Initiative. Voice. Democracy.

We got'em.

We're gonna use'em.

John Kerry's Media Corps is a new site on JK.com.

http://www.johnkerry.com/onlinehq/mediacorps/

From HQ to volunteers to the mediasphere.

Talking points.

Issues of the day.

Attacks recorded.

And the tools to put them to use.

We have five months
    to bring the message
        through the volunteers
            to the voters.

So let me tell you about the Rapid Response Model, how Kerry's Media Corps builds on it, and what makes this a beta release.

The John Kerry Media Corps

Embracing the decentralization message, volunteers put together the Dean Rapid Response Network in 2003. Last week John Kerry's staff launched the Media Corps, their first cut at rapid response.

Components:

• For each message (presumed weekly)
  • An assignment
  • A deadline
  • Background
  • Feedback email link
• Other tools
  • Research materials on the assignment
  • Recent television ads
  • Link to the D-Bunker (removed after the first week)
  • Tips for writers and callers

That's the anatomy. What's the whole?

1. Media Corps is a boundary communication channel. It pushes memes to volunteers. The campaign's politics and communications teams design messages. Media Corps throws them over the wall.
2. Media Corps is an end run past the political press corps. It tells volunteers to take the memes and run with them. To local media. To audience participation channels. To letter writing and other P2P channels. Can you spell disintermediation?
3. Media Corps is a memetic amplifier, making messages louder and reaching further. No longer are TV ads the only place you're likely to experience the campaign's message. The community reinforces broadcast memes with their own versions. This improves what advertisers call reach and penetration. 
4. Media Corps minimizes memetic drift, keeping volunteers on point. Its centralized and standardized seed message is the reference version. Unlike a game of "telephone" where messengers garble the message, Media Corps always gives a public point of origin.
5. Media Corps is a localization strategy, tailoring messages. Politics remains local. No national message works everywhere. Most advertising is wasted just trying to find its audience, let alone delivering the right message. Volunteers translate
6. Media Corps is a memetic biodiversity play, a lab for new ideas. Media Corps pushes its memes through thousands of channels, each reinventing the message. Some versions will spread further, survive longer, and have more impact than others. No single campaign office or market research firm can imagine or test all the variations the way the Media Corps can.

Why does it matter?

• Money. Every minute of "free media" is a minute more trusted than advertising. But the payoff is dollars that don't have to be raised.
• Message Innovation. Marketing sciences are all about developing the right sequence, timing, and presentation of the right messages for the right people. The right message is the hard part. Media Corps is a force multiplier for the communication team.  
• Measurable Results. Powering the feedback loop. Managerial gold. 

The Rapid Response Model

Most of the money in this election will be spent on television ads.

Every presidential campaign staff has a political director and a communications director. Typically a political director picks the ideas, issues, facts, and positions that will win voters to the candidate and money for the campaign. Then the communications staff wraps them up in events for the media to cover, things for voters to read, oratory for the candidate to propound, and all the other stuff that gets the word out. Advertising and branding, product management and media relations. Promotion.

Campaign communications are dynamic.

Hot items in the press change a campaign's message strategy hourly. For example, right now Rumsfeld is defending his performance in Iraq instead of attacking Kerry's war record. While a candidate's staff is small and agile enough to respond to attacks, it's not enough. Once leveled, an attack can fester in the air for weeks. And character attacks are best fought by anyone but the candidate.

That brings us to "rapid response."

Rapid Response has four parts:

1. Prepare
2. Detect
3. Respond
4. Feedback

Preparations include:

• Write, edit and test talking points
• Recruit a cadre of first responders
• List traditional media channels by locale
• Write procedures for responding to each channel/program/publication.
• Building training materials for effective response
• Set up a database of responders

Detection in three steps:

1. Notice an attack, through surveillance.
2. Report the attack to your rapid response network
3. Prioritize the attack.

The US has about 300 million citizens, about 106 million voted in the 2000 general election [US Census Bureau]. There are tens of thousands of newspapers, radio stations, television channels, mailing lists, and web sites. Two "free" strategies:

• Volunteers adopt a program/publication. "Mike will read the Business Section of the Miami Herald."
• Automated clipping services, like Google News Alerts.

