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Developing the “Good Citizen”: Digital Artifacts, Peer Networks, and FormalOrganization During the 2003-2004 Howard Dean CampaignDaniel Kreiss a

a Department of Communication, Stanford University,

Online Publication Date: 01 July 2009

To cite this Article Kreiss, Daniel(2009)'Developing the “Good Citizen”: Digital Artifacts, Peer Networks, and Formal OrganizationDuring the 2003-2004 Howard Dean Campaign',Journal of Information Technology & Politics,6:3,281 — 297To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/19331680903035441URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19331680903035441

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Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 6:281–297, 2009Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1933-1681 print/1933-169X onlineDOI: 10.1080/19331680903035441

281

WITP Developing the “Good Citizen”: Digital Artifacts, Peer Networks, and Formal Organization During

the 2003–2004 Howard Dean CampaignKreiss Daniel Kreiss

ABSTRACT. The 2003-2004 Howard Dean campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination isoften heralded as the prototypical example of peer-driven politics. Building from an emerging body ofliterature on the Dean campaign, through interviews with key staffers and a survey of public docu-ments I complicate this view by analyzing the interplay between the formal campaign organization,digital artifacts, and citizen networks. I demonstrate that from the earliest days of the primary the cam-paign developed strategies and innovative organizational practices for convening and harnessing citi-zen networks. Drawing on analytical perspectives that combine Foucauldian “governmentality” andactor-network theory, I argue that this was facilitated through the deployment of a set of artifacts thatrealized and leveraged “networked sociality.” Finally, I argue that while the Internet Division of thecampaign adopted many “postbureaucratic” practices, it was embedded in a formal organizationalhierarchy that shaped its technical work.

KEYWORDS. Actor-network theory, campaigns, democracy, Internet, open source politics,organizations, peer production

On a warm August night in 2003, GovernorHoward Dean, frontrunner for the Democraticpresidential nomination, bounded up on stage inNew York City’s Bryant Park carrying a redinflatable baseball bat. In the midst of a drive toraise $1 million before the governor’s appear-ance, a comment on Blog For America sug-gested that, in recognition of their achievement,Dean carry the bat as a reference to the onlinegraphic that showed donors their progresstowards the goal. For Dean’s Campaign ManagerJoe Trippi (2005, p. 8) this was a canonicalmoment, symbolic of the fact that volunteersand small donors had ownership over the

campaign through the use of new onlinenetworked communications tools. Many aca-demic accounts echo Trippi in emphasizing thepeer-to-peer processes that appeared to be driv-ing the Dean campaign. For example, HenryJenkins (2006, p. 208) argues that “peer-to-peerrather than one-to-many communication” char-acterized the campaign. Lawrence Lessig(2003) argues that the Dean effort demonstrated“yet another context into which open sourceideals can usefully migrate,” while ManuelCastells (2007, p. 251) describes the campaignas an example of “autonomous forms of politi-cal organizing.”

Daniel Kreiss is a Ph.D. candidate in Stanford University’s Department of Communication.The author thanks the anonymous readers of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics; Fred

Turner, Nicholas Anstead, and David Karpf for detailed readings of earlier drafts of this article; and isindebted to the insightful comments of the audience at the Politics: Web 2.0 conference hosted at Universityof London, Royal Holloway, April 17–18, 2008.

Address correspondence to: Daniel Kreiss, Department of Communication, Building 120, 450 SerraMall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2050 (E-mail: [email protected]).

Downloaded By: [Kreiss, Daniel] At: 22:22 27 July 2009

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These characterizations in turn reflect para-digmatic theoretical perspectives that proceedfrom and rework well-established theories ofcollective action (Olson, 1965; Tarrow, 1998)in positing how new communications technolo-gies are fundamentally reshaping the problemof “free riding” and the necessity of formal,hierarchical organizations. Bimber, Flanagin, andStohl (2005, p. 381) argue that “self-organizing”increasingly characterizes collective action in aworld with dramatically falling informationcosts and routine “private-to-public boundaryspanning.” Meanwhile, similar to other formu-lations of networks as a distinct organizationalform (Podolny & Page, 1998; Powell, 1990),Benkler’s (2002, 2006) influential theory of“commons-based peer production” describesvoluntary, leveled, and communicatively recip-rocal networked collaboration that is distinctfrom both the firm (Coase, 1937; Williamson,1975) and the market. This new form of large-scale collective action is posited to have greatimport for political practice, especially withregard to the public sphere, and is made possi-ble by “decentralized information gathering andexchange” (Benkler, 2002, p. 375).

While these analytical approaches do notentirely overlook the existence and persistenceof formal, hierarchical organizations in aworld suffused by networks, these structuresare generally understudied or assumed to betaking on features of networks, given shifts inthe information environment. For example,Benkler (2002, p. 391) acknowledges the roleof formal organizations in convening and“harnessing” peer production, but there is ageneral lack of attention to the ways thisoccurs and the interactions between organiza-tional forms. Indeed, much work on commons-based peer production proceeds as if networksare autonomous organizational entities. Mean-while, a body of work on “postbureaucraticorganizations” (Heckscher & Donnellon, 1994)posits that some formal organizations increas-ingly resemble networks. In the politicaldomain, Bimber (2003) argues that postbu-reaucracy is characterized by a flexiblestructure, an acute orientation to changes inthe external environment, and a decline in for-mal roles as contracts between individuals,

collaborations, and partnerships take placeoutside of the formal organization.

This study turns to the Howard Dean cam-paign for the Democratic presidential nomina-tion to explore the relationship between digitalartifacts, formal campaign organizations, andpeer networks. Despite a rich body of theory oncollective action, empirical research on theorganizational structures and technical prac-tices of electoral campaigns is surprisingly lim-ited. Students of politics generally have littlepurchase on the processes by which artifacts areadopted by campaign organizations, and manystudies detailing how candidates use new media(Bimber & Davis, 2003; Howard, 2006) wereconducted prior to the emergence of the social-technical practices that broadly characterize“Web 2.0 environments” (Chadwick, 2009, p. 34).Meanwhile, an emerging body of work findsthe Dean effort to be a rich research site, giventhe campaign’s unprecedented adoption of net-work theory and Internet applications (Foot &Schneider, 2006; Wiese & Gronbeck, 2005).These studies undermine many accounts of thecampaign as a uniquely participatory, emer-gent, and decentralized phenomenon. Forexample, Hindman (2005, 2008) demonstrateshow the campaign used the Internet to revolu-tionize the “backend” of institutionalized politi-cal practice: fundraising, volunteer recruitment,and voter mobilization. In addition, a body ofwork documents the limits of interactivity, lackof substantive forms of citizen participation onthe campaign (Haas, 2006; Stromer-Galley &Baker, 2006), and ongoing importance offormal organizations and elite professionals incollaborative, participatory campaign practices(Hindman, 2007, p. 195).

