Internet Use in the Dean Presidential Campaign

Poster

Abstract: How are new social networking technologies such as blogs, meetups and email communication loops being used and deployed in national presidential campaigns? Keri Carpenter's research helps to add to this growing body of research. She conducted a 3 month long ethnographic study of the Howard Dean for President campaign's online organizing group at national headquarters in Burlington, Vermont. The Dean campaign accomplished several things. It raised over $50 million in small amounts from over 300,000 individuals, nearly half of it online. It attracted nearly 640,000 supporters to the campaign in about 12 months time. It deployed social networking tools which allowed supporters to take significant autonomous action, both on and offline on behalf of the campaign. Though the candidate himself didn't win, the technologies such as online fundraising, Meetups and other online social networking tools that allow for autonomous action have been co-opted and extended by the two candidates still in the Presidential race: Senator John Kerry and George W. Bush. The successes and failures of the tools employed during the campaign offer important lessons on how the Internet can be used to organize distributed masses of people to collaborate for active participation around an ideological goal such as a Presidential campaign or issue-centric organizing groups such as Moveon.org or RightMarch.com.

Bio: Keri Carpenter is a Ph.D. student in the Interactive and Collaborative Technologies research group in the Dept. of Informatics in the School of Information and Computer Science. Her dissertation is focused on online political organizing. She worked at the "Howard Dean for President" national headquarters in Burlington, VT from late fall 2003 to the end of the campaign in mid-February 2004. Her previous research interests have included online privacy and information visualization.