More On Organization

An Email From Headquarters

Luigi.

I hope you are okay with my keeping public our conversation. This is the transparent democracy part.

I just wanted to add a few things in response to your email.

I am not asking the question if Dean will run in 2008 or not. I have met him twice, and it is all over his face. He will. I knew that even before I met him. If he does not run in 2008, then 2004 was sham. And I know it was not, I was part of it.

I am not even asking the question if he will win. Victory is guaranteed. He will win.

The question I am asking is what if 2008 is more like 1776, a year when democracy itself gets reinvented. Will we have the orgnanizational framework in place to handle all that outburst of energy all over the map? That is what I think about. The grassroots organizational structure that will elect him will become even more important after he is in the White House. The very idea of governance stands to get reinvented.

When the goofy white men invented democracy in 1776, they did have many deficiencies, when looked at in hindsight and compared to the future, but it was a total revolution when compared to the past. 1860 expanded upon the idea. Then women got voting rights. In 1932 organized labor gained some sort of a victory. 1960 saw JFK really bring the focus onto the primaries. 1992 was also a watershed. Bill Clinton claimed he was the first person to get himself elected president solely based on his network of personal friends, Friends Of Bill. He said he became president because he had more friends than anyone else in America.

The original idea was of a republic. The people vote for these hopefully wise white men, and they take care of business for the next so many years. That idea stands to get challenged through DFA. Citizens organized at grassroots levels participate in the democracy on a monthly basis. That is a fundamental departure. The country moves from being a republic to becoming a democracy. Are we up for it? That is the question.

I think we are on our way to direct elections for President. Bye bye electoral college.

So the organizational framework is of fundamental importance.

You are right, most of what I am talking about is political and organizational, not technological. The technology already exists and is available for free online for anyone who might want to use it. And it is only going to get better.

I am very impressed with DFA Link.

Maybe you have the people and the resources, but I would be wary of DFA becoming too technology centric. We are not a technology company, we are a political organization. It makes sense to do some things in-house. But I think we should be leery of trying to do everything in-house.

If you think you are up for it, by all means do the blog aspects in-house. But I am kind of thinking, why would we want to compete with Google? They show signs of becoming the successor company to Microsoft itself. They have billions in the bank, and more coming. Why not just use their Blogger? They also have audio and video options. And they keep improving the whole thing. Blogger is as close to word processing online as it gets.

Instead we focus on having a framework. A mechanism that puts all Deaniac blogs on one map, a mechanism for Deanics to vote for blogs and blog entries. That way we still do the core work, but what can already be done online for free, we don't duplicate, and instead pour our resources into political and organizational work.

Just a thought.

We will keep talking.