In turn, a number of scholars have pointed tothe organizational complexity of the campaign.Jett and Välikangas (2004, p. 3) characterizethe campaign as a form of “open source orga-nizing” that is “a network in many respects, butit also exhibits the fluidity of a market and thegoal-oriented discipline of a formal organiza-tion.” Taking a more meso-level view, in ananalysis that includes the Dean campaign,Chadwick (2007, p. 14) draws from socialmovement theory to argue that “digital networkrepertoires” facilitate the creation of “hybrid”


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organizational forms that use “mobilizationstrategies typically associated with parties,interest groups, and new social movements.”Each of these perspectives makes a valuablecontribution in providing an analytical frame-work for thinking about networked collectiveaction in a way that avoids overemphasizingpeer-to-peer processes while paying closeattention to the complexities of organizationalforms and practices.

This article extends this empirical work onthe Dean campaign and contributes to theoreti-cal perspectives on networked politics byclosely detailing the campaign’s organiza-tional and technical practices. Through open-ended interviews with key staffers and a surveyof public documents, including archived Webpages, professional press articles, blog posts,and first-hand accounts, especially Trippi’s(2004) autobiographical The Revolution WillNot Be Televised and Streeter and Teachout’s(2007) edited collection Mousepads, ShoeLeather, and Hope, this article proceeds inthree parts.1 I begin by discussing the strategybehind the campaign’s uptake of networkedcommunications tools and argue that staffersand consultants developed a novel set of prac-tices that centered and thus leveraged the peer-to-peer networks that emerged independentlyof the campaign early in the primaries. Draw-ing from analytical perspectives that coupleFoucauldian governmentality and actor-network theory, I next turn to analysis of theinnovative networked artifacts that realizedand structured digitally “networked sociality”(Wittel, 2001) to further backend campaignpractices, detailing how campaign staffers’version of the “good citizen” (Schudson,1998) was technically and discursively pro-duced. I then show how these practices wereshaped by, and in turn influenced, formalorganizational processes, especially as peernetworks served as resources for staffersand advisors in internal organizational con-flicts. In the process I argue that the case of theDean campaign suggests that collaborativepeer networks are structured by the demandsof an inter-organizational environment,political institutions, and intra-organizationalprocesses.

CENTERING THE DEAN CAMPAIGN

By the late summer of 2003, Howard Dean,former governor of Vermont, was at the top ofthe polls for the Democratic presidential nomi-nation despite entering the race as an outsidercandidate. To many close observers of politics,Dean’s meteoric rise was fueled by new Inter-net applications including blogs and Meetup—aWeb site that facilitates offline gatherings—that enabled citizens to self-organize. Trippi(2003) even argued that the role of the formalcampaign organization was simply to “providethe tools and some of the direction . . . and getthe hell out of the way when a big wave isbuilding on its own.” While this is a romanti-cally democratic account, in reality these citi-zen networks were convened and harnessed forbackend labor through an innovative set oforganizational and technical practices honed bythe formal campaign organization. As JeromeArmstrong (2006), an influential progressiveblogger who served as an advisor and consult-ant for the campaign, described their strategy:

Much has been said about the decentral-ized and emergent quality of the HowardDean campaign, and many people,actions, and efforts did emerge with thevolition to join in word and deed; but fromthe very beginning, from May and June of2002, there was tactic encouragement ofthe decentralized campaign, from the verycenter.

Understanding how this strategy developedis contingent upon the detailed consideration ofthe socio-technical context within which the2003–2004 primaries occurred. Political blogs,while not new, had growing user-bases andvisibility by 2002, the time when potential can-didates were making initial hires to staff theirnascent campaign organizations. Blogs servedas sites for Democratic Party activists to discusspolitics and candidates independently of theformal campaigns, many of which lacked dedi-cated Web sites for presidential runs until thefall and winter of 2002, and even then weretechnically unsophisticated.2 The majority ofthese online progressive party activists and



bloggers were interested in and active promot-ers of Dean’s candidacy, becoming engagedwell before he formally announced his intentionto run for the nomination. This was, in part, aresult of Dean’s antiwar stance, which appealedto the base of the party.

Not only did Dean’s independent online sup-port outstrip that of the other candidates early inthe primary cycle, it also proved highly conse-quential with respect to identifying and takingadvantage of opportunities that were later lever-aged by the campaign. During the summer of2002, a network of blogs including MyDD, runby Jerome Armstrong, and the volunteer-createdand administered Howard Dean 2004 (latercalled Dean Nation) not only provided activistswith outlets to become engaged in Dean’scandidacy in the absence of a fully functionalformal campaign organization, these effortsalso served as Dean’s de facto Internet pres-ence. For example, when William Finkel ofMeetup was contacting all the Democratic pri-mary candidates in early 2003 to offer them for-malized use of the online application, he wroteto the volunteer administrator of Howard Dean2004, Aziz Poonawalla. After featuring a linkon the site, Howard Dean 2004 drove the initialuse and growth of Meetup among the cam-paign’s supporters. Armstrong (2007, pg. 47)eventually put Finkel in touch with Trippi andconvinced the campaign to adopt it as an orga-nizing tool, making Dean the only candidatethat responded to the firm’s initial inquiry.Meetup went on to become the organizationalcore of Dean’s online effort and a significantfundraising vehicle. Just as importantly, it wasa symbol of the campaign’s technological profi-ciency for the political press. By the summer of2003, Meetup supporters even served as a trans-parent and verifiable metric for political jour-nalists to judge the strength of primarycampaigns.