Response. Every attack should be met with a swift and effective response. Prioritize only when you don't have the resources to respond everywhere. When you choose among multiple attacks, watch for the attacks which:

• are coordinated,
• reach a bigger audience,
• are authentic,
• are more potent, or
• open a new channel or issue.

Join fights:

• You can win.
• Where you can be seen or heard.
• Where you need to learn something from the engagement.

Response has three steps:

1. Assign. It doesn't make sense for everyone to respond to the same thing. Make sure your response team covers all the attacks worthy of response, and that people are matched to the assignment.
2. Draft. Every attack is a little different. So tailor your response.
3. Engage. Mail the letter, call the show, post to the bulletin board.

Feedback serves four goals:

• Risk assessment. Attacks going unchallenged? Attacks with disruptive potential?
• Message improvement. What's working? What isn't?
• Resource allocation. Where should we drive volunteer time and attention?
• Channel/medium profiling. What can we learn about media outlets to improve our effectiveness?

Prepare. Detect. Respond. Learn.

Challenges?

• Deeper-memes. Can you build a sequence of messages that assert an underlying value or point? For example, can "competence" and "character" be built in to how we talk about economy, environment, security?  
• Listen well to feedback. Listening doesn't scale, that's why we vote. And why we summarize. You need a combination of structured ("on a scale of 1 to 5...") and unstructured ("What did you say?") input.
• Positive Reinforcement. Bring volunteers back for new message cycles. Acknowledge people and teams for effort, creativity, and results.
• Experiment with the Process. This means consciously trying messages and talking points with different characteristics. How many words can fit in the bumpersticker version? What's the best day of the week to launch a campaign? Best time of day? Can we run two at once? Four at once? Does it have to be a whole week, or can we run one from start to finish in 48 hours? Test. Measure. Test again.
• Tailored Experiences. Support both high and low energy volunteers.
• Speed. Keep the cycles short. Look to IM and SMS for alerting to new threats.
• Memory. Help volunteers expose successes and failures to each other.
• Quick Help. Attacks aren't homogenous. In addition to research for this week's campaign, put response research for the 25 most common attacks, and 5 responses on each issue.
• Training. Build volunteer knowledge and skill. It's summer: recruit 50 high school teachers to craft tutorials on each issue, on each medium. Interview successful writers and callers for their story. Feed lessons learned back to the volunteers. 
• Attack. Initiate an issue. Seed the conversation. See how long it takes for big media to pick up a meme. See how long other groups take to respond, both friends and foes. Change the rhythm, put opponents off-balance.

I wrote Rapid Response: Memetic Engineering in the 2004 Presidential Campaign, my assessment of a new project from the John Kerry campaign. It's a recap of the political Rapid Response model, an analysis of the John Kerry Media Corps version of that model, and a checklist of things for the JK campaign to work on.

Not included: the idea of the grassroots web site network.

When you blend:

• "all politics is local" with
• "the edge of the network has the power" and
• "nobody trusts campaign commercials" 

You turn to free media.

John Kerry HQ is doing it with Media Corps, but not to weblogs.

Both the Dem and GOP professional staffs are resisting publishing decentralization.

Otherwise they'd host the biggest network of blogs in the world. Blogs for each county, each precinct, every meetup, each working committee. Aggregators that tie local groups together. Both content and event/activity syndication. And promotion of those sites to the local news media, community groups, and political clubs.

The ROI? Better communication, coordination, cohesion, and collaboration. We need it as groups form, as citizens swell their ranks, as we commit time and energy to making momentum. Tools to help them follow the campaign's lead while making local sense of issues and messages.  

But they're not. The people who understood and supported this vision are no longer part of the Kerry staff. Instead, we're seeing incremental marketing. 3 of 5 Cluetrain Points.

Maybe next time.

[aka public policy]

Scaramouche (1952, George Sidney) The Bride versus Johnny Mo fighting on the railing.

An influence across generations.

While I'm reading how memes diffuse through the blogosphere in hours and days.

I love the web.

