:: frightening traditional operatives :: ::

Embracing the New Politics and Perfecting the Old
Donnie Fowler / November 2004

...Democrats have also been slow to adopt the tools of the new politics. When we do, our understanding has been very shallow. The Party's understanding of the web and other technologies has not kept up with the extraordinary speed of the advances. Fortunately, there are great Democrats in Silicon Valley and other tech centers who can help where we have already tried to help ourselves by ourselves. Technology is much, much broader than putting up a website and giving a volunteer a $200 Palm Pilot. Not only does it provide vast new means to raise money, it provides us uniquely different ways to communicate to voters through email and websites. The Internet is not television, radio, or direct mail, so communicating across it must be approached differently. The Internet is interactive (like talk radio on a more limited scale) and it is d e c e n t r a l i z e d, allowing activists to organize themselves without waiting for the "go" signal from a national or state headquarters. While this frightens many traditional operatives, self-starting grassroots means that more folks can participate in more ways than ever before. Technology also provides us dramatically better ways to identify and speak to narrow slices of the electorate. Powerful database technologies already exist in Silicon Valley so we need not create these tools from scratch...

.read more here