Articles about CivicSpace
Using Mapping Tech to Mine for Voters – eWEEK, Chris Nolan
Ex-Dean aide gets new life in valley – Sillcon Valley / Mercury News, Dan Gillmor
Next generation eager to lead Democratic Party – Atlanta Journal Constitution, Tom Baxter
Books in which CivicSpace is discussed
DeanSpace in the news
Los Angeles Times > Reprinted By: Common Dreams > More than ever, the internet gives people a connection
12/21/03 Matea Gold
To that end, a group of software engineers coded their own Web site kit program called DeanSpace that allows local communities to build their own Dean Web sites that automatically update and share content.
NY Times > The Dean Connection
12/5/03 by SAMANTHA M. SHAPIRO
Zack Rosen was a creator of DeanSpace, ”the revolution itself.” He started the project, originally called Hack for Dean, after reading about Dean on the campaign Web site for 20 minutes. ”I just knew this is the guy,” Rosen says. He recruited an unpaid team of nearly a hundred programmers, including his friends Neil and Ping, to write software for the campaign that would allow the many disparate, unofficial Dean Web sites to communicate directly with one another and also with the campaign. Typically, to reproduce information from one Web site to another, a user has to cut the information by hand and paste it into each Web site, a laborious process. The software that Zack’s group built allows any Dean Web site to reprint another’s stories, images and campaign feed automatically, as if they have a collective consciousness. It also will provide a ”dashboard” for the people in Burlington, where the campaign can track patterns on its unofficial sites and observe which content is most popular.
Baseline > The Marketing of a President
11/18/03 by Edward Cone
Take DeanSpace, which was launched in late October. They blog-and-community environment uses the Drupal open source content management system as a platform. It provides all users with simple ways for them to crosslink their sites, simplifying conversations between the opinion generators. Connected through the Really Simple Syndication standard (RSS), the DeanSpace bloggers can subscribe to other blogs and see posts at the other sites immediately in a news-aggregator window. Syndication also shows the Dean campaign whose views are most valued â�� and active. “If something goes on one site, and it shows up on 50 more, then maybe we put it our site,” says Teachout.
MSNBC > Behind Dean’s Win on the Web
10/21/03 By Felix Schein
“Dean Space, for example, which will tie together hundreds of independent Dean Web sites and provide the campaign with yet another online community. The bonus here: Dean Link allows the campaign to monitor what all the Dean related Web sites are talking about, in essence creating an internal polling unit within which to distribute ideas and test policy proposals.”
Wired News > Netizens Rally for Dean Team
7/04/03 By Katie Dean
A new site has popped up on the Net to help elect Howard Dean president, using a network of independent “nodes” of supporters to collaborate, share news and even design multimedia campaign materials.
A group of software developers has formed Americans for Dean, a site designed to help organize those who support the former Vermont governor’s bid for president.
“It’s an autonomous, self-organizing, grass-roots campaign network,” said Zack Rosen, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign computer science student who cooked up the idea. “We’re giving people a Web tool to organize the campaign network. We want to help get this man elected.”
SiliconValley.com > Dean puts Web into campaign politics
8/10/2003 By Dan Gillmor
“She quickly got scores of responses. Members of an unaffiliated group called Hack4Dean, since renamed DeanSpace, were among those who answered the call, and a site she’s calling “Visible Volunteers is taking shape.”
Teachout, 31, heads Internet outreach for a campaign that is rewriting some of the rules of politics. Dean’s team isn’t the first to use new media in a national race. However, more than any previous campaign, the people running this one truly get the meaning of the Net.”
Boston Globe > Net gains for Dean, Candidate increasing funds, support via the Web
8/11/2003 By Joanna Weiss
“renegade crew of programmers set up hack4dean.org, dedicated to helping people set up their own pro-Dean websites”
Reason Online > Dean’s List : Can the Vermont guv flash mob his way to power?
8/13/2003 By Jeff Taylor
“So can anything in Dean’s bag of bits be so effective? There might be the makings of a massively distributed pro-Dean propaganda machine in the formative stage. And that’s propaganda in the least pejorative sense of the word, information that is bent to a particular goal and worldview.
DeanSpace is an open source built template for pro-Dean Web sites. Dean supporters canand haveused the package to put up their own Dean sites. Despite the no doubt honest claims to the contrary, DeanSpace needs a good bit of computer savvy to get up and running, certainly more than clicking on a link at Meetup. But in exchange for little user work Dean acolytes get a very powerful tool to help spread Dean’s message and, presumably, create Dean voters.”
Heise Online > Going into the fight for the white house with open source
08/23/2003 By Janko Rottgers
“With a smart internet-campaign Howard Dean managed to push himself from a outside position into the center, being now the best financed candidate for the democrats in the US-Election campaign.”
“So far Deanspace is stil being in the beta test phase. Only a few websites are using the test-version (…). Rose expects the 1.0 version to be released in a few weeks. How effectively this network structure is going to be has to be seen by then. Although this was technically possible before, this is the first time this technique is used in a political campaign on such a big scale.”
“There are no fears that George W. Bush could use these tools, rosen said: “Bushs campaign will be entirely different from Deans campaign”. The campaign site of the present president seems to confirm his statement. There is no sign of interactive elements on that site yet. (…)