Brian Sarrazin turned me on to this Social Networking Forum at Cal. Wednesday, April 28th, 2004, 7p-9:15 pm. Wells Fargo Room on the Haas Campus. Topics look worthwhile:

• the economic incentives of SNT and the concept of “incrementalism”
• the efficacy of SNT in building long-term relationships
• the opportunities of ubiquitous computing, efficient user interfaces, database scaling and more intelligent query engines
• the global marketplace as facilitated by SNT; market consolidation

The poor sods roped onto the panel: Eytan Adar of HP, Bobby Chao of Chinese friendster YeeYoo.com, VC Skip Fleshman, Andy Halliday of Spoke (formerly of In-Q-Tel), and Marti Hearst of Cal SIMS. Bonus: PhD Research Presentation by Harvard's Wayne Lim. $15 includes a quick dinner; rui@berkeley.edu for tickets. Bring Bullfighter but listen to voices of skepticism and experience, to what isn't said.

[aka community]

Out of the millions who blog, a handful do what professionals call journalism. Would more be better? Should we actively promote citizen journalism?

We could.

• Local Civic Journalism clubs.
• A full blown track in public school starting at age 8.
• An awards ceremony like the Pulitzer for best CJ reporting, best analysis, best thread, best catch of something missed by major media.
• Grants to develop curriculum for Business, Science, Public Affairs, Sports reportage.
• A professional guild helping CJers get press credentials and access like any news network.
• Legal services for bloggers to protect sources, file FOIAs, use sunshine ordinances, and defend IP.

And this is just for plain old text.

What will citizen journalism look like in 2009? My wild ass speculation: (like anyone will remember this post)

1. Moblogging comes into its own. Photos at a campaign stump speech by attendees outnumber those taken by photojournalists. And some aren't in bad light, of the back of someone's head, of the floor, with a finger over the lens, or from 10,000 feet away. Some will capture the spirit of an event and a defining moment. Long bet: By 2010 I'd be very surprised if ubiquity alone doesn't find us with a cell phone photo (or whatever we wind up calling them in 6 years) winding up above-the-fold on a major newspaper story, featured on the evening news, and gracing the cover of Time Magazine. A generation ago, big media adapted to electronic news gathering. The public continues that trend as the diffusing technology follows Moore's Law (more, better, faster, cheaper, smaller).  
2. Campaign coverage.
• A blogger on the presidential campaign bus.
• Designated bloggers at each meetup, taking photos and posting the minutes.
• Campaign aggregators, by location, topic, and affiliation go up 5 minutes after the home page.
• Local reporters become editors for local bloggers, compiling their accounts of the campaign.  
3. Personal video blogging becomes a staple of the portals and ISPs, a reason for customers to adopt broadband. And buy shiny tiny new digital video cams. Even laggards will have Logitech cams delivered with their just to be in on the conference call at work or to talk with family. First evidence: surging video camera aftermarket.  
4. Video syndication. We'll be moving more video en masse. RSS enclosures, anyone?.  As we're seeing in China's blocking of weblogs and other news sources, people route around censorship. P2P news distribution offers that alternative. Even for text news, P2P distribution of RSS and cached feeds let the network scale up.
5. News discovery systems, like Google News, will expand reach from the thousands of traditional news publishers to a broad selection of personal publishers. At first it's to weed out P.R. pros and to find reliable streams of general interest subject expertise. Eventually, they'll learn that the sixth-grade blogger has something meaningful to say about Outkast, worth sharing.
6. Blog juice. TV news and online editions of newspapers will explore ways to co-opt cheap content. Bloggers as stringers? Look for a play from the Classified Advertising department to annotate listings with fresh context from blogs, especially in smaller markets. Maybe even sharing revenue with popular bloggers. Example: citizen reportage on housing, neighborhoods put in with real estate listings.  
7. Stringer status. I'll bet hundreds of bloggers earn stringer accreditations from national news services and local news media. Not for everyone, but those willing to subscribe to journalism's standards will find this an edge.
8. Do you want it fast or good? Most blogging is about fast, slashing the distance between idea and paper. But video is inherently more interesting after post production. Home studio software adds polish. Voice overs, teleprompters, transitions, stock music, green screen backgrounds, titles. Nonlinear editing tools like Final Cut Pro will emerge in free/cheap format.
9. Extension. News isn't homogeneous, it's specific. Chess reporters have standard ways of representing game play. As do those who cover soccer/futbol. Or obituaries. Or police blotters. Or movie reviews. Watch for structural extensions to standard blogging, new blanks in the forms tailored to the application. And for clever ways to share new extensions.
10. History. Opposition research teams will hire specialists to comb campaign, activist, and lobbyist weblogs for dirt. Every weblog post from this election cycle is fair game. Would this help or hurt Kos's election chances?
11. En mi primera lengua. News translations on the fly, continuing a reverse cultural imperialism where English absorbs ideas and words from around the world. RSS and Atom will face semitic times of day and non-Gregorian calendars.
12. VNRs. Video News Releases will come along with citizen journalism. Citizen flackery and propaganda.
13. My News Station. We saw a handcrafted version of this in the Dean campaign. HowardDean.tv used DishTV, cable news, and hacked TiVos to collect news. They also collected video from the field, from students and volunteers, and cut it into a daily TV news program. That will become automatic. News aggregators (Bloglines) and discovery systems (Google News (clusters by topic), Technorati (clusters by reference), Daypop (what's hot)) will group and cut together syndicated videos based on location, time, and subject; create a montage of related footage; and stream a custom video channel just for you. 
14. Community stations. Following Hoder's advice on regional blogosphere building, we'll see "people's news" become a trusted alternative to state and corporate media. Military professionals will prioritize community blog servers right after radio and television stations. It won't happen in this decade because John Kerry should be able to keep the peace for the next 8 years, but the next time a country fears an attack by the US, watch their blogosphere come under attack from within.
15. Big screens enter. What do you do with a 250 megapixel monitor? Something 5 feet tall by 8 feet wide at paper resolution? Could you create a dynamic montage of video and stills that reflected your interests over time, relative popularity and proximity of news stories. The World Wide Wall® of News: a must for every corporate Chief, political war room, and mayor.  

