Open-source political campaign
Comparison of participatory democracy to the Internet
Open-source political campaigns, open-source politics, or Politics 2.0, is the idea that social networking and e-participation technologies will revolutionize our ability to follow, support, and influence political campaigns. Netroots evangelists and web consultants predict a wave of popular democracy as fundraisers meet on MySpace or Facebook, YouTubers crank out attack ads and bloggers do opposition research.
Typically these terms describe short-term limited-life efforts to achieve a specific goal. Longer term projects involving embedded institutions (of journalism, parties, government itself) are more often called "open-source governance" projects. All open politics share some very basic assumptions however including the belief that online deliberation can improve decisions.
Origins of the term
In print, open-source politics was first used by political operatives in the lead-up to the 2004 United States elections. The earliest reference to the term in major media was a September 5, 2003 story in Salon.com in which supporters of the Draft Clark campaign and of Vermont Governor Howard Dean both claimed that their campaigns represented the ideals of "open-source politics." The term was meant as a reference to open-source software such the Linux operating system, which is designed to allow users to alter its code to make improvements. The idea was that new technologies would allow similar participation and the attendant benefits in the political realm. The story omitted the fact that Dean's campaign had actually begun to employ these tools only by the initiative of the Meetup.com bot, a simple string-matching algorithm that began to schedule meetings "about Howard Dean" when the number of people listing this string in their interests hit a critical mass.
The term was further refined in its current usage by a story in The Nation by Micah Sifry which appeared days after the 2004 election.
“Open-source political campaign” enters the record as comparison of participatory democracy to the Internet. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Open-source, political and campaign can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2917673. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2004 and 2003.
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This entry incorporates text from “Open-source political campaign” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.