These blogs were also hubs of online activitythat the campaign strove to incorporate to gar-ner financial and human resources. After Trippiformally joined the candidate as CampaignManager in January 2003, he sought to providecoordinated, routine direction to these volunteerefforts by convening them through the net-worked technologies of the formal campaign

organization. Armstrong recalls a meeting inearly 2003 with his consulting partner MarkosMoulitsas Zúnigu, founder of the blog Daily Kos,and Trippi, during which they crafted the broadcontours of the campaign’s Internet strategy:

The three of us discussed what webelieved could be brought inside the cam-paign from the ongoing decentralizedeffort—the gist of “the revolution” beingto launch an official national campaignblog, where the online community, fund-raising, and organizing efforts could becentralized. . . . (Armstrong, 2007, p. 45)

This strategy was implemented through thecampaign’s Internet Division, which craftednovel organizational practices and deployednetworked artifacts including blogs and Meetupto bring extant and new networks inside itssphere of operations and thus provide themwith direction. As such, the campaign workedtoward creating and fostering a geographicallydistributed community of bloggers, supporters,volunteers, and funders that congregated at theWeb site and blog and monitored the activitiesthere. The aim was to ensure that supporterscould be routinely and quickly mobilized toperform the fundraising and organizing tasksthat needed to be accomplished, often to attractpress coverage.

To implement this strategy, the campaignrecruited and hired a number of staffers for theInternet Division who had technical expertisefrom outside the political field and often incommercial settings. Trippi (2004, p. 54) him-self exemplified the way some of these staffersbridged professional fields: he possessed nearlythree decades of experience running politicalcampaigns, in addition to having worked for anumber of Internet startups during the late1990s that he referred to as “a few brash youngcompanies,” including Wave Systems, SmartPaper Networks, and Progeny Linux Systems.Trippi argued that this work shaped his under-standing of how technology could be used inelectoral politics. He was joined on thecampaign by a number of individuals who pos-sessed less extensive political experience, butwho shared knowledge and skills relating to the


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Internet that were then applied to a politicalcampaign. These resources were essentiallycarried across contexts, a phenomenon that anumber of scholars have noted with respect tosocial movement organizations (Gusfield,1981; Staggenborg, 1988; Taylor, 1989).

On the one hand, this was reflected organiza-tionally. For example, Bobby Clark (2007, p. 77),an entrepreneur who worked on technologystartups in Colorado and California, was thefirst Web strategist for the campaign andrecruited his former colleague, Dave Kochbeck,to serve as the campaign’s first informationtechnology (IT) director. Clark describes howKochbeck’s commercial technology experi-ence helped him understand the challenges of acampaign, as he “served as our campaign’schief technology officer (CTO), as he had forour San Francisco startup. . . .” (Clark, 2007,p. 77). On the other, these professional andtechnical skills helped shape the practices of thecampaign. Clay Johnson, a freelance technol-ogy consultant and lead programmer for Dean,and Nicco Mele, the Webmaster for the cam-paign who had extensive experience in similarpositions with various progressive organiza-tions, were both central figures who created thecampaign’s technical infrastructure. Stafferswithin the Internet Division also includedMatthew Gross and Joe Rospars, both of whomwere bloggers prior to joining the campaign andwere instrumental in the launch and developmentof Blog for America, the first blog hosted by apresidential campaign. In characterizing theirapproach to using the Internet in electoral poli-tics, Zack Rosen (personal communication, April7, 2008), a volunteer developer with Hack4Deanwho was hired as a staff member in late fall 2003,described the Internet Division in new economyterms as “feeling like a creative, creative projectrather than a managed organization.”

Professional backgrounds alone do notexplain the organizational and technical inno-vations of the Dean campaign, because anumber of candidates had Internet staff mem-bers that similarly bridged fields.3 Many staff-ers also attribute these innovations to awillingness to experiment born of the wide-spread acknowledgment during the early stagesof the primaries that a fresh approach was

necessary to be competitive. This was all themore important given the candidate’s limitedresources and name recognition, his estrange-ment from the Democratic Party’s establish-ment, and the press’s relative dismissal of thecandidacy. This helped foster what ZephyrTeachout (personal communication, July 10,2008), Dean’s Director of Online Organizing,characterizes as innovation born of necessity,and this was supported by Trippi’s considerableresources as Campaign Manager. For stafferswithin the Internet Division, Web-based toolsincluding blogs and Meetup maximized theresources of the campaign by leveraging thework of thousands of supporters and volunteers. Aconversation in early 2003 between Armstrong(2006) and Trippi makes this clear: “You don’tunderstand,” said Joe. “This campaign has nomoney. Look, John Kerry has a list of 20,000hardcore supporters, nationwide, OK. . . . Howare you guys going to get Howard Dean enoughpeople to go head to head with John Kerry? Canthe Net do this?”

As such, these concerns drove much of thecampaign’s uptake of networked tools. TheInternet not only provided resources, but wasalso the basis for staged, high-profile eventsthat attracted press coverage, as journalists mar-veled at Dean’s success in raising money insmall online increments, part of the campaign’scommunications strategy detailed below (seeArmstrong, 2007, p. 50). Through online fund-raising and Meetup, Dean was not only able tokeep pace with Kerry’s fundraising and volun-teer operation, but by summer of 2003 actuallyexceeded him. At the same time, online fund-raising, combined with the continued growth ofDean Meetups, served to legitimate the cam-paign for other actors in the field, especiallyjournalists, but by extension elected officialsand the public; this was reflected in Dean’shigh-profile endorsements and rise in the pollsthroughout 2003.

All of this was premised on the developmentand deployment of networked artifacts thatwere themselves the result of novel organiza-tional practices. Similar to the commercialfirms that Neff and Stark (2003) describe as“permanently beta” with their flexible organi-zational structures and continuously developed



and in-process products, the campaign’s Inter-net Division turned to the Web to recruit thevolunteers and consultants who helped developmany of the networked artifacts that thecampaign ultimately deployed. As Teachout(2007, p. 68) describes, when the Internet Divi-sion needed a new organizing tool they wouldoften “put up a request for help on the blog.” Atother times technical projects that originated inthe supporter community were incorporatedinto the campaign. For example, the volunteergroup Hack4Dean, a distributed network ofover 100 programmers, developed the Webapplication DeanSpace, a toolkit built on theopen source platform Drupal that enabled sup-porters to set up their own Web sites and planevents for Dean. Mele (personal communica-tion, July 29, 2008), Dean’s Webmaster, arguesthat these practices of utilizing a volunteer basetied together the political culture of the grass-roots and “the open source, collaborativeworld.” That said, they were also compelled bythe limited resources of the campaign. Given alack of programmers, staffers were used togoing online and “asking for help when weneeded it” (Teachout, 2007, p. 68). There wasalso the expediency in some cases of reachingbeyond the formal boundaries of the organiza-tion given the “political maneuvering” neces-sary to have technical needs addressed in anenvironment with limited resources and com-peting staff priorities (Nuxoll, 2007, p. 197;Teachout, 2007, p. 66),

