Page 186 - The Resilient Organization

Postcard No. 2 from Hanover, New Hampshire 173

online—for example, registering with Meetup.com or sharing news about
the campaign via e-mail. Other actions—for instance, writing letters to
undecided voters in early primary states—were offline activities that the
campaign used online tools to facilitate (that is, making the addresses of the
undecided voters available for download from the campaign’s Web site).
Although the official campaign organization initiated contact between
itself and its supporters (and created means of contact among supporters),
there were still plenty of kinds of cross-communication that were beyond
the campaign’s planning, expectations, and control. Months before Dean’s
campaign launched its official blog, there were already people who had
taken an interest in Howard Dean’s candidacy and who were expressing
that interest through online community forums. For example, Dean Nation
was a blog that was launched in 2002, about six months before the start of
the official campaign’s blog.
There was a lot of informality and openness in all communications.
Although Blog for America was an official campaign space, its comments
area functioned as a public square. Visitors were not required to register
until many months later in January 2004. In 2003, the blog was open to any-
one to comment anonymously, including visitors who opposed Dean’s can-
didacy. Also, every official post by the campaign was normally treated by
visitors as an “open thread”—whatever was the official post topic, visitor
comments generally went off topic very rapidly. However, even when they
were off topic, many of the comments and much of the dialogue and the
exchange of information and Web links were related in some form to
Howard Dean and his campaign, or more broadly to politics. The Blog for
America comments space developed a community atmosphere as regular
visitors learned to recognize each other. It also became a place where visitors
gave their immediate reactions to the campaign’s events and circumstances.
The campaign’s blog comments grew throughout 2003 to hundreds per
posted topic and to thousands per day. Furthermore, the comment area regu-
larly provided a window into the shared points of view and the debates among
Dean’s supporters, as well as their debates against Dean’s detractors who
would visit. The Blog for America comment space, overall, made the commu-
nications, reactions, and spirit of Dean’s supporters visible and transparent.
In addition to Blog for America, cross-communication among Dean’s
supporters took place through numerous kinds of unofficial DFA groups