With the election of 2004 still fresh in memory, we have asked a distinguished group of technologists, politicos, and journalist/bloggers for a brief answer to the following question: What was the single most important use of technology, or lesson about the role of technology, in this election?

First up in this symposium were Dan Carol, Esther Dyson, Allison Fine, Brewster Kahle, Jon Lebkowsky, Chris Nolan, Doc Searls, Matt Stoller and Brad Templeton

Now chiming in: Sanford Dickert, Seth Godin, Mathew Gross, Joichi Ito, Jeff Jarvis, Adina Levin, Tom Matzzie, Howard Rheingold, Jonah Seiger and Clay Shirky. And there’s more to come.

Please register and join in the conversation (responses may be posted at the end of this feature).

Sanford Dickert

The single most important use of technology: databases and the ability to target messaging and resources to the likely voters that would support a candidate.

The biggest lesson of the campaign: that technology without an effective plan or coordination severely dampens the gains accomplishable from the reduced transactions costs. When scores of enthusiastic groups are targeting the same voter with robo-calls, direct-mail drops, emails requesting volunteer efforts and financial support -- the effectiveness of the efforts dampen or get diluted (especially when there is a limited pool of resources in geographic areas).

The second biggest lesson: technology is not the solution - it is a platform for building community and buy-in. But efforts are only as effective as the message and coordination of the various channels within a campaign.

Sanford Dickert served as CTO of the Kerry-Edwards Campaign.

There was a lot more data and a lot less information. In other words, the unfiltered flow of news translated into fewer useful soundbites that actually got spread. JibJab had more of an impact than 100 deaths in Iraq, apparently.

Seth Godin is an author and speaker. He blogs at http://www.sethgodin.com

I know that as the first presidential campaign blogger, I'm expected to say blogs were the most important piece of technology in 2004. Or that, as a Deaniac, I should point to the way in which Meetup helped to rebuild the social network of disaffected Democrats and activists, providing the Democratic Party with a much-needed injection of human capital.

All of that is true. But if I had to point to the single most important use of technology in this election (on the Democratic side), it would be the use that drives the Internet purists the most nuts: that is, the use of the old-fashioned email solicitation to raise some old-fashioned, serious dough.

None of this is belittles the importance of blogs and the new grassroots network that is forming on the net. But politics in 2004 was still won (or lost) in the dominant medium, television-- and television costs money. Email contributions-- and a great message-- helped lift an obscure Governor from Vermont into the stratosphere of the Democratic primary-- and mediocre commercials and some bad caught-on-tape television moments finally sent his campaign crashing back to earth.

A single email to a well-built list could raise you a quarter or half a million dollars in 2003 and 2004-- sometimes more. It's the power that built MoveOn, the Dean campaign, and-- eventually-- the Kerry campaign. Without these small-dollar donations in response to email solicitations, it's doubtful that the Kerry campaign would have been able to nearly match President Bush's warchest of special interest money. Large donors still played a critical role in helping the Democrats, of course; but it was the small-dollar donors on the net-- reached via email-- that turned a perceived Democratic disadvantage of $160 million in March, when John Kerry won the nomination, into near-parity with the Republicans by the end of July.

Mathew Gross directed Internet Communications for the Dean presidential and the Erskine Bowles senatorial campaigns in the 2003/2004 cycle. He currently blogs at http://www.mathewgross.com

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Joichi Ito

Quality and speed of news reporting often come into conflict. We were counting on blogs to make a difference, but lot of attention was focused on speed instead of depth. I think we are still conditioned by the mass media and the real-time info-porn style news we get on TV and as with all new media, we are still emulating the media we are used to. Blogging should not be about "electronic publishing" or "Internet broadcasting," it should be something else. It should be about communities, collective action, dialogue that is trying to bridge differences and build consensus. It wasn't that...yet. Remember the first TV shows had radio announcers sitting in front of the camera talking? It was just radio with pictures. We need to break the mold of traditional mass media and stop trying to mimic it or beat it. It will take awhile, but I'm confident it will happen. I think the grassroots activity around the Dean campaign had elements of the bottom-up emergent behavior that we might be looking for, and it might be a good idea to take a look at what worked with the campaign instead of talking about why it didn’t work.

Joichi Ito is Vice President of International and Mobile for Technorati and Chairman of Six Apart Japan. He blogs at joi.ito.com.

For the first time in any election, technology gave the citizens a voice. Accuse me of blog triumphalism and I will plead guilty. Weblogging brought the power of the press to the people and we have only just begun to see the impact of it. The progression so far has been quick: It started about five years ago with tech bloggers; 9/11 brought on many new writers (the warbloggers); the war brought in a new audience; and this election brought respect to citizens' media.

Bloggers have begun to tear apart the power structure of political fund-raising (as Dick Morris said to Joe Trippi at a recent event for The Week magazine, the Dean bloggers did what Congress has failed to do, instituting campaign finance reform -- but from the bottom up). Bloggers got invited to the conventions (covering nothing, but at least they could waste their time along with the 15,000 journalists who previously controlled access to power). Bloggers are getting read and quoted in major media (I was shocked on election night to hear CNN's Aaron Brown read on the air a post I'd just written urging us all to take a post-election peace pledge; and look at the pre-election New York Times op-ed page, taken over by bloggers not only in the center but in each of the columns there). Bloggers challenged the powerful (Dan Rather would be wise to start reading what his audience says.... but he isn't). Like any human endeavor, this one brings bad (mudslinging) with the good: This technology is upending the relationships between citizens and media and politicians, putting power where it belongs in a democracy, in the hands of the people.

Jeff Jarvis is president and creative director of Advance.net. His blog is BuzzMachine.

