The Dean campaign's grassroots organizing effort has spawned an open-source software project aimed at producing code for running grassroots organizing efforts.
This campaign's grassroots base – you – are incredible, and as you are discovering, quite powerful. Spawning from ad-hoc meetups and spilling over into Yahoo Groups and mailinglists you are defining the future of the political process. But while Meetup.com and Yahoo Groups have been very instrumental in this campaign, they were not designed specifically to be tools for political organization and expression. So I decided someone should build them.
Thus began the DeanSpace project. From a simple webpage with some rough ideas on how these tools should work and a mailinglist for development discussions, the project has grown into a full fledged open-source development community. Complete with rowdy IRC design debates and weekly tarballed releases, we are coding the tools we think will help define the future of political and civic participation.
(Thanks, Brent!)