As is clear, many of the organizational prac-tices of the Internet Division resemble the fea-tures of postbureaucratic organizations detailedby Bimber (2003). Indeed, the postbureaucraticwork style of the Internet staffers is whatenabled the campaign to center the labor of peernetworks. Staffers responsible for Internetfundraising and Meetup were constantly captur-ing and monitoring fundraising data and volun-teer numbers, tailoring their work to respond tothe labor of peer networks and changes in thecampaign environment. Staffers were also, attimes, attentive to comments on Blog for Americaand used their own posts to rebut charges fromrivals, respond to professional press articles,disseminate the campaign’s messages, andissue calls to action. In essence, they convened

their own 24-hour alternative messaging ser-vice that was highly responsive to the campaignenvironment. In turn, many staffers cited howtheir positions on the Internet team were morefluid than those of other divisions, as they grap-pled with shared technical challenges, workedon collaborative projects, and interacted with thepeer networks around the formal organization.

This does not mean that there was no special-ization or formal processes within the InternetDivision. Mele (personal communication, July 29,2008) had deep knowledge of the Internet’s usein political and advocacy campaigns anddescribes a sentiment echoed by many otherstaffers: “In the beginning we were very reac-tive, we were trying to figure this out on thefly.” Over time, he argues, the campaign devel-oped more stable goals and routines relating toe-mail list growth and organizing, while staffersincreasingly took on more defined tasks. ZackRosen (personal communication, April 7, 2008)describes how routines coexisted with thedemands of networks:

There definitely was some formal man-agement and formal work processes thathad to be done to run a national organiza-tion. The Web site needs to be updated,you’d be writing, blogging, there’s news-letters and fundraising. All the necessitiesof a national campaign organization hadto be filled. But in addition to that was abunch of work that had to do with directlyleveraging the work that was done outsideof the national campaign organization bythe volunteers independently.

These tasks were continually negotiated inpractice, and through interactions with the otherdivisions of the campaign.

The practices of the Internet Divisionresulted in an extraordinary array of Web-basedtools that were not only innovations in the polit-ical field, but also stood alongside some of theearliest prototypes of what we now refer to as“social networking” sites. To analyze theseshifts in political practice, I draw from theoriststhat couple Foucauldian “governmentality”and actor-network theory. I argue that theseartifacts realized certain citizenship practices


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while harnessing the work of peer networkstowards the campaign’s strategic ends.

NETWORKED ARTIFACTS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF CITIZENSHIP

The Dean campaign was the first electoraleffort to widely deploy new media platforms torealize, convene, and make visible social net-works in order to channel their collaborativelabor towards organizational goals. As such,digital artifacts were innovative means of con-necting citizens to political institutions andstructuring their practices. This occurredthrough the leveraging of digitally “networkedsociality,” which Wittel (2001, p. 51) describesas consisting of “fleeting and transient, yet iter-ative social relations; of ephemeral but intenseencounters. . . . In network sociality the socialbond at work is not bureaucratic but informa-tional; it is created on a project-by-projectbasis, by the movement of ideas. . . .” WhileWittel is concerned more broadly with thesocial practice of network-making, for the pur-poses here I refer only to the collaborativesocial mode that characterized the digital peernetworks clustered around and convened by theDean campaign. In predating both the coiningof the phrase Web 2.0 (Scholz, 2008) and thecommercial applications including Facebookand YouTube that are now synonymous withsocial networking, the campaign was a proto-type for the socio-technical practices that, asChadwick (2009, p. 16) argues, constitute a turnfrom the “deliberative assumption.”

While the literature on peer production andnew forms of online collective action generallylacks a theoretical account of the relationshipbetween formal organizations, peer networks,and mediating artifacts, science and technologystudies offers a series of conceptual tools foranalyzing the ways power is exercised throughand structures networks. In recent years a num-ber of scholars have productively combinedactor-network theory with Foucauldian “gov-ernmentality” approaches to theorize relationsof power in socio-technical practice. For Fou-cault, “governmentality,” or “the conduct ofconduct,” “refers to all endeavors to shape,

guide, and direct the conduct of others … and italso embraces the ways in which one might beurged and educated to bridle one’s passions, tocontrol one’s instincts, to govern oneself”(Rose, 1999, p. 3). As such, governmentalitydoes not explicitly relate to the state andextends beyond overtly controlling and con-straining forms of domination, detailing themultiple ways power is productive of actions,guiding and shaping them from various sites(Burchell, 1996, p. 19). Extending Foucault, the-orists have used actor-network theory (Callon,1986; Latour, 2005; Latour & Weibel, 2005;Law & Hassard, 1999) to analyze the role ofartifacts in structuring particular practices ofcitizenship. For example, Barry (2000, 2001)argues for research into the politics of interac-tivity, suggesting that through engagement withartifacts and technical regimes, we cede agencyto tools that are productive of actions in struc-tured ways (see also Andrejevic, 2004;Stromer-Galley, 2004). Of particular interestare the ways technical devices are embedded inassemblages that facilitate what Latour (1987)refers to as “action at a distance.” Barry,Osborne, and Rose (1996, p. 12) for instancedescribe how artifacts deployed at local siteshelp enroll citizens in networks that have statepower as their effect.

The work of these theorists provides a lensfor analyzing the artifacts that mediatedbetween the Dean campaign and the peer net-works that predated and were constituted by it.As noted above, the Internet Division activelysought to develop and implement online appli-cations that would maximize the campaign’sresources, given the uphill nature of Dean’s bidfor the nomination. To that end the InternetDivision of the campaign used technicallyskilled volunteer labor along with paid consult-ants to develop a host of applications for thecampaign that were not only innovations in thepolitical field but were both inspired by andstood alongside early commercial social net-working Web sites. For example, DeanLinkwas a social networking Web site modeled afterFriendster (Teachout, 2007, p. 69), and Genera-tion Dean was a virtual community for youngsupporters (Michel, 2007, p. 155). GetLocal,developed with the help of Zach Exley, then the



Organizing Director of MoveOn.org, “allowedpeople to offer political events to those whowanted to attend, and turned the candidate Website into a place where people could find eachother. . . .” (Teachout, 2007, p. 65). This toolsupplemented, but did not replace, Meetup, andprovided greater functionality for supporters.Finally, TeamRaiser was a Web-based fund-raising application developed for nonprofits bythe firm Convio, which the campaign modifiedto enable volunteers to set fundraising goals onpersonalized Web pages (Larry Biddle, per-sonal communication, October 20, 2008).