The strongest lesson I've seen was related to technology, but not about technology. Technically-literate members of the Dean team took leadership positions and revived moribund local Democratic party organizations in places across the country, getting out the vote and getting local candidates elected. I've seen it in Austin, Minneapolis, suburban Chicago, Silicon Valley -- and that's just people I've met. The local organizing includes newfangled email and blogs, and old-fashioned block-walking. For years, Republicans used the churches, while the rest of America forgot how to organize. Networked communications is one set of techniques in the overall effort to revive political activism, starting with neighborhoods and issue campaigns.

Adina Levin is director of the ACLU-Texas Cyberliberties Project and policy committee chair for EFF-Austin. She blogs at http://www.alevin.com/weblog.

A few days after the election the most important use of technology in the election may be viewed as e-mail lists or blogs by the fashionable punditry. But, in retrospect, the determining factor will probably come out to be the Republican party's ability to find new evangelical voters through sophisticated databases using geo-demographic profiling. The Democrats met their vote goal—the Republicans found new voters where nobody thought they were. The method by which they did that will ultimately be judged the most important technological development in this election--and maybe in political history.

Tom Matzzie was recently the Director of Online Organizing for the Kerry-Edwards campaign. Prior to joining the campaign he was the Online Mobilization Director for the AFL-CIO.

If people are sufficiently motivated to self-organize -- and this all-important element is a requisite, no matter what technology you use -- the Dean's campaign use of blogs by Dean supporters, Meetup.com for local self-organization, and distributed online fundraising was an effective means for a community of interest to elevate to prominence (and fund!) a candidate who was not annointed by the party leadership. As the Dean campaign learned in Iowa, this is not sufficient to convince people to vote for your candidate.

Howard Rheingold’s latest book is Smart Mobs http://www.smartmobs.com.

Technology's role in this cycle was almost as over-hyped as it was in 2000. The Internet is a means to an end. It enables both sides to channel energy in tangible ways - to recruit and mobilize volunteers and supporters and raise money. But I think we can definitively say that neither side won or lost as a result of their Internet or technology strategies. The Net was, and will always be, a critical tool in the arsenal, a vital part of any communications strategy. But we need to stop looking for the exclamation-point"proof" of its "effectiveness" and start thinking of how progressives and Democrats are going to expand our base on the merits: message and personality.

This election was won in the heartland - in places where high-technology means cable TV and touch-tone phones. Don't get me wrong: I am not trying to be pessimistic. I have hope, even in this dark day. But I think many in our community get caught up in breathless amazement about the tools and forget the other things that matter.

Jonah Seiger is a Washington DC-based communications consultant, specializing in Interactive Media strategies, and a founding partner of Connections Media LLC, He blogs at http://www.seigerspace.com.

The most important event was the moment where the blogosphere took on the Dan Rather/National Guard memos. This mattered, of course, because we want that kind of chicanery discovered whenever possible. It also mattered, though, because it marked the moment of capitulation by the mainstream press to the competitive force of weblogging.

Even as late as the Trent Lott defenestration, we had to sit through some patronizing commentary of the "Well, the bloggers may have played a minor role" variety, but the Rather mess stripped them of any possible source of denial.

Not only did the unmasking of that crude forgery reveal a remarkable amount of both bias and dim-wittedness at CBS, it demonstrated that the speed and vigor of the blogosphere's fact-checking is unequalled by anything in traditional media. Not only did the professionals not do as good a job as the webloggers, they didn't even know the story was happening until it was effectively over.

The most important change, though, was the involvement of members of the public who are interested in politics, but look apathetic to a system that denigrates anything other than obsessive involvement. Though it wasn't as obvious as the changed role of weblogging, the ability to engage a larger section of the public in the campaign will be bigger and more profound over the long haul.

Sometimes the change involved a lowering of transaction costs – Howard Dean's fundraising efforts suddenly made it possible to raise real money, $25 at a time. This alters the "Must. Court. Big. Donors." imperative of the standard campaign.

Sometimes the change involved a lowering of coordination costs. Getting more than three people together to do anything is tedious, but getting more than 300 together to support an unheard-of candidate a year and a half before the election is unheard of, or was unheard of, before Meetup. Now, of course, it's normal, and that change means more involvement from more people, and more kinds of people.

Sometimes the change involved a lowering of both transaction and coordination costs. MoveOn's brilliant distributed calling center made it easy to coordinate an army of volunteers who had a half an hour here and there, and it made it easy for each of those people to make get-out-the-vote calls.

The weblogging story is over, at least as a story about technological change. Now, and from now on, weblogs are mainstream media in political campaigns. The possibility of engaging people out on the long tail of political involvement, though, is just getting started.

From 1960 to 2002 (Nixon-Kennedy debates to Trent Lott's downfall), we were in a game of scale -- better central organization, bigger donors, more broadcast airtime. The people who had some interest, some money, some time, were, prior to 2002, low grade ore, too costly in time and money to be courted by the campaigns. And of course the people sensed that as well, and stayed away in droves.

Now, we're seeing the wave of decentralization crest in politics. When it becomes easier to make a donation and cheaper to accept one, your $25 can make a difference. When the phone bank is a "Wherever you are, whenever you can" activity, instead of a 4 hour shift in a shabby campaign headquarters, and when this increased flexibility lowers campaign expenses, suddenly outreach can be lateral.

We had more donors, more phoners, more voters this year than we've had in a long time, and because the tools enabling that are just getting good, those effects will increase (though of course, so will the counter-measures from those who like their campaigns centralized and their polity inert.) The Senate races in 2006 are going to be a really profound test of these effects (the House has been hopelessly gerrymandered away from competitive races), as the decline of broadcast media and the increase in tools to lower transaction and coordination costs will be that much further along.

Clay Shirky is adjunct professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. His Internet writings are at http://www.shirky.com.