Posts for October 22nd, 2005

Spending today in Maine at popTech (Thanks to Te Smith for her help) and spent the days listening to how technology and visionaries are working to “make a difference”. And one of the conference speakers, Professor Yochai Benkler (see Dina’s post and Buzz’s post), spent fifteen minutes explaining the “future of open source’ - and how the centralized model has been spun on it’s head.

Intriguingly, this is what I heard at the start of the Dean phenomenon - that the conversation is occuring on the edge, and not in the center. Trippi was masterful in leveraging this energy (”You Have the Power”), but the challenge is - the process for electing people into public office is a much more complex than most people think. The engagement of the masses is not necessarily easy - but the lesson that I took away is supporting the community can derive benefit, but how do you generate deterministic performance (e.g. the meme you want discussed becomes the dominant one) in the timeframe you need?

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