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: Dan Carol, Esther Dyson, Allison Fine, Brewster Kahle, Jon Lebkowsky, Chris Nolan, Doc Searls, Matt Stoller and Brad Templeton. Lots more to follow. And please register and join in the conversation.

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

I don’t mean to be a curmudgeon but there was not that much new really – be it the use of Palm Pilots (which started in 1998), raising online money in droves (lest we forget McCain and Bradley from the last cycle), or matching membership lists to voter files to fuel voter registration drives. But we did more of that and that’s worth honoring and the results are pretty obvious. Of course, technology accelerated and expanded the reach of our work a great deal, and at times helped glue organizations together, and for sure, drove exciting new community building when house parties and smart mobs and MeetUps actually brought folks together.

But in terms of re-connecting the D/democratic/progressive coalition of 50-70 million people back into a winning machine, which is my core passion, the legal, cultural, and political forces of dis-aggregation continued to outpace our ability to aggregate and put Humpty Dumpty back together again (more on that challenge here). And I suspect that the effects of the blogosphere and distributed democracy cut both ways here too.

So while I am continually excited about the role of technology in politics, what I am most passionate about is promoting effective integration at the seams and going deeper with the core applications that advance our causes and drive our campaigns, not the latest firsts in themselves. Ultimately, the tools must serve the work. And there, I am most focused on efforts to meet our core movement challenges to build smart state electoral network building projects (like The Oregon Bus Project) and to create strategic new message initiatives like The Apollo Alliance, than I am about better mechanics. Though of course we need them all done better. The day we have these all cranking at 100%, message, mechanics, money and mobilization, and still lose, is the day I will be depressed. That isn’t how I feel today after November 2nd.

Dan Carol built the first U.S. Senate website in 1994. He is a member of Carol/Trevelyan Strategy Group’s senior management team, and blogs at http://www.kumbayadammit.com.

I think the big lesson was really that technology mattered very little in this election. Many people used the Net; some even posted blogs, wrote or disseminated campaign messages, and otherwise used technology. But in the end, I don't think "technology" changed many people's minds about any of the issues. In the end, it was about politics, not technology. Perhaps the most important thing technology has done - for this election and for politics and life in general - is shorten our timescale. Stories that used to unfold over days now unfold in hours or even minutes. Politicians and pundits give instant rather than considered reactions. So perhaps the biggest impact has been on the transformation of our culture from long-term, thoughtful consideration of the issues, to a more short-term, "he-said, she-said"-volley style of news coverage and, ultimately, thinking. Politics is not sport or entertainment, but perhaps media convergence has also led to some broader convergence of how we think about things - towards shallowness and lack of consideration for long-term consequences.

Esther Dyson is editor at large at CNET Networks, where she is responsible for its monthly newsletter, Release 1.0, and its PC Forum. She blogs at http://weblog.edventure.com/.

With the first dawn of reflection, I am struck by how the use of technology mirrored the best and most basic principles of old fashioned community organizing, particularly people to people contact. Rather than replacing what works well, campaign technology built upon and amplified on-the-ground efforts through meet-ups, friend to friend emails, interactive blogs and chat rooms that created a sense of connectedness and a common purpose for people who had become accustomed to being seen as ATM machines by television-dominated campaigns. The voter mobilization technology efforts highlighted key differences in the cultures of the Republican and Democrat parties. The Republicans built an amazingly effective voter mobilization infrastructure that was proprietary, and very hierarchical and structured. The Democrats relied instead on open source applications that were pushed out through a variety of networks to be used and improved upon by hackers, activists, and local campaigns across the country. Many more people and groups were involved in the Democratic efforts, but probably in a less efficient, reliable and successful way. Overall these efforts reflect the ability of information and communication technologies to facilitate conversations and not overtake or sublimate people and their passions.

Allison Fine is executive director of the E-volve Foundation, which provides seed funds for online democracy and activism efforts.

Video is the most convincing mass media ever invented-- and it is starting to come to the Net. Stepping beyond the few broadcast companies, we can have a plurality of voices, which would be refreshing. This election we saw the first starts: the Jon Stewart on Crossfire video was downloaded 1.5 million times just from iFilm; Eminem's Mosh video was downloaded around 1 million times just from the Internet Archive; hundreds of homemade pieces and advocacy pieces were made and uploaded to commercial servers and hosts like the Internet Archive, sites of shorts were put up in days (see http://www.p2p-politics.org/ that encouraged uploads of new videos). Next time, lets have the infrastructure and law systems in place to encourage political and issue based moving image collections.

Brewster Kahle founded WAIS and Alexa and now runs the Internet Archive.

