(Originally published as a book review on Amazon)

The other day I received my copy of The Power of Many by Christian Crumlish. I don’t recall exactly when I first met Christian online. The earliest emails that I can find have from him are from December 2003. During this time, I was working as a volunteer for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign.

In particular, I was working with DeanSpace, an effort to help many small groups easily set up powerful interconnected websites. A lot has happened since then. DeanSpace has evolved into CivicSpace. Kerry is now the Democratic nominee. My wife is now a candidate for State Representative in Connecticut. Many of us have been using our experiences from the Dean campaign to help other campaigns, and many people are fishing around for a good book to try and understand how the internet is changing politics and all aspects of our lives.

The Power of Many is the book you should read if you want to get a real, on the ground, grassroots perspective of what happened during the Dean campaign and what it means for our country today. Christian has done a great job of speaking with many bloggers and grassroots activists. He explains the actions and technology in a way that many can understand and appreciate.

For people who want to understand what my involvement was like, and the involvement of many others, start with The Power of Many.