(This is a draft of a chapter written for a possible book about experiences of Dean supporters during the 2004 Democratic Presidential Primary)

In 1982, I took a computer consulting position at Bell Laboratories. I spent my working hours writing programs to help optimize the design of telephone circuits. I also spent a lot of time playing speed chess during lunch, and exploring new electronic worlds after hours. Some of the time was spent playing Rogue, an early computer game. More of the time was spent sending emails and Usenet posts.

A computer I had an account on, was connected over the phone lines to a computer twenty miles away. It, in turn, was connected to another computer a little further up the line. By following the links properly, I could get to Arpanet and send emails to people around the world.

In October, 1982, I sent a post to the net.singles Usenet newsgroup. Several people that I had known online but not face-to-face showed up and I experienced my first Meetup.

Ten years later, I became interested in the presidential campaign of Paul Tsongas. I put a Tsongas bumper sticker on the back of my car and wrote my first check to a political campaign.

On New Years Eve, 1998, I went to what I would consider my second ‘Meetup’. Members of an online community had a New Year’s Eve party in Washington DC. I took a train down to Washington and spent New Year’s Eve with a bunch of people that I had met online, had shared interests with, but had never met face-to-face.

I have always been a news junkie of sorts, and when I started working on Wall Street in the late eighties, I had the good fortune of being able to access news wires through various trading systems. Instead of relying on an edited down version of the news that I would find in the local papers, or on the evening newscasts, I could explore the news that was interesting to me and form my own opinions.

The ability to get news via Yahoo! and then later via Google News was wonderful and by early 2003, I was getting most of my news online.

In February, 2003, I felt I should become educated about the different Democratic Presidential candidates. There were a lot of them running and I believed I should educate myself about these candidates. I had heard of Joe Lieberman, he was from my home state, John Kerry, from the next state over and Richard Gephardt who had been speaker of the House for many years. None of the particularly excited me, and I felt that John Kerry was probably the best of them. However, there were a bunch of other people, Gov. Dean from Vermont, Senator Edwards from North Carolina, Senator Graham from Florida. I didn’t really know much about any of them.

I started searching online for information, and I found that I really liked the policies of Howard Dean, socially liberal, fiscally conservative. In my mind he carried the mantel of Paul Tsongas quite well.

Not only was there information from various news sources about Howard Dean, but people were writing in blogs about him. In March, 2002, I started writing online journal entries on LiveJournal. I started using Blogger and Ecademy in August of that year. It was great to read what other ordinary people were saying about Gov. Dean and his campaign.

Through LiveJournal, I discovered a site called Meetup.COM The goal seemed to be to get a bunch of people from a shared locality with a shared interest to meet one another face to face, the way I had met people from the net.singles Usenet group in 1982 or from the online community in 1998. I had signed up to go to LiveJournal Meetups in the fall of 2002. Unfortunately, there weren’t enough LiveJournalers in my immediate area to have a Meetup, and it didn’t seem worth it to travel down to New York City for a LiveJournalers Meetup.

On February 20th, there was an article in one of the weblogs that “Dr. Dean is scheduled to attend the March 5th Meetup in New York! The New York Meetup is the second-largest group after Washington DC, with 92 supporters, so this will be a very exciting opportunity for Dean to see for himself just how strong his netroots are”. It went on to say, “Dean has 1590 supporters signed up, whereas Kerry and Edwards have 499 and 298, respectively (as of this writing). Dean has pledged to try and attend as many Meetups as possible, so it is clear that he understands and appreciates his netroot support”.

By this time, I had already made my first financial contribution to the Dean campaign. My wife and I decided to go to the Meetup. We had no idea what to expect. I think it is useful to keep in mind that most people going to their first Meetup, whether it was in March 2003, or today, have no idea what to expect.

The Meetup was taking place in what sounded like an interesting restaurant so we decided to make dinner reservations an hour ahead of the Meetup. That way we could have a place to sit and something good to eat.

So, we ended up with a great place to sit and a good meal. However, we didn’t end up interacting very much with any of the other folks attending the Meetup. The crowd was overwhelming and they cleared most of the tables from the restaurant so they could fit more people in. Still, the room was packed and there were long lines outside.

I was struck by the twenty-somethings who had gotten inside and were talking on their cellphones to their friends outside. “Yeah, I made it in. I’m standing near the back wall. Where are you?” I was also struck by the same people talking about the importance of balanced budgets. I had always thought balanced budgets appealed to an older crowd.