Where do you think citizen journalism be in 2010?

[aka community]

Jeff Jarvis says Google email (gmail) is just another portal me-too.

I don't think so, Jeff.

Email has juice. Only telephones are used more.

40% of a company's knowledge is stored in its email boxes, hidden from intranet search engines, locked away on desktops. Email is rich with:

• social information (who is asked about what, who redistributes information to whom),
• time signatures (sent, received, read, forwarded, printed),
• threading and propagation clues (A sent it to B who replied while copying it C who forwarded it to...),
• urls pointing to the web,
• enclosures passed along, and
• entry points, from mobile devices to robots to business software.

evectors' ZOË demonstrates the value of combing through your mail to fuel search and reveal context.

For Google, this has three strategic benefits:

1. Better Google scoring. There's no reason Google can't collect a billion emails by this time next year. A million users times a thousand messages. The urls will inform PageRank™, and in near real time. If you thought weblogs got you Google juice, wait for email.
2. Ad Revenue. Either you'll pay for ad-free viewing or you'll get Google text ads tailored to your emails. A billion page reads of additional targeted inventory to sell.
3. Appliance sales. With Google search, weblogs, and email, Google will give Microsoft mail service a run for its money. Watch Google roll out Blogger in a Box this year, the better to clue the Google search engine to intranet content. A year from now, watch the microcontent of email and weblogs continue to converge, especially behind the firewall.

How does Yahoo differ from Google?

Where Yahoo sells communication, Google sells context.

Where Yahoo brings integration, Google leads with relevance.

Where Yahoo! lets you type up a "buddy list", watch Google tweak your orkut social network with clues from your mailing behavior, and vice versa.

Where Yahoo uses their toolbar to access their many services/properties, Google's toolbar will observe your browser experiences. And that includes now sending and reading email, surfing, news watching, reading and writing weblogs, following and posting to usenet, and shopping. With email, orkut and your toolbar, they now can create a compound profile of your interests.

Context, relevance, experience. Tough to beat.

[a klog apart]

I've been rationalizing the 30-50 hours a week of grassroots campaigning I've been investing in the local Kerry campaign since last summer. Changing the world is great, and we're doing that. My takeaway is what I learn from it, how the work itself changes me. Here are a few lessons learned.

EQ is more important than IQ.