While these social networking technologiesafforded supporters the opportunity to digitallygather around the campaign and form online,and even in-person, social relationships basedon their political interests, identity, and geo-graphic location, the successful channeling ofthis networked sociality towards the ends of thecampaign entailed indirect forms of structuringcitizen participation given that these peer net-works were outside the boundaries of the for-mal organization. This involved technicallyproducing certain types of citizenship practicesalong with legitimating select forms of partici-pation through the hosting and design of thesesocial spaces, messaging through e-mail and theblog, and, at times, direct staff contact. Forexample, much of the design and functionalityof the Dean For America Web site reflected thecampaign’s priorities by steering users towardscontribution pages and offering interactivityonly in select domains: users had numerousopportunities to make a donation to the cam-paign but could not contribute to a policy plat-form (Haas, 2006). Other applications wereexplicitly designed to leverage off- and onlinesocial relationships for the ends of the cam-paign. The TeamRaiser pages, which providedsupporters with the opportunity to “create theirown content on personal pages within the Website—most often telling friends and family whythey supported Howard Dean and asking themto do the same,” were directed towards fund-raising and were estimated to have helped raise“more than $1 million for the campaign”(Clark, 2007, p. 84). Meanwhile, DeanSpaceenabled supporters to create their own affinity-and identity-based group blogs and forums for

Dean, which were then networked through syn-dication technologies that allowed the sharingof content (Koenig, 2007, p. 207; Lebkowsky,2005, p. 6), including that produced by the offi-cial organization.

Dean staffers within the formal organizationin turn were acutely involved in the work ofthese networks. For example, there was aNational Meetup Coordinator within the cam-paign’s field operations who was responsiblefor working with these groups. Michael Silber-man (personal communication, July 28, 2008)describes some of the challenges he faced inthis role, as volunteers

. . . wanted to help elect Howard Deanpresident. Their goal was to do whateverwe said was most useful. On the otherhand, we had to be really careful of notbeing too much command and controlbecause they were all volunteers, wedidn’t know what worked in every com-munity. . . . Even though a lot of thecampaign was described as self-orga-nized, people want to check in with thecampaign and have a direct line to thecampaign. . . .

This direct line consisted not only of best prac-tices for the volunteers who were new to poli-tics, but also detailed agendas for the volunteerhosts of Meetups that clearly conveyed thepriorities of the campaign (Silberman, 2007,p. 114; see the Appendix). In many respects,the Meetup program resembled traditional fieldoperations, but with a greater reliance on volun-teer leaders to self-identify and play a staffers’role in their own community, all of which wasfacilitated by an Internet application thatenabled supporters to quickly and easily findtheir geographically proximate peers.

The socio-technical practices that leveragednetworked sociality occurred in conjunctionwith the narrowcasting communication anddata management practices that were institu-tionalized in the field and that Howard (2006)argues realizes forms of “managed citizenship.”This was clear in that while the campaigndeployed many new social networking applica-tions, e-mail remained the primary vehicle


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through which the Field, Internet, and Financedivisions delivered messages to supporters. AsKelly Nuxoll (personal communication,November 19, 2008), the E-mail Director forthe campaign, argues: “The campaign used e-mail as a broadcast mechanism rather than as atwo-way mechanism” in urging citizens toattend fundraising and political events anddonate money online. This strategy had its rootsin the practices of MoveOn, which created the“industry standard” format of short text blockswith embedded links to donation or actionpages (Biddle, 2007, p. 172). Indeed, Teachout(2007, p. 64) describes how the visit of ZackExley and Eli Pariser of MoveOn to Deanheadquarters in April 2003 revolutionized thework of the Internet Division: “That visit,more than any other single day, transformedthe way we thought about much of the Internetcampaign. In that day we moved from chaoticcreativity to creativity driven by the need fore-mail list growth.” Coupled with the gather-ing of addresses and use of e-mail was thedevelopment of analytics that tracked not onlythe most successful appeals (so that messagescould be tailored) but also supporter informa-tion across the range of Dean social network-ing applications. As Larry Biddle (personalcommunication, October 20, 2008), the Direc-tor for Direct Mail, Telemarketing in theFinance Division, described it, he worked tomake sure that the campaign digitally capturedwhat individuals were doing for Dean, includ-ing hosting parties and attending events, sothe campaign could “get the most active peo-ple and have them telemarketed” to make acontribution.

As is clear, how these artifacts weredeployed was a social decision and not atechnical necessity. The tactics to “crowd- oropen-source organizational processes” (ZackRosen, personal communication, April 7, 2008)at the backend of operations came in lieu ofmore substantive involvement in the campaign,for example at the level of policy, strategy, orthe allocation of resources. The policy platformof the candidate was the purview of the cam-paign’s formal advisors. Outside of an onlinevote that the campaign hosted about whether toparticipate in the public financing system, there

are no other examples of the candidate recon-sidering or taking a new public position on amatter of policy or strategy as a result of citizeninput. In a largely complementary article inWired, Gary Wolf (2004) noted this explicitly:“But since none of the grassroots groups areofficially tied to the campaign, there is no guar-antee of influence over policy. Dean is free toignore the political wishes of any of thesegroups, and he often does.” Even the candi-date’s Internet policy was closed to publicdebate, crafted in part by the campaign’s “NetAdvisory Net,” a group of leading technologistsand scholars that included Joichi Ito, DavidWeinberger, Howard Rheingold, and LawrenceLessig. The limited nature of networked partici-pation is also clear in the public criticism, airedafter Dean’s losses in the early primaries, of thecampaign’s decision to spend the bulk of itsresources on television advertisements.4

In sum, networked artifacts were productiveof certain types of citizenship practices, asthey convened and leveraged networked soci-ality towards the strategic ends of the cam-paign. These organizational and technologicalinnovations centered on the creation of a geo-graphically dispersed and stable pool of sup-porters who could consistently be called uponto perform the fundraising and organizingneeded by the campaign. As the social affor-dances of these artifacts implies, this stabilitywas furthered by the range of emotionalattachments and relationships that individualsdeveloped through their engagement with eachother and the campaign, not unlike Web 2.0business models that commodify social labor(Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005; Terranova,2004), although with the shared political endof getting Dean elected. In this sense, whilethese supporters were outside of the formalorganization’s boundaries, their work wasstructured through artifactual practices. At thesame time, these artifacts extended the reachof citizens, offering them powerful new toolsto organize their peers and support the candi-date. While this addresses the relationshipbetween the formal organization and peernetworks, the next section details how thesenew media practices were shaped by internalorganizational processes.



THE DEAN CAMPAIGN ORGANIZATION

Given that the focus of attention among thepress and scholars was on the Dean campaign’sonline effort, many accounts have overlookedthe ways in which the Internet Division of thecampaign was embedded within a formal orga-nization. This in turn has led to characteriza-tions of the campaign that elide its formalstructure, decision-making hierarchy, special-ized divisions, and defined staff positions. Insum, in many respects it had an institutionalizedorganizational form that was broadly recogniz-able to professionals in the field. A detailedlook at the structure of the campaign organiza-tion and its internal dynamics suggests thatflexibility, a sensitivity to the external environ-ment, and the decline of formal staff roles—typical postbureaucratic practices—were notuniformly the features of the Dean campaignorganization, nor was it a radically decentral-ized and leveled form of political organization.Open-ended interviews with key staffers pro-vide a richly detailed look at the Dean cam-paign organization and suggest how strategyand resource conflicts within its boundarieshelped shape what peer networks were calledupon to do, as much as the demands of a com-petitive electoral environment and the institu-tionalized practices of the political field.

While it was less publicly visible than theInternet Division (part of the campaign’s pressstrategy detailed below), the Dean campaignhad a formal organizational structure that wasresponsible for its strategic planning and policypositions, as well as carrying out routine, day-to-day tasks, including coordinating field oper-ations, managing communications, and per-forming the majority of its fundraising (seeFigure 1). The individuals in these positions inturn generally had professional backgroundsthat differed from the staffers of the InternetDivision. Many of the Deputy Campaign Man-agers and Directors of the Field, Political,Finance, and Communications divisions wereeither long-time Dean aides or seasoned politi-cal staffers with extensive work experience inother campaigns, the Clinton administration, or

party organizations. Meanwhile, the consultingfirms hired by the campaign were well estab-lished in the political field. For example, PaulMaslin, Dean’s Pollster and Senior Advisor, is apartner in Fairbank, Maslin, Maulin & Associates,a highly regarded firm whose presidential cli-ents included Gore, Dukakis, Hart, Mondale,and Carter.

These campaign divisions and specializedstaff roles reflect the institutional context andorganizational environment in which the cam-paign was embedded. Thus, it is only in light ofan academic literature that emphasizes peer-driven political processes that scholars shouldbe surprised by the formal Dean campaignorganization. The Dean campaign had tobecome credible to other actors in the field,especially professional journalists and partyleaders, by adopting a legitimate organizationalform. At the same time the campaign needed todevelop structures to accomplish routine tasks,including reporting to the Federal ElectionCommission, dealing with journalists lookingfor easily reachable and authoritative campaignspokespersons, coordinating volunteers andstaffers in multiple states, meeting with influen-tial citizen groups, and preparing the candi-date’s schedule. In sum, while the formalorganization leveraged collaborative labor forthe backend tasks detailed above, there is littleevidence that these peer networks could havecommanded the resources necessary to dealwith what required routine coordination.

In turn, staffers outside the Internet Divisionlargely used new media in ways that “ampli-fied” (Agre, 2002) the institutionalizedpractices of their respective domains. This wasapparent in the Finance Division, which was thefirst to be staffed on the campaign and whichgrew to encompass over two dozen staffersunder the direction of National Finance Direc-tor Stephanie Schriock, a veteran who joinedDean after a three-year stint at the DemocraticSenatorial Campaign Committee. While itfunctioned outside of the public eye, by allaccounts the fundraising efforts of the FinanceDivision were highly successful, especiallygiven the underreported fact that offline sur-passed online donations (Kelly Nuxoll, personal


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communication, November 19, 2008). And forthe professionals working in finance, the Inter-net was seen as a tool that could extend estab-lished fundraising practices. For example,Biddle (personal communication, October 20,2008) argues that he brought his experience as anonprofit and political fundraising professionalto bear on using the Internet to facilitate theevents, telemarketing, and direct mail efforts ofthe campaign. Biddle urged potential donors tosign up for events online so that the campaigncould better manage involvement. He incorpo-rated proven text from solicitation letters intoonline asks, and he developed the analytics thatenabled him to trace involvement and craft fol-low-up appeals.

The communications strategy of the campaignrelied on a very old tactic: finding an effectivenews hook for journalists that would compelthem to write about Dean. The Internet provedimmensely useful in this regard, as Trippi, anestablished political professional for whom com-munications was a primary concern, deliberatelystaged high profile online fundraising actions togarner media coverage (Armstrong, 2007, p. 50).For example, in July 2003, the campaign posteda picture of the candidate eating a turkey sand-wich on the Dean For America Web site to coin-cide with a $2,000-a-plate fundraiser hosted byVice President Dick Cheney. Small donationspoured in, and Dean out-raised Cheney by nearly$200,000. Meanwhile, this episode, and others

FIGURE 1. Select snapshot of the Dean Campaign National Organization, December 2003.Organizational chart based on Federal Election Commission filings and adapted from the GeorgeWashington University campaign database, available online at: http://www.gwu.edu/∼action/2004/dean/deanorg.html. For space and clarity, this leaves out the advisors and consultants who did nothave defined roles in the campaign organization, in addition to many non-senior level positions (forexample, the Finance Division had over two dozen staffers). As detailed in this article, it also doesnot reflect many of the actual working relationships of these staffers.

Kate O'ConnorMike Ford

Senior Advisor

Andrea PringleDeputy Campaign Manager

Tom McMahonDeputy Campaign Manager

Robert RoganDeputy Campaign Manager

Joe TrippiCampaign Manager

Larry BiddleDir. for Direct Mail, Telemarketing

Bobby ClarkDatabase FinanceKelly NuxollE-mail Dir.David SalieHouse Parties

Linnea DyerDep. National Finance Dir.

Stephanie SchriockNational Finance Dir.

Finance

Brent ColburnResearch Dir.

Research

Michael SilbermanNat. Meetup Coord.

Tamara PogueField Dir.

Field

Courtney O'DonnellDep. Communications Dir.

Jay CarsonNat. Spokesman

Tricia EnrightCommunications Dir.

Communications

Julie NortonDep. Policy Dir.

Jeremy Ben-AmiPolicy Dir.

Policy

Nicco MeleWebmasterZephyr TeachoutDir., Online Organizing

Matthew GrossDir. of Internet Comm.

Joe RosparsWriterClay Johnson Lead ProgrammerKen HermanDatabaseJim BraytonProgrammerJascha Franklin-HodgeNat. Systems Administrator

Joe DrymalaSpeechwriterZack Rosen

State and Local Tech. Coord.

Internet

Paul BlankPolitical Dir.

Political

Mark MichaudDir. of Operations

Operations



that were similarly designed to simultaneouslyraise money and receive press coverage,grabbed headlines heralding Dean’s online suc-cess, as journalists construed it as evidence forthe radically innovative nature of the campaignand, by extension, the candidate.

At the same time there were numerous sitesof internal conflict and organizational tension,as staffers argued over strategy, resources, thecandidate’s ear, and Dean’s public image.Given that Trippi only hints at these conflicts inThe Revolution Will Not Be Televised, theyhave received little attention in academicaccounts of the campaign. While Trippi wasDean’s Campaign Manager, and was thus for-mally responsible for all of the campaign’soperations, advisors who had long relationshipswith the candidate from his time as governorand who held his trust made competing claimsfor organizational power. After the campaign’slosses in Iowa and New Hampshire, the profes-sional press reported on these conflicts withinthe formal organization as keys to the spectacu-lar collapse of a frontrunner. For example, writ-ing in Salon, Benson (2004) echoes manyparticipants in describing a campaign that was

. . . roughly divided into three groups of thegovernor’s top advisors from Vermont—Kate O’Connor and Bob Rogan in onecamp, Trippi in another, and everyoneelse in a third. The result was that internaldecision-making processes tended to bechaotic, with top supporters getting con-tradictory marching orders from Trippiand the Burlington staff in the same day.

However, the specific history of these conflictsis less important for the purposes of this articlethan how they were shaped by and consequen-tial for the campaign’s internal organizationaldynamics and what peer networks were calledupon to do.

At the center of many of the dynamics of thecampaign was the unique organizational posi-tion that the Internet Division occupied. As anumber of staffers described, the Internet Divi-sion assumed tasks that spanned the domains offinance, communications, and field given thatit was organized around a communications

platform—one that was put to a wide range oforganizational uses. This in essence created aseries of shadow divisions that were housedunder the rubric of the “Internet.” The roles ofsome staffers make this evident. For example,Zephyr Teachout served as the Director ofOnline Organizing and Matthew Gross was theDirector of Internet Communications, while theDivision as a whole was constantly involved infundraising efforts. Outside of the InternetDivision, the campaign’s deployment ofnetworked technologies reconfigured job pro-cesses and division boundaries. As Nuxoll,the E-mail Director for the campaign, (2007,p. 197–198) describes:

It was beginning to be unclear that depart-ments were separate entities at all, sincefield and communications were runningtogether thanks to Meetup; finance wasincreasingly part of field, courtesy ofhouse parties; the policy people realizedthey could get their message out with theWeb pages, blog, e-mail, and forms; andscheduling knew a few things that impactedthe grassroots, reached partly throughMeetup and the blog.

This was not, however, a frictionless pro-cess, as staffers were at times unclear who theywere supposed to be reporting to and, assuggested above, there were at times radicallydifferent approaches to using these networkedtools. Dean’s National Meetup CoordinatorMichael Silberman cites how he straddled boththe field operations and Internet Division, somuch so that it was not always clear who hissupervisor was. At the same time, he describeshow he saw his work more in terms of field,given that “the ethos was more in line withwhat I was doing. While the Internet team wasmore of the hot ticket, being more reactive,what we were doing was more about buildingcapacity and infrastructure” (Michael Silberman,personal communication, July 28, 2008).Silberman’s comments reveal how differentdivisions, with divergent goals and with stafferswith varying professional backgrounds, hadcontrasting approaches to similar or the sametools. Nuxoll was hired as a member of the


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Internet Division but subsequently moved toFinance. From this vantage point she describeshow she navigated divergent genres of e-mailacross divisions that were derived from differ-ent institutional models, namely organizing forthe field staffers, nonprofit direct mail fundrais-ing for the Finance Division, and the MoveOnmodel for the Internet Division (Kelly Nuxoll,personal communication, November 19, 2008).This spanned the range of the event mobiliza-tion pitches of the Field staffers and lengthy,formal direct mail letters of Finance to the shortparagraphs and action items that the Internetteam used.

These divisional boundary-spanning activi-ties of the Internet staffers, and the lack of clar-ity about reporting among individuals usingthe Internet in other divisions, provided Trippiwith the opportunity to implement strategywithout coordinating with other senior aides orconsulting division heads. As Teachout (per-sonal communication, July 10, 2008) recounts,the Internet Division was a “fifth head,” ororganizational division, that was “at the bleed-ing edge of all kinds of things”; for example,Trippi could make “communication decisionsthrough his very willing foot soldiers on theInternet team, as opposed to through a commu-nications person who is expressing any kind ofjudgment about the nature of messaging.” Oneoft-remarked upon detail is that the Internetstaffers all sat outside of Trippi’s door wherehe had easy access to them when he wantedsomething done. This also helped to ensurethat while their tactics were flexible at times,goals were not, and routines did develop. Forexample, fundraising was clearly Trippi’s pri-ority, and the Internet Division was both disci-plined about its pursuit and had a reasonableunderstanding by the late fall of how much itcould garner through each clockwork pitch.The success of this online fundraising in turnoffered a clear set of metrics, in many respectsthe most important, through which to groundclaims for organizational autonomy and helpensure influence in the strategy and allocativedecisions of the campaign. In this sense, thecampaign’s use of peer networks for backendoperations was also conditioned by organiza-tional dynamics.

CONCLUSION

While many scholars see the Dean campaignas the prototypical example of a new, radicallyparticipatory democratic politics, other accountspoint to the campaign’s complex hybridity(Chadwick, 2007). This article demonstratesthat it was a complicated and often contradic-tory phenomenon. It was clearly not the purelydecentralized, emergent, and self-organizedeffort that some have celebrated. At the sametime, Jett and Välikangas’s (2004, p. 6) argu-ment that “the Dean for America campaign islike an island of formal organization in a sea ofautonomous volunteers” does not capture thecomplex interactions between the campaign’sformal structures and peer networks. The cam-paign’s Internet Division rather successfullydeployed a series of innovative organizationalpractices and networked artifacts that structuredthe networked sociality of these volunteers. Thiswork in turn was shaped in accordance with theperceived demands of an inter-organizationalenvironment, political institutions, and internalconflicts over resources. These peer networkswere not wholly autonomous. While volunteersdid take the reins of all sorts of projects, theywere in domains far from the substantive pol-icy, strategy, or allocative decisions of the cam-paign. The formal organization was shaped byefforts to guide the work of these networks,which often required postbureaucratic workprocesses that in turn were embedded in morestable organizational routines. As noted above,the production of these networks also served asa resource in intra-organizational conflicts.

While the Dean campaign is only one case,this study suggests that a more nuanced discus-sion of the relationship between peer networksand formal organizations is necessary for ourunderstanding of online forms of democraticpractice. Scholarship that celebrates peer-to-peerpolitical collaboration often overlooks the factthat online practices of citizenship are still pri-marily realized through formal political organi-zations. Citizenship not only continues to bemediated by formal organizational structures,but also the artifacts they deploy to connectindividuals to institutions. As the Dean cam-paign’s interaction with peer networks makes



clear, even “emergent” forms of collectiveaction can over time become formalized, giventhe work of stable organizational forms thatconcentrate resources, make strategic decisions,mobilize activists, and signal to other actors,especially journalists and elected officials, theirlegitimacy in order to accomplish their goals.As this article has argued, formal organizationalresources still matter a great deal and conveneand harness peer networks towards ends thatare very familiar: fundraising, recruitment, andmobilization. Indeed, new media political con-sulting companies including Blue State Digitaland EchoDitto, both of which were founded byalumni of the Dean campaign, help their organi-zational clients do precisely this.

Scholarly discussion of these processes is allthe more necessary given the implications fordemocratic theory. To date, the types of net-worked participation available to citizens throughthe formal organizations that mobilize them havereceived too little attention amid the embrace ofwhat appears to be new forms of politics online.It is more complicated, and subsequent cam-paigns have extended many practices pioneeredby Dean staffers. As the preceding demonstrates,the Dean campaign was open to participation insome instrumental realms but had no channels forconvening a public debate or incorporating sug-gestions with regard to the candidate’s policyplatform. As such, the campaign was not deliber-ative nor especially participatory in many con-texts; rather it largely reflected an extension ofelite-guided, mediated electoral practices thatwere institutionalized in the field during the1990s, or by some accounts even much earlier(Howard, 2006). That said, the opportunity topartake in the backend of campaign operations tohelp Dean get elected in a competitive electoralcontext still inspired thousands of volunteers andDean staffers who may not otherwise have partic-ipated in the political process.

NOTES

1. For the data presented here that is drawn frompublicly available sources, full citations and URLs, whereappropriate, are provided for all material quoted and refer-enced in text. As this article is a piece of a larger research

project, materials that bear directly on this study and donot violate the privacy of or disclosure agreements withsubjects will be made publicly available for the purposesof replication upon the completion and publication of thiswork. In the meantime, the author welcomes all inquiriesas to the data presented here.

2. Dean’s presidential Web site, Dean for America,went online in September of 2002. It had limited function-ality, providing a way to sign-up for e-mails, contact thegovernor, read about the candidate in the press, and learnabout the issues. The contribute link was only added inDecember. Other primary campaigns, including those ofKerry and Edwards, were at a similar stage in the waningmonths of 2002.

3. Kerry and Edwards’s Internet staffers had similarprofessional backgrounds. This suggests that while therewere a range of established firms that provided Internetpolitical consulting services during this time period(Howard, 2006), new media campaign staffers were notyet professionalized and were drawn from the commer-cial, nonprofit, and political sectors. A survey of presiden-tial primary campaigns during the 2007–2008 cyclesuggests that this changed somewhat, as a number ofcampaigns hired prominent figures from the 2004 cycle,especially former Dean staffers, many of whom hadlaunched their own consulting companies.

4. Trippi’s firm Trippi, McMahon & Squier, handledthe campaign’s media, including television advertisements.They were roundly criticized for large expenditures in earlyprimary states, which nearly bankrupted the campaignshortly after the New Hampshire primary (Justice, 2004).

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APPENDIX

Sample Meetup Agenda (Dean for America, 2003)

HOST GUIDE: JUNE DEAN MEETUP

June Meetup Goals

Excite people to do the following . . .

1. Help Dean reach 100,000 members in the 5 days after the Meetup by taking home sign-upsheets and asking others to join the Dean’s List.

2. Schedule local events for Dean supporters with the new features on DeanForAmerica.com(available Monday, May 26).

3. Schedule fundraising house parties during June to strengthen our numbers before the June30th FEC filing deadline.

Suggested Agenda

1. Hand a sign-in sheet to everyone who walks through the door—and recruit helpers! Duringyour remarks to the group, explain that Dean cannot contact his supporters or interested indi-viduals without these names. Registering for Meetup does not automatically sign you up forDean emails.

2. Introductions

a. Introduce Yourself: Why are you working to elect Dean?b. Explain how this campaign is different . . . Importance of grassroots activities such as the

Meetups. Remind the group that thousands of voters are attending hundreds of Meetups atthe same time across the country.

c. Briefly introduce above goals (1 minute or less)d. If your Meetup is small enough, ask others why they support Dean (10-15 min.). If your

Meetup is large, you’ll probably want to skip this step.

3. Play a Howard Dean video if possible, or read the welcome message from Governor Dean,which will be available at www.deanforamerica.com/meetuphosts.

4. Explain the three different actions that we’re asking everyone to take:

a. Take-home signup sheets: Distribute the take-home signup sheets (available as a down-load) to allow people to signup others who want to get involved. Meetup members canhelp double Dean’s email list by sending the forms back to the campaign as soon as possi-ble. Please be sure to ask people’s permission before you add them to the list.

b. Local Dean events: This week, we’re launching a web page that will allow individuals toschedule local organizing events and sign-up directly on the DFA website. Anyone canplan a Dean event and invite other to join. We can’t miss an opportunity to spread theword and recruit new supporters at parades, fairs and other public events. Please encour-age everyone to vsit [sic] www.deanforamerica.com and start using these new tools!

c. House party fundraisers: Join or schedule a house party fundraiser before the June 30FEC filing deadline.

www.deanforamerica.com


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