Following are extracted comments I have made over at the Online Social Networks forum. While they are missing the full context, I have edited them so that enough context should be available.

In the “Tools For Online Activism” discussion, I posted this:

Jon, Pete, Thank you for your comments. Let me reply to some of the questions and ideas that have come up by challenging an assumption that I think a lot of people have. Pete asked, “Do you have stats on success rates of candidates with Drupal or blogging type sites versus static sites?”

I don’t. That is because I don’t know of a good metric to measure success. The most popular metric is if the person got elected. However, I believe that is a flawed metric. As an illustration, my wife ran in a district where Republicans outnumber Democrats two to one. A Democrat hadn’t run in nearly ten years and hadn’t won in nearly a hundred years. If we use the metric being elected, my wife was not successful. However, as I noted, I don’t believe that is a valid metric. Perhaps a more valid metric is, did she get more votes than anyone expected. She got approximately 40% of the vote, much better than the 22% Democratic registration, much better than any Democrat in nearing 10 years, and much better than anyone expected.

Yet even this metric is flawed. She got more people involved. She got more people to consider running for office, she got more people talking and thinking seriously about the issues, so even if she had gotten less than 10% of the vote, by these later standards, she was successful.

I think the same could apply to Dean. While he did not win the Iowa caucuses and ultimately the presidency, and for that matter he didn’t do as well as many people had been expecting a few weeks before the caucuses, he vastly outperformed the expectations of a year before and has had a profound effect on the political landscape.

From my experiences, I think Jon is right; candidates are just barely catching on. I think that this again gets to expectations and to a feedback loop. Candidates have expected voters to be, by and large, uninvolved. They expect supporters to send checks and get to the polling places, but don’t expect much more. They certainly don’t expect a dialog. This has started to change during the Dean campaign. People now expect more of a dialog with the candidates, as noted by Pete’s comments about his responses to solicitations from the Dean campaign. I wonder how many people expected a dialog with the Gore campaign in 2000 or the Clinton campaign in 1992.

As voters start expecting more of a dialog, candidates will need to engage in more of a dialog. They will need to find tools to effectively engage in such a dialog. Static websites are very far from promoting a dialog. Websites taking advantage of content management systems and blogs are closer to creating that sort of a dialog.

So, with this, I get to Jon’s question. “What do candidates want?” In the traditional viewpoint, they want to get elected. They want to get more votes than their opponents. They want to be as efficient as possible in raising money and in getting people to vote for them. The problem is that efficiency in gaining voters traditionally has ended up being much more broadcast oriented. It ends up being much more about setting up a page where their message goes out, but there isn’t a dialog.

Even for this, blogging and content management systems are useful. When I set up websites for the Dean campaign, I had communications directors talking about how great it was that they could simply go to the website and add new content. This made the communications directors more efficient.

However, if we want to change the political landscape, we need a dialog. We need transformational leaders who are saying more than ‘Vote for me’. We need leaders who honestly say, “this is what I believe, and this is why I believe it. Let’s talk about what you believe and why you believe it and let’s see if we can work together to come up with even better ways to address the problems our country faces.”

This sort of discussion may not currently be efficient in the short term goals of getting a candidate elected. However, I believe it is the most effective way of working towards the goals that our elected officials should have. I believe that blogging and content management systems, with comments and trackbacks enabled, are an important tool for such discussions, and I do believe that as we start expecting more from our candidates, we will start getting more from them. If we change the expectation of politicians to require a well thought out dialog, candidates will need to make much smarter use of tools like blogs and content management systems and we will have a more vibrant democracy.

As always, my two cents, your mileage may vary.

Over in the “Collective intelligence and an inclusive "We the People"” discussion, I posted:

Tom, I thought your response was right on the money. We do need more deliberation in all aspects of the governing process. I am fascinated by the concept of consensus councils and look forward to learning more about them.

A lot of my focus has been on electoral politics, and I believe that we can make minor changes to the electoral process to make it more deliberative. First and foremost we need to get more people running for office. I believe that campaign finance reform, making it easier for people to run and preferential voting, giving the voters a greater say in the electoral process are two key components of this.

I also speak a little bit about it over in Tools For Online Activism (the post included above).

As one final comment, it seems as if the ideas of tort reform that are being proposed are inherently anti-deliberative. Their goals are to limit the results of deliberations by juries, and as such, I believe they are inherently damaging to democracy.