My wife and I had never been in a crowd being addressed by a Presidential candidate. The energy was overwhelming. Was it because Gov. Dean is a particularly powerful speaker, or was there that sort of energy in a crowd anytime a Presidential candidate addressed a crowd? My wife and I didn’t know at the time, but left deciding that we wanted to be more involved with the Dean campaign.

We read the blogs and signed up for email lists. Through this, we heard of another interesting event, house parties. Although I had given to a presidential campaign once, a decade earlier, the idea of organizing a fundraiser for a presidential campaign never occurred to us. That is, until we read about house parties on a blog or mailing list.

We decided we would have a house party. We contacted David Salie up in Burlington and agreed to host one. We received information about how to host a house party. I talked on a mailing list with other potential house party hosts. Just as we had never hosted a presidential fundraiser before, none of our friends had ever attended one, so we weren’t sure who to invite or how to get a good crowd.

It was around this time that I discovered the Federal Elections Commission listing of donors to former presidential campaigns. I started gathering names from this list, and posted to the mailing list what I was doing and how I was doing it.

Before I knew what had happened, the mailing list was shut down and David Salie was on the phone telling me that I couldn’t have the house party. It turns out that it is against the law to use names off of the FEC listings for fundraising purposes. I protested that I hadn’t actually used the names yet, but had just started gathering them.

No good. The lawyers in Burlington wanted to play things incredibly safe. They didn’t want to risk anything; better to just cancel my house party. So, I sent out notes to everyone whom I had already invited, mostly on the assorted mailing lists that I was on saying that something had come up and I had to cancel the house party.

It was a heartbreaking disappointment; our first chance to really be involved with a presidential campaign, dashed because of a technicality. Nonetheless, I let David know that we still wanted to be involved and let us know when the next set of house parties were being organized and we would help.

Meanwhile, we helped lead Meetups. In May, Joe Trippi wrote in a blog entry that “in 4 1/2 months Dean Meetups members have grown from 432 to over 24,000 and still growing”. We joined various groups, such as a statewide group of Meetup hosts and a national mailing list of Meetup hosts. Another group that I joined was called hack4dean.

Hack4dean was a group of programmers, mostly young guys still in college, interested in coming up with the one great tool to which would revolutionize the way campaigns work. We would develop online portals for interconnected groups tied together with RSS, bit torrent, FOAF, and every other kind of cool tool that could be imagined. It would replace the reliance on Yahoo Groups that had become so common place in the early days of the campaign. They decided to rename the group DeanSpace and to settle on using the open source content management system, Drupal, as their framework.

I set up some test websites using DeanSpace and ended up setting up the Connecticut for Dean website. Connecticut for Dean was not an official organization and a lot of things were done on an ad hoc basis, including the website. However, it was a very successful website and for a period it was getting more traffic than Joe Lieberman’s national campaign website.

In June, we traveled up to Burlington to be with the crowd of five thousand people who had traveled from many different places to celebrate Gov. Dean officially declaring his candidacy. It was part of a grand trip. We started off by dropping my middle daughter off at summer camp. Then, we spent a day with Kim’s brother who lived in Hanover NH. The day of the announcement, we drove from Hanover to Burlington. On the way, we saw many cars with Dean bumperstickers. We felt like we were part of some grand convey. Looking out over the landscape of Vermont, I thought of the famous Ronald Reagan advertisement, Morning in America. It felt like a new morning, full of hope and joy.

It was hot at the announcement. People passed around bottles of water. One man lent a bandana to us to cover Fiona’s head. We saw a few friends from Connecticut. Afterwards, we wandered around Burlington, trying to find the campaign headquarters. The headquarters had moved from downtown to South Burlington, and we finally found someone who could give us directions to the new offices.

We showed up in the afternoon after the announcement. The offices were fairly empty, everyone was either home recuperating or off at one event or another. The names that we knew at that time were Zephyr Teachout and David Salie. Neither of them were around and the volunteer passed us off to Michael Silberman. Michael showed us around the office and we chatted for a little while. Then we headed off back to Connecticut.

During the summer we did everything we could to help with the campaign. There was a large fundraiser for Governor Dean at George Soros’ house. Soros lives a short drive from our house. I have worked for years on Wall Street, and it seemed like a great opportunity to support Governor Dean, visit a very interesting house, and do a little networking as I tried to find my next permanent job. Kate O’Connor took a great picture of us with Governor Dean at the event. When Governor Dean gave his stump speech we pretty much knew it by heart.