I'm not sure I can zero in on a "single most"; I think it's important to consider all of the following: We've always suspected that Internet technology could transform politics; online activists have been around for years, though they were mostly focused on technology policy. Before the Internet would have an impact on broader political issues, we needed to see a critical mass of users who had been online long enough to be comfortable with at least some aspects of the technology. We're there. For a political candidate to use the Internet effectively, there would have to be some cessation of message control. Howard Dean and Joe Trippi understood that, and they took the chance; others will hopefully follow. In order to use technology to empower citizens and support their participation, we needed to build effective activist tools and networks. We're doing that, and we're thinking how to be more inclusive. My hope now is that we won't lose momentum; that citizens will understand that their involvement doesn't end with their vote, that they will use the many tools that are emerging to support an ongoing participation in political process.

Jon Lebkowsky is CEO of Polycot Consulting, L.L.C. He blogs at http://www.weblogsky.com

Chris Nolan

By my lights, the most important piece of technology to show up in this election cycle was made 30-some odd years ago. It's the good old IBM typewriter.

That's the IBM typewriter that wasn't used to write memos detailing President George Bush's absences during his Texas National Guard service. It's the typewriter that didn't have superscripts. It's the typewriter that couldn't create uniform line spacing.

I was a little precipitous when I said the faked memos would re-elect George Bush. But certainly they played a role in convincing Bush supporters that Big Media and its elitist buddies in the Democratic Party -- that's me and many of you -- were so determined to get the President that they'd stop at nothing to get the job done. That helped turn out votes in his favor, I'd bet on it. Former Clinton advisor and Kerry campaign spokesman Joe Lockhart's cameo appearance in the whole mess -- serving as some kind of reassurance for Bob Burkett, the guy who "discovered" the memos -- poured gasoline on the fire. That 60 Minutes’ producers couldn't tell the difference between a typewritten letter and one created using Microsoft software added a sheen of bumbling incompetence to the whole thing.

So I nominate the humble, forgotten IBM typewriter on which I started my reporting career and which -- any day now -- will finish Dan Rather's.

Chris Nolan, PDF contributing editor and “Stand Alone Journalist” blogs at http://www.chrisnolan.com.

We clearly now have a much more connected electorate, and we will have much more connected governance. Campaigns on the Democratic side — especially Dean's and Kerry's — famously made use of the Net to raise money and drive grass roots support. What the Democrats missed, along with the mainstream media (which, by November, had annexed A-list political bloggers on both sides) was the equally — and far more effectively — connected grass roots work fed artfully by the Bush campaign on the Right. President Bush's "moral" messages, especially those regarding gay marriage, resonated with many of the country's (reportedly) 80 million fundamentalist Christians, who have long viewed the Net as an ideal environment for the evangelical work that energizes their faith. While it's easy to make too much of what worked on one side of what turned out to be a close election, it is also easy to miss how well the "silent majority" uses the collective commons provided by the Net, and how much the Net has transformed operations for all political movements — and, finally, for the mechanics of governance.

Doc Searls is co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto and a senior editor of Linux Journal. He blogs at http://doc.weblogs.com.

The most important political tool and new institution this cycle was Google. As a research tool, communications tool, organizing tool, nothing holds a candle to the power that the ability to search the world's information brings to the world of politics. We might consider some lessons in terms of political architecture that this implies. Google was not built to influence an election, unlike the 527s or the DNC. It was built to solve a specific and universal problem. Yet one would be hard-pressed to find a campaign staffer anywhere who did not depend on it. To understand how to build an effective long-term movement, one should look to tools built to solve universal problems, see what principles underly them, and see how those principles can be applied to movement building. The open architecture of the internet aids movements that foster openness. The closed architecture of TV aids movements that foster a closed society. To the extent that we are looking to modernize liberalism, we must do so with this in mind. Effective political movements have at their core institutions that solve universal problems first, and political problems second.

Matt Stoller, a PDF contributing editor, cocreated the Blogging of the President radio show and blog. He has been active in Democratic politics and the 'netroots' since the spring of 2002.

As exciting as all the novel uses of technology may have been, the
most important use was probably plain and boring -- databases. In
particular the republican databases that they used to coordinate support, and coordinate the "get out the vote" effort to likely republicans. In spite of much conventional wisdom that a high turnout would be good for the Democrats, the Republicans beat them at this game, and did a better job of getting out the vote. Of course they used many means, not just the grass roots effort managed via databases, but this was the tech that made the difference.

What's equally interesting is which technology did not make a difference, namely blogs. In spite of all the detailed research and tons of blogs to go to for various slants of the real story, few people changed their minds, certainly not from Republican to Democrat. As was commonly reported, a huge fraction of voters felt that Iraq had WMDs and had planned the destruction of the World Trade Center. All the information spreading tools in the world were unable to combat this mass level of misinformation. Sometimes because they didn't get read by the folks that weren't already singing in the choir, and also because there were counter-blogs and seemingly well researched exposes in both directions on every issue.

Brad Templeton founded ClariNet Communications Corp. (the world's first "dot-com"). He also created and publishes rec.humor.funny, the most widely read USENET newsgroup and its web site, www.netfunny.com. He is currently chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The views expressed here are his alone.