising (see Ron Paul '08 and ActBlue for details), and voter-generated field campaigns on behalf of candidates as diverse as Paul, Obama and Huckabee. I don't want to leave the impression that all this dispersion of authority is, by definition, politically effective. Nor do I want to suggest that having a voice is the same thing as having power. With a few interesting exceptions, we have yet to see national campaigns really share authority with their supporters: as comrade Zephyr T. likes to say, they're willing to share tasks, but not power.

But if I get that far in my remarks, it should set Mike up nicely, as his talk is titled, "Managed Chaos: Bringing Order to User-Generated Activism." I won't speak for him here, but I know he's planning to look closely at "distributed campaign offices" and what works best in trying to channel all this decentralized voter energy on behalf of a campaign.

What do you think? Should I focus narrowly and deeply on voter-generated message-making? Or try to cover the whole horizon of how open source politics is emerging in America? Am I downplaying the importance of social networking in 2008? And are there other examples you think I should highlight?

Micah Sifry | Michael Turk | Open Source Politics | Social Networking | voter-generated content | Web 2.0
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