As the summer rolled on, Governor Dean came to New York City for a big rally in Bryant Park. I volunteered to help register people as they showed up. I sat at the side of the event and took down people’s names and contact information and entered it into a spreadsheet on my laptop. Kim went with my older daughters up front. Since we were there early, Kim ended up in the front row. Kim and the girls ended up in some of the broadcasts of the event. Afterwards, we went backstage and talked with a few different people from the campaign.

A personal interest of mine is the Association of Internet Researchers. It had become clear over the months that the Internet was having a large effect on the Dean campaign, and that the Dean campaign was having a large effect on the way people used and understood the internet. I proposed to present a paper at their annual conference which was scheduled for October. I set up a survey online. I sent out emails, posted to websites, blogs and bulletin boards, talked in chatrooms, and in every possible venue to encourage people to fill out my survey. Some people asked on the mailing lists who I was, if I could be trusted, what I wanted this information for, etc. Others vouched for me and talked about their interaction with me in various online venues.

Many of the results were unremarkable. The respondents were pretty closely split between male and female. A third of the respondents had attended graduate school, which seemed particularly high, but fit with the stereotype of Dean supporters being highly educated. The income distribution tracked national averages, as did the percentage from different states, with a few exceptions. There were disproportionately high number of respondents from Connecticut, which made sense, since I was from Connecticut and got a lot of people from Connecticut to respond. There were a lot of respondents from Vermont, where the campaign was headquartered, and states like Oregon and Washington had a high percentage of respondents, which I assumed reflected the strong online organizing activities there.

In the survey, people reported that they were online to gather information about Gov. Dean. They also reported being online to organize. Meeting people socially was another important reason people were online. This appeared to be a significant part of what was going on with the campaign.

A quarter of the people said that they had met a lot of new people or developed a lot of new friendships face to face as a result of being online with the Dean campaign. This certainly rung true for Kim and I. Our social life had shifted to being very focused around the Dean campaign. Our social activities were Meetups, house parties, steering committee meetings, and that is where we spent time with our closest friends.

For people in their thirties, this was especially pronounced with forty percent of the respondents talking about having established a lot of new friendships as a result of being online with the Dean campaign. One blog had an interesting parody of the campaign:

“Welcome to Howard Dean's Meetup! The first Wednesday of every month has now become the source of exciting new social opportunities that will open up your lifestyle to everything true romance has to offer!

There are maybe 79,999 people out there just waiting to "meet up" with you. You're hot, you're sexy, and people find it appealing that you're involved and positive about an individual's ability to influence national elections at the grassroots level.” http://tomburka.com/archives/2003_08.php#000230

Yet this parody was not without some basis in truth. The official blog announced, “ Congratulations Are In Order ... for Laura Elaine Katzive and Daniel Lee Ackman, who were married today. According to their wedding announcement, they "met a year ago at a talk given in New York by Howard Dean."

How important was this social aspect, this meeting people face to face at Meetups, and the potential of a meaningful relationship? To me, the most interesting statistic I observed was that the highest correlation to the amount of money donated was not income level, how committed a person was to the campaign, how active they were with mailing lists or blogs. The highest correlation to the amount of money donated was frequency that people attended Meetups. While we cannot say for certain that going to Meetups is what caused people to donate, it is clear that there is a strong relationship between financial giving and meeting people face to face. I am sure that an experienced fundraiser wouldn’t be surprised by this, but it seems to be something that too often gets forgotten when people talk about the Dean campaign.

This is not to say that all was rosy with all the relationships that occurred online and face to face with the Dean campaign. The New York Times Magazine did an article on the Dean campaign that portrayed many of the volunteers in Burlington as college aged boys that couldn’t make it with the girls so threw themselves into computers and politics. Needless to say, the article was not well received by many Dean supporters.

Around September, an email appeared on an international Dean supporters mailing list. One person was threatening to sue another over who should run Meetups, could register domain names with the Dean name in it, and speak to the press.

Having spent a lot of time extinguishing flame wars online, I sent an email to the mailing list suggesting that this sort of stuff didn’t belong on a public mailing list. I suggested that if people needed to work this out they could contact me and I would attempt to mediate the dispute. Contact me, they did! The amount of hatred and bile was astounding. They appealed to anyone in authority they could find, and as a general rule, everyone in Burlington said that for a variety of reasons, they couldn’t be involved. Slowly, they reached a point where they agreed to disagree and as much as possible stay out of each other’s hair.

