(1) “Liberal Democrats” is just fine. No need to get bogged down in hyperfine details of marketing.

(2) Open Source is an idea that’s very poorly understood. Open Source is not democratic, it’s meritocratic – the project needs a leader or at most a small leadership team, and the leadership team needs to deliver. Eric Raymond (a bog-standard netlibertarian wackjob) wrote the seminal book on the practicalities of OS – The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which is a must-read for anyone interested in this topic (available for free at the link).

(3) There is something which is at base fundamentally anti-OS about organizing people. The organization of successful OS projects emerges naturally through the relative skill and interest of the participants.

(4) OS translates poorly to non-software enterprises. It’s possible, but hard. I have worked on an OS hardware project (no details b/c it’d blow the pseudonym). Things went swimmingly as long as I was pushing things forward by doing things, reporting them to the rest of the interested group and getting feedback. Other people pitched in to a greater or lesser degree, but the project died when I had to stop working actively on it for a year or so. This project was in part a conscious exploration of the application of OS principles to hardware design. I’m aware of three other hardware OS projects, all of which came to naught for the same reason as mine did – the principals ran out of time/money and nobody was there to pick up the slack.

(5) OS can probably be made to work OK in purely information based collaborations similar to software, so a manifesto or declaration of principles might be successful. How do you measure success, though?

(6) Politics is about money and access. Success (IMO) consists of getting good legislation passed and bad legislation killed. In order to do this you need the ear of an elected representative or even better, the rep’s senior legislative aide(s). This means either the ability to make significant campaign contributions or the ability to turn out voters in the rep’s home district, ideally both. I’ve lobbied congress (again, no details due to psudonym) with some success in the past, and the thing that opens doors is the ability to tell the staffer you’re talking to exactly how the desired legislation positively impacts the rep’s district. Without this, at best you get a polite few minutes of bored attention.

(7) NetLibs have already shown that they can raise money.

(8) Can netlibs improve the access of fellow-travelers to potentially sympathetic representatives? I think mybe they can by using information technology to match up constituents with representatives and providing them with the kind of information needed to open doors. It’s one thing to contact your rep and get a hearing based on simply being a constituent, but it’s much better and more effective if the constituent is armed with information about how the proposed legislation affects the rep’s home district and pet projects.

(9) The same use of distributed information collection and processing that helps with getting access to representatives can also be deployed to alert affected people in the rep’s district about the concrete effects of proposed legislation. This has the potential to leverage lobbying efforts by getting constituents to call their representative, and to do so armed with relevant and effective talking points.

Actually there’s a distinct difference between progressives and liberals (it’s not a huge difference, but there is a difference), but the centrists have been flogging the word as though it is synonymous with liberal for so long that it doesn’t really matter whether there is technically a difference, though I’d do unspeakably natural acts to anyone who could get Kos to retake the label “centrist”, him calling himself either progressive or liberal makes me feel dirty and want to shun both terms.

And strictly speaking progressive is a word for radicals who are afraid to use such an explosive label as “radical”, so it’s not perfect no matter how you look at it, though it is accurate, while being inaccurate.

Broomstick Fucking Communist Witches of America Party? No?

[insert jokes about "block" and "house" parties here]

I think the open-source idea is REVOLUTIONARY and the BEST IDEA E*V*E*R!!!!!

With this idea we can take over the WORLD!!

It has always been a source of great frustration to me and many I know that we have NO WAY to get in touch with, say, the guys at MoveOn, or the Democratic Leadership, not directly. WHen we have an idea or an improvement that could REALLY HELP. Open source would allow input, and GOD KNOWS the Dems need it….(with 80% of AMericans favoring Healthcare reform, why wasn’t it run on? Getting rid of Perry: would have been easy if Bell had run on defeating the Trans-Texas Corridor or the fucking TOLL ROADS that NO ONE wants, (that will be owned by OTHER COUNTRIES, made out of FOREIGNERS!) A simple commercial that said “Do we want OUR TEXAS Roads to BELONG to FOREIGNERS? Foreigners that we will have to Pay Money to for the Privilege of Driving on them? VVote for Bell!” would have ACED the Governorship!!)

Anyway, progressives are different things. In historical terms, we’re liberals.

“The Liberal Roots Project”…?

“Liberal-ize America”

“Freedom is Liberal”

…