(Originally published in Greater Democracy)

Yesterday evening, several of us who write for the Greater Democracy blog received an email from Elissa Bishop-Becker saying:

“On C-Span now is a live program on the Digital Future--part of a series from the Library of Congress. David Weinberger is one of the panelists and you can email questions.”

The email turned out to be a good illustration of what David was talking about.

For those of you that don’t know David, he’s this slightly goofy guy with a weblog that I met through the Dean campaign. For those of you that do know him, he is a brilliant speaker, a Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Institute for Internet & Society, and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto.

In his comments at the Library of Congress, he spoke about the categorization of information and how the Internet is changing all of that. He spoke about the importance of personal connections, trust, friendship, and the sharing of information.

As I listened to him, a lot of thoughts gelled in my mind.

Over the past couple of weeks, there has been a lot of soul searching about the direction of the Democratic Party. People have gathered in living rooms to talk about what went wrong. Emails have been flying, blogs have been buzzing. Should the party move further to the right? Should Howard Dean become DNC Chair? What is the message of the Democratic Party? Will the Democrats finally come up with a response to the Contract on America?

Here at Greater Democracy, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about ‘The Master Narrative’. What is the Master Narrative of the Democratic Party? We’ve spoken a lot about the age of Post Broadcast politics and the power of thoughts generate at the edges that bubble up. David’s talk tied all of this together for me.

Put simply, the Democratic Party is people that care for one another. They care for one another at the edges, without the need for a centralized authority. You see it in emails and in blog links. You see it in random acts of kindness and people sitting down together and searching for common ground. You see it in the recent discussion in blogs about strengthening the good and ‘Blogger Corps’. It is the message of a young Jewish man wandering around Israel two thousand years ago, and the message of many great religious leaders. It is the moral compass that that has been lost by so many in politics, including those who promote ‘faith based initiatives’. It is about bringing people together in hope and compassion, not about driving them apart in fear and distrust.

Perhaps this post, and subsequent posts can be the beginning of a contract of compassion bubbling up from the edges.