Other online organizing activities were much more enjoyable. One morning, reading various news, and comics, online, I found the Doonesbury cartoon where Alex was planning a flashmob at the Space Needle. In the cartoon, she was sitting at the computer typing in the instructions. Everyone should gather at the Space Needle in Seattle at 10:25 Saturday morning and hop up and down chanting Howard Dean. They should then disperse. Alex’s mother looked over her shoulder and commented how she just didn’t understand her daughter’s political activities anymore.

I sure understood it. Here was an event to raise Gov. Dean’s visibility, to get people together in face to face community, to have fun. Using tools created by the Dean campaign, I scheduled the exact event Alex had described in the comic strip. I sent emails to anyone I could find in Seattle. I posted to the blog about it. Other people picked up on it. They spread the word. Some people complained that it wasn’t a real flash mob. It was too planned. Others complained that it wasn’t really addressing the issues of the campaign. Some folks for Seattle questioned why some guy from Connecticut was organizing the event, and not the people in Seattle.

To that, I had a quick and easy reply. I made them co-organizers in the system, and handed the ball to them. In the end, around 150 people showed up. Many of them then went on to do other Dean related activities. During the Dean campaign, many people wanted to promote the view of Dean supporters as people that really cared about what was going on around them by contributing to food banks, donating blood, or doing other important civic actions. People brought food for a food bank and went and helped clean up a beach afterwards. The event got national news coverage and was deemed a great success. One person even emailed me a video of the event.

Another key aspect to building successful grassroots organizations is public recognition. For Kim and I, we received public recognition for our activities by being asked to participate in a couple events with Governor Dean.

It proved to be a very interesting week. Tuesday, November 4th, 2003 was our third wedding anniversary. It was also a special day for Kim and I in many different ways. Kim’s mother would have turned 61 on Tuesday. Kim’s mother had died of cancer four years earlier on Kim’s birthday. I never got a chance to meet Kim’s mother, we had only been dating a few weeks when her mother died. A year later, Kim and I got married on her mother’s birthday. Eleven months later, Fiona was born and we baptized on her grandmother’s birthday and her parents wedding anniversary.

Tuesday was also the date that I learned that my aunt had died over the weekend, the day that we received the invitation to see Gov. Dean in New York, and Election Day for local municipal elections. The next day, Kim and I stood behind Governor Dean as he delivered a speech announcing his plans to ask his supporters whether he should accept public financing or not. If he accepted public financing, he would reach an end of his fundraising, since he had already raised about as much as he could and still accept public financing. However, if he declined public financing, that would mean something like $19 million dollars less money he would have available. This amount would need to be made up for by additional fundraising.

I was a strong supporter of him declining public financing, since the fundraising was an important way in which people could feel involved. It wasn’t about the donors who could give two thousand dollars each. It was really about the donors that could give twenty five dollars or fifty dollars; donors who had never been involved in a campaign and had certainly never given before.

After the speech in New York City, we went to the subway to head back to Grand Central Station, and from there back to Connecticut. On the subway, we ran into Governor Dean’s mother who had been at the speech and was taking the subway home. With all of the issues about Kim’s mother, it was great to talk with Governor Dean’s mother and for the campaign to become that much more personal to us. People too often forget that candidates for national office are regular people with families that love them, just like you or I.

The next day, numerous people talked to us about how they had seen Kim on television standing behind Governor Dean.

During these few days, there was this big discussion about how Governor Dean had talked about needing to reach out to people with confederate flags on the back of their pickup trucks. Many people seemed to misinterpret his remarks and I wrote a letter to the New York Times about this. I was pleasantly surprised when they contacted me to tell me that they were publishing my letter.

The bigger issue for Kim and I came up with what was to happen Saturday. Michael Silberman had invited us to go up to Burlington for some big event. He couldn’t say what it was, but talked about how it was related to Governor Dean’s speech in New York City. He did say that it was going to be a small group of people who were specially invited from around the country.

The problem was that Saturday was when my aunt’s funeral was going to be. We looked at schedules; we talked about what was going on. I spoke with people in my family. In the end, we decided to go to a viewing for my aunt on Friday. From there, we would drive to my mother’s house and spend the night with her. In the morning we would drive up to Burlington.