Everything in campaigns is about emotion. Values trigger emotions, as do symbols of those values. And emotions get you money, volunteers, votes.

Campaigns are tough on the emotions.

A local DFA leader said "Anger Unifies" at the last Democratic Unity Meetup. Lots of adrenalin. Ups and downs. I went to three Dean meetups the night after the California primary, the day Dr. Dean withdrew from the race. I saw frustration, despair, anger, denial, and loss. But I also saw resolve, support, and bonds with their fellow Dean faithful. In a race that lasts six weeks, you can turn up the emotional volume. But what do you do with a race that lasts 100 weeks?

You can't pick your comrades.

We encounter every "people problem" that HR pros prepare for, that social workers encounter, that psychiatrists commit for, in grassroots campaigning. The persistently off-topic person. Trolls. The person who thinks everything is interesting and emails you about it, and your 500 fellow volunteers. Fair weather friends. The craven mercenary. The paranoid. The narrowly obsessed (we almost started a John Kerry's Hair weblog back in September '03). The person who picks fights. The lonely. The shy. It takes centered, socially adept people to work with these people.  

Burnout is a huge problem.

We're lucky to have any active volunteers survive the primary season. It's expensive to volunteer. You're giving up recreation that might have been keeping you sane. You're spending less time on friends, family, and your love life. You may even trade off time you could be working or looking for work, dipping into savings or living frugally. I know volunteers who put off graduation, that lost a job, that neglected their health. So recruiting well rises to the top 5 issues every week.

When grassroots groups pay for their own expenses, they go to jail or embarrass their candidate/cause.

My group, East Bay Kerry, is unincorporated and not a PAC and not recognized by the FEC or IRS. If we take money from an organization to print fliers or buy buttons, we're breaking the law. If we sell buttons at a table, we're breaking the law. If we keep a few bucks from a house party to pay for the party's pizzas, we're breaking the law. It's paralyzing.

We need ways to legally raise and spend money without screwing John Kerry for President or the DNC.

Hoisting: those higher on the scale of commitment recruit those lower on that ladder, and work to bring them up.

There's a clear ladder of political engagement. It runs from "I can vote?" to elected official. At each step of the ladder, we pull up those behind us. If you volunteer for 2 hours every two years, you call someone to vote this year. If you're leading a writers bureau, you recruit new members from those who were previously interested but not volunteering.  

How much does that happen in the workplace?

Rarely.

Self-interest doesn't often lead to such seemingly altruistic behavior.

But if it is in the campaign's interest (or the enterprise's), how can you institutionalize pulling folks behind you up the ladder? How do you make each leader's success dependent on the growth of replacement leaders and fresh blood?

The new labor market features increased competition for great talent, increased employee turnover and shorter tenures. So hoisting becomes a competitive advantage. How well do you align incentives with hoisting behavior? How well do you incorporate

There is no organizing software that thinks of the user as the voter or volunteer.

All the commercial tools for running electoral or advocacy campaigns is top down, center out. CRM for politics. Clueless, in the Cluetrain Manifesto sense.

Keep all that stuff, though. It works.

Add new edge-powered stuff. Let anyone say "Hey, kids, let's put on a show!" Without approval from a hierarchy. Decentralized authority and the tools to act on it. And then help that nugget of energy flourish internally, and in interaction with others.

There are no tools for committee-scale organizations to be productive.

I want to put on a lecture series for John Kerry. Or host a bowling league fundraiser. Or mentor a Swing State grassroots team. Or coordinate high school students in growing Or coordinate 75 Earth Day activities.

Where are the tools that let me plan, staff, fund, schedule, coordinate, train, account, syndicate, dunn, manage, remind, and otherwise get things done?

Where are the recipes for getting things done? And the place to post my own?

We need team-scale productivity tools.

No grassroots organization is an island.

This is from some analysis I did for ActivistTech or DemTech or whatever it's called: A hypothetical bridge commission.

My speakers bureau in East Bay - West of the Tunnel works with other committees

• Fundraising
• Media relations
• Writers
• Swing state

Both ours, and those of East Bay East of the Tunnel, San Francisco's grassroots Kerryfolks, local union organizations, the Wellstone Club's speakers bureau, the official campaign, venue hosts, etc. More than 200 political and activist groups are players in the Bay Area's East Bay. Each committee in my organization needs to be able to manage the life cycle of relationships with each of the others. To get things done: events, money, recruiting, media, etc.

