In July 2003 Vice President Dick Cheney was in Columbia, South Carolina for a fancy sit-down lunch with 150 big-money donors willing to kick in the maximum $2,000 to the reelection campaign of Cheney and President George W. Bush. Dick Cheney was to raise $250,000 from this exclusive group of black-tie diners in one afternoon. This would be an ordinary event for any campaign and lost in the pages of history, but this fundraiser is remembered for another reason. And that reason can best be symbolized in the form of a turkey sandwich.

Prior to the Cheney fundraiser, supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean were gathered online at the Dean’s Blog for America trying to figure out ways that the campaign could continue its small donor driven campaign fundraising success. One idea floated about was for the campaign to try and match the Cheney fundraiser dollar-for-dollar in online donations. The day of Cheney’s fundraiser the campaign posted a picture of Dean, eating a turkey sandwich while blogging, on their site asking supporters to chip in what they could to match the black-tie Cheney event. By 12:30 the next day the campaign had raised over $500,000, or twice as much as the Cheney event netted.

This story about a turkey sandwich shows the essence of how Web-centered politics change the equation in communications and outcomes in campaigns. As Dean himself said, “We had people whose job it was to read the blogs for feedback and ideas and we developed a feedback loop that allowed us to do these incredible events. The two-way conversation was key - you can’t just talk, you also need to listen.” After the impressive money haul pulled in by the Ron Paul for President campaign on November 5^th, an idea sprung by campaign supporters and subsequently embraced by the Paul campaign, I decided to check out what on earth was going on in this decentralized Web-based campaign. My first stop was Ron Paul Forums where I found over 400 people currently viewing the Grassroots Central sub-forum.

I originally stumbled into the Ron Paul Forums when I began writing this post. Googling around for the image of Dean eating the turkey sandwich I saw a link to the RP Forum. The discussion thread, this was from July 2007, began with a retelling of the turkey sandwich story and then continued to ask what ideas the supporters could contribute to the campaign. One of the first suggestions happened to be that the campaign post all campaign contributions in real-time on the front page of their Web site. The poster wrote, "A ticker on www.ronpaul2008.com that shows the ammount that he’s raised is a must, especially in demonstrating that he actually has a good chance at winning and that your donations aren’t just a waste. I could see his donations sky rocketing with this." I had stumbled across another turkey sandwich. Everyone knows by now that Paul adopted this idea to show his campaign contributions as they were coming in on his Web site and everyone knows about the supporter generated money-bomb that brought in $4.3 million on November 5th. These ideas were both pulled from the Paul supporter community.

The Ron Paul online community is incredibly lively and filled with ideas about how to best use the fund raising power of the community to raise the profile of the little known Texas congressman. While November 5th, chosen to coincide with Guy Fawkes Day, is the most well known of these "money bomb" events where the community organizes a mass fund raising event it is not and will not be the only one. November 11th was intended to be another million dollar fund raising day but topped out at $200-250,000. The Paul community chose Veteran’s Day weekend as a "money bomb" day to highlight that the anti-war Paul has received more contributions from active U.S. military than any other candidate. The next day on the community organized fund raising schedule is set for December 16th in commemoration of the Boston Tea Party. Supporters talk of raising anywhere from another $4 million to upwards of $10 million on this day. T-Shirts are being made, Web sites created, and a massive amount of energy is being expended by a groups of individuals who are not on a campaign payroll to raise as much money as possible and bring more people into what they consider to be the "Ron Paul Revolution".

In many ways the tales of turkey sandwiches and Guy Fawkes Day fund raisers explain a shift in our politics that goes beyond the amount a campaign can raise from its supporters. The changing nature of technology has allowed information to flow in multiple directions at once allowing unburdened access to communication channels to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. Supporters, who may well be experts in a particular field or have lived the problems that politicians discussed, can offer much more than financial support or ideas about how to increase financial support. They can offer a way to deal with and control information.

The problem of information has been one of the greatest problems facing politicians and the government since the dawn of the industrial age. How do we deal with all these issues; all this information? No one person can read every single bill introduced in Congress and no one person can write every policy statement issued for a campaign. Politicians rely heavily on their staff to read bills, write opinions, create policy positions, and hone messaging. Certainly, we as voters accept this as fact and understand that our politicians are both responsible for the decisions of their staff, as they will ultimately sign off on these decisions, and reliant on the talent and wisdom of those that they employ. By tapping into the creativity and experience of citizens, constituents, communities of interest, and experts through networked communication technology the politician can distribute the burden of information by decentralizing their information consumption operation. Think of it like a wrestler falling with every part of her body hitting the mat as opposed to landing on her side or shoulders. There is a significantly reduced risk of injury when the impact is distributed through the body instead of one part, the side or shoulders, taking the full impact. Distributing information consumption allows more information to be consumed at a lower cost and with added benefits of insight that might otherwise would have been absent.

Ron Paul and Howard Dean are both examples of politicians that relied not only on the votes and money of their supporters, but their ideas and creative energies. This same wealth of knowledge and experience can be tapped for legislative purposes, as indicated in the experiments by Dick Durbin and Ed Markey to reach out to blog communities for help in crafting a bill and asking questions in a hearing. Sen. Chuck Schumer has asked the Daily Kos community for their advice on Senate candidates for the upcoming 2008 elections. The House Judiciary Committee posted online all e-mails received from the White House and the Justice Department related to the purging of U.S. Attorneys so the public could aid in the investigation. There is little doubt that the investigations by the community at TPM Muckraker helped the investigation and acted as a source for the media.

The Internet has enabled politicians to tap into a great wealth of knowledge and provided a door into the process for the public. Manuel Castells and Araba Sey write, "by changing the direction and the content flow of information through the use of the Internet, the range of political actors is broadened, new avenues of collective mobilization may appear, and a different format of debate may take place, transforming the political scene that had been framed by the one-way communication systems of the mass media era." Everyone can make a turkey sandwich and politicians should be ready to take a bite.

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A lot of Internet and politics experts have been sitting around waiting for someone in the 2008 presidential race to emerge as the next Net candidate in the mold of Howard Dean. After last night it appears that that candidate has been found. Ron Paul, a backbench 9-term congressman who previously sought the presidency on the Libertarian ticket in 1988, raised over $4 million online yesterday to set the record for most money raised by a presidential candidate online in a 24 hour span. The amazing thing about this haul of money is that it was not