openness

Earlier this week, Allen wrote about an intriguing twist to Barack Obama's use of campaign social networking tools: his supporters are actively using MyBO to organize against Obama's stand on FISA. The group is now up to 18,240 members, the largest such group on his website.

Obama is getting lots of credit for allowing this kind of thing to go on under his digital roof, most prominently from the Jay Rosens and Jeff Jarvises of the world.

But this development is more properly seen as a natural evolution in any open, networked system that is allowed to operate in the political space. The credit belongs to his supporters, not Obama.

It's now a truism that when presented with an open platform, users will hack it to serve their purposes, not necessarily those of the sponsor. Many times, those two sets of priorities are intertwined (e.g. supporters desire to get involved matched with a campaign's need for volunteers), though in this case, they weren't.