Where are the tools for identifying potential relationships, making them real, sustaining them, and gracefully retiring them?

Blogging remains absurdly difficult.

And the tools don't make it any easier.

Information overload is a real problem without practices or tools for managing it.

Just before the California primary, I was receiving more than 500 political emails daily. I didn't even get to look at my thousand RSS feeds.

When we got to 10 daily emails on our local Yahoo! group, people started unsubscribing faster than they were joining.

We're experimenting with multiple email channels (high and low volume, broad and niched, ad hoc and scheduled) but it's all confusing to our volunteers.

How much fatigue will the average voter feel in 200 days, if this keeps up? How can we lower the political noise? Does tuning out mean voters stay home?

Ok, so I'm off to a meeting of the Speakers Bureau.

I've heard it said by Dave Winer and many many others: if only Dean had reinvested half the money raised into the Internet, then ...

OK, so you're the Dean Campaign Chief Information Officer in August 2003. The money starts to roll in. $20 million over six months, $2-4 million per month.

What would you spend the money on?

1. What does your monthly budget look like?
2. What is your application and infrastructure portfolio?
3. How much will you allocate to maintenance?
4. You're building from scratch, so what problems do you hope to avoid through wise architecture?
5. What are your big milestones?
6. Who are your key vendors?

How do you spend in consonance with the campaign strategy?

1. How will you use the Internet to bring offline voters into the campaign at the same numbers as radio or television broadcasts?
2. What is your online strategy for responding to attack ads and opposition pundits in radio, television and print?
3. Online community takes time to build and is very hard to organize geographically. What will you do to match the state-by-state primary schedule?
4. What can you do with online services to serve the campaign in caucus states?
5. You are preparing for Bush to launch in Spring 2004. What are your countermeasures to reach out to moderate Republicans online while the GOP uses its advanced voter email systems to barrage 200 million validated email addresses?
6. How will you lower the cost-per-vote vs. the GOP?

Delightful to see the new American politics through such insightful British eyes. Me and Opehlia. A blogger and her cat from the land of the Beatles and Disraeli. A regular read on metablogging, online democracy, and other things I find fascinating. Just a bit askew in unexpected ways.

I saw a picture of the Queen Mary 2. Ten lifeboats on a side, 20 in all. The ship can carry 2620 passengers and 1254 crew. So 3874 into 20 is 194 people per life boat. But you need to plan for some boats being more full than others, some breakage, etc. So let's assume 10% overcapacity, or about 215 per boat. Most restaurants don't have that capacity. Do the QM2's boats? Who built them? Do the lifeboats have boats, food, electronics, storm shells?

OK, I gloated for an hour.

I'm only a little surprised.

A few factors contributed to the success.

1. The big management change in the Kerry camp in November. Strong organization on the ground.  
2. All the candidates spent a year turning up voter turnout. With high turnout, a GOTV machine isn't a competitive advantage.  
3. Kerry put all of his energy behind one punch. Can he keep his balance and sustain that level of effort? Will the same tactics that worked in a 2.9 million person state scale to one with 35 million people?  
4. The whole message thing changed then too: They Let Kerry Be Kerry. He's great with people. Great on discussing issues. Totally affirms my view that campaigns are conversations.
5. Bush bagging Saddam elevates warrior status. Kerry served in combat, highly decorated. Served on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee for 20 years. A long time architect of America's war on narcoterror and political terrorism.
6. Dean and Gephardt nuked each other. Not civil, and Iowans punished them for it. It's to Dean's credit he survived.
7. Kerry and Edwards have a higher Emotional Quotient (EQ) than Dean. Dean wasn't very likeable in the debates or in interviews. One long note of derision, frustration, just ready to burst out of his skin. Other candidates, like Kerry and Edwards, showed many emotional notes, in appropriate circumstances. 
8. By process of elimination (angry Dean, babyfaced Edwards, civilian Gephardt) you're left with Kerry.

What should Dean do?

• Keep on plugging, the machine was working.
• Work on yourself. Get high, drunk, a massage or something so surgeons can expose your warm fuzzy side, the side that laughs, giggles, cries. Your true believers know it's in there.
• Go two weeks without mentioning Iraq. It'll scare the bejeezzus out of Clark.

What should Kerry do?

• Franchise your HQ. Start building tools so your volunteers can do more kinds of things. "Franchising" your headquarters roles lets each metro area lay solid groundwork before you come to town. (Call me. 510 444 8234)
• Get six hours of sleep and keep eating your oatmeal.
• Money follows support. Put supporter enrollment above donor armtwisting.   

All said, I'm proud of my local team. Our small crew has five people on the road in Iowa and New Hampshire. We're actively working on our campaign craft, studying from old hands. We're doing the basics badly but learning from each experience, better each week. We're communicating well with each other, despite our circle growing.

Slowly those of us who were afraid to commit are becoming true believers. We can say things like:

John Kerry is the Real Deal.

We're sending a president to Washington, not a message.

He's the one we want on the podium opposite Bush.

and believe them.

And we have the nerve to ask people to join us.  

• Come to a Kerry meetup this Thursday night.
• I'm shopping for a media relations strategist for the Bay Area, to help us take back the White House.
• I need a team that understands precinct, CRM profiling, and direct marketing software, so all Americans can have health care at least as good as Federal employees.
• Curriculum developer wanted, so we can build the Opportunity America we all deserve.
• Speech communications professor, to give voice to the average American instead of powerful interests.
• I need a conversation with someone who can coach newbies on project templating, so 20% of our children don't go to bed hungry.
• A digital artist, to bring sunshine and transparency back to government service.    

Call me. Or write: phil@dijest.com.

You're not seeing a lot of me here. I'm doing most of my blogging over on EastBayKerry.com (all politics is local). And spreading myself thin in bulletin boards, other people's blogs and doing campaign related stuff. My apartment flooded, throwing off my schedule and keeping me away from my computer for a week. Small stuff.

[a klog apart]

Susan Mernit called. 30 minutes later I'm in a North Berkeley bakery with J.D. and Mary. "J.D. Lassica?" I ask. Indeed it is. I didn't tell him to his face, but I've been learning from J.D. for more than a year now. That whole big J in the "blogging as journalism, blogger as journalist" meme. Thinking about ethics. Management as journalism. Public/private tradeoffs. Truth squads. He's quieter in person than on his blog (maybe that's called "listening", Phil).

Stuff I didn't get to mention to J.D.:

• EastBayKerry.com is about making national issues local, local issues personal, and to provoke engagement in the political process.
• Don't Blog was birthed during breaks while hung over at the 2003 Blogtalk conference.
• I really like that General Clark's been holding Bush directly accountable for domestic misconduct about foreign affairs. Not just well said, but a consistent and dogged demonstration of public integrity.  

I've been tuning in to Mary Hodder's biplog (Berkeley Intellectual Property Weblog) since Spring 2003. New Media Mary [sorry, Mary] also edits the napsterization blog. Mary's writing/shooting a documentary on Cow RFID (radio frequency identification) tags, sort of a Total Bovine Information Awareness Program. Blogworthy in a Mad Cow era. Contrast this to Mary's growing irritation with fringe intrusions into her own privacy, like seeing her name and RSVP status show up on party evites. Transparency in that little virtual social encounter makes going to the party less mysterious, meeting people there feel less serendipitous, and steals intimacy from the inviter-invitee relationship.

Just imagine how the cows feel. MooooveOn.

Then Thai lunch with Susan.

Susan wants to bring bloginess to social service charities. All that klogging goodness (authentic and timely stakeholder communication, collaboration turbocharged, institutional memory, etc.) for not-4-profit agencies that heal, feed, and nurture those who need it. Off to a good start but enduring bigco bureaucracy wrapped in 501c3 woolens.

Susan advised a bit about the state of the Actionable Sense Society's formation. Thanks.  

Why do we need to escape the home office for the social engagement of a cubicle farm? Why do we find it so useful to meet in person? Do we ever figure out what we're going to do when we grow up?   

I like it when Susan calls.

[a klog apart]