Interactive Campaigning ala Wiki 172
brettlg writes to tell us LinuxInsider is reporting that Utah Democratic hopeful, Peter Ashdown, is hoping to leverage his knowledge of the internet and small business resourcefulness to take down the incumbent Senator Orrin Hatch next year. From the article: "Peter Ashdown is the founder of Xmission, Utah's oldest Internet service provider (ISP). His Web site includes a blog and a monthly live chat session. But Ashdown's site takes public participation on his campaign Web site one step further -- opening his platform to all. The site is based on the "Wiki" open-source model made famous by Wikipedia."
Exposing himself to trouble (Score:5, Interesting)
Tin-foil hat? Hatch helping the scox scam? (Score:3, Interesting)
Frankly, when considering it's msft, I wonder if it's possible to be paranoid. Think of all the bizare and brazenly illegal activities that msft can been caught doing: fake grass campaigns - including letters from dead people, faked video evidence in DOJ trial, the entire ODF fiasco in MA. . .
That said, remember that Hatch's kid works for scox. Also remember that Hatch is on the judicial commitee, which means that Hatch has significant say-so over the careers of the federal judges in Utah.
Anybody familiar with the scox-scam knows that these judges have been insanely pro-scox from the start. The fact that obvious farce is still going strong after nearly three years speaks volumes. The trials don't even start for another 1.5 years.
Good example of "Open Politics" (Score:1, Interesting)
The open politics combines traditions of the free software and open content movements with postmoderism, and promotes a decision making method claimed to be a more open, less antagonistic, and more capable of determining what is in the public interest with respect to public policy issues.
Criteria
Underlying preferences
Implementation
These criteria are generally satisfied by a wiki or some other collaborative workspace in which multiple points of view are conveyed and reviewable in "living documents" that reflect, on an ongoing basis, what the community thinks.
History
Open Politics grew from earlier work in online deliberation and deliberative democracy, which in turn drew on research in issue-based argument and early hypertext and Computer Supported Cooperative Work research of the early 1980s.
The 2003-04 Deanspace project is widely considered to be the first serious attempt at Open Politics. It grew into Civicspace and was largely relying on blog and meetup technologies to build some support behind Democratic Party dark horse Howard Dean. It was largely an emergent, unplanned effort. In fact, meetup.com simply applied its ordinary stupid algorithm to a number of members who had listed "Howard Dean" (a mere text string to that algorithm) in their list of interests. It obediently buzz-clicked out a scheduled time for a live "meetup", and open politics history began, with no intelligence being directly involved at all (which some find ironic, and others, fitting).
The 2004-05 Green Party of Canada Living Platform was a much more planned and designed effort at Open Politics. As it prepared itself for an electoral breakthrough in the 2004 federal election, the Green Party of Canada began to compile citizen, member and expert opinions in preparation of its platform. During the election, it gathered input even from Internet trolls including supporters of other parties, with no major problems: anonymity was respected and comments remained intact if they were within the terms of use at all. Despite, or perhaps because of, its early success, it was derailed by the party's leader, when he discovered that it was a threat to his status as a party boss. The Living Platform split off as another service entirely out of GPC control and eventually evolved into openpolitics.ca [slashdot.org] and
Pete Ashdown isn't the guy (Score:2, Interesting)
That said, Pete Ashdown isn't the man to do it. See, I've met him on several occasions, and while he is a techie and may get those questions right, he is not a people person. At all. Much like Orrin, he himself is first on the priority list. XMission is a wonderful ISP, and far and away the best available in Utah (I wish someone as good as them existed in Upstate New York), and I thank Pete for that. Stick to tech.
There's no chance this can fail! (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, just like the open source movement has taken down Microsoft on the desktop.
If he runs his campaign like he runs his business (Score:2, Interesting)
I typically vote Republican and have voted for Hatch in the past but I feel that Pete's attention to his customers (through XMission) will translate to his constituents. I will definitely vote for him this fall.
Re:Great way to Hatch a campaign (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Great Ideas, over qualified though... (Score:4, Interesting)
For president, yes. Not one.
"Additionally, bearing in mind that most of our current spending can be accounted for in a foreign war,"
First of all that's bullshit. The war "only" costs 200 billion or so. Secondly the war itself was discretionary spending. There was no reason to invade iraq which was a secular socialist state which opposed religious fundamentalism.
"do not forget the amount of spending Democratic Presidents Kennedy and Johnson did on Vietnam."
Once again discretionary spending but in their case they kind of inherited the problem.
"Also, most economic indicators would also suggest we are doing better than we were at the end of Clinton's second term."
Yea right, and Iraq is going to join OPEC any day now. Thanks for the laugh though.