Kim’s car had been acting up. We had taken it to the shop and it was repaired in time for our trip north. Friday, we drove to my cousin’s house in Greenfield, Massachusetts. One of the first things my cousin said when we got there was that she had seen Kim on the news. We talked about the campaign and my letter to the editor. The family viewing was small and quiet. We shared memories of my aunt and talked about how everyone else in the family was doing and about desires of getting the family together.

We then drove to my mother’s house in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The Mohawk Trail is a beautiful road winding from Greenfield to Williamstown. It is especially beautiful on a clear autumn day. However, we were driving in the evening, after the sun had set. Then, it becomes a dark and twisty road which is much more of a chore to drive.

My eldest brother had come up from New York City, and we spent the evening with my mother; having dinner, looking at pictures, and talking about the family.

We got up early Saturday morning to drive from Williamstown to Burlington. The car had been acting okay, but when we stopped to get gas, it had problems getting going again. We briefly worried about if we would make it to Burlington on time. Yet it was a short aberration, and the car was fine for the rest of the trip up.

We arrived in Burlington around ten in the morning. We looked around for Michael Silberman who didn’t seem to be around. I also tried to find Zack Rosen whom I had met through DeanSpace, and by then was working in Burlington. He wasn’t there either. Finally, someone came along and herded us, and everyone else who had gathered in the lobby into a large conference room.

There was getting to be quite a crowd, and they were all from Vermont, with the exception of one or two that were from New York, just across the lake.

This was neither a small group, nor a group of people from all over the country. I wondered, were we in the right place? Had plans changed in someway? Was this a mistake, and should I have gone to my aunt’s funeral?

Michael showed up and directed Kim and I to a different conference room. We had been in the room with the people from Vermont that have been doing such great work and were invited to be in the audience. We went into a smaller room with the other ‘signers’. None of us, I believe, yet knew exactly what was going to go on. There was a PC Tablet there that we could all practice electronically signing on. Each of us signed our names, and finally the whole explanation came out.

We would be signing our Declaration of Independence from the special interest groups that have been destroying American Politics. We got our briefings. Joe Trippi spoke about the importance of each of us speaking in our own voice about why we were involved and why we felt that it was the right thing to do to opt out of public financing.

We then all drove over to University of Vermont at Montpelier for the announcement. We went off into another room where there were more briefings. We did get a chance to speak briefly with Governor Dean. Kim asked him if he would sign the picture that had been taken of us and him at a fundraiser at George Soros’ house. Later, Gov. Dean posed holding Fiona. One of the pictures came out particular well and we printed hundreds of copies of it on card stock which we sent to all of our friends as a holiday card. Inside, we printed, “In this Holiday season, Let us all work together to help Hope, Joy, and Prosperity Triumph over Fear and Oppression. (Fiona with Presidential Candidate Howard Dean)”

The drive home was uneventful. We stopped to visit the Ben and Jerry’s factory. We had lunch with another Dean supporter whom we had talked with a lot online, but never face to face. The car started acting more and more strangely on the way home. We got home okay, but the next day, couldn’t get the car into reverse. It turns out that the transmission was on its final legs, and that trip was the last time the car was ever driven.

If this wasn’t enough, we then received a phone call from ABC Nightly News. They wanted to do a piece on people who had gotten involved with the presidential campaigns, and figured that Kim would be the perfect person to interview. They came to our house, interviewed Kim, filmed her writing a comment on the blog, sending a letter to a voter in Iowa and then serving dinner. It ended up being a short spot on the nightly news that captured the new ideas of Governor Dean’s campaign and tied it down to the life of ordinary people.

Again, we received many phone calls from people that had seen us on television.

When the caucuses in Iowa rolled around, we couldn’t work things out to go to Iowa. We were disappointed by the results, but we headed up to New Hampshire to help with the primary there. We drove around Hanover dropping off literature. We then went to Manchester to do more literature drops on election day, coupled with visibility events, standing on corners chanting slogans for Dean. In the final hours, we did phone banking and then we went to election night party. The results were better than Iowa, but still not what we were hoping for.

As the campaign wound down, Kim and I wondered what would happen for us next. Governor Dean encouraged all his supporters to stay involved and to consider running for local office. Kim decided to run for State Representative. I continued to blog, and ended up receiving press credentials to cover the Democratic National Convention as a blogger.

The long months of the Dean campaign, and then Kim’s campaign have changed us, we believe for the better. We have stronger voices in the political process now. We have close friends around the country that grew out of the campaign. We have hope. We just don’t have any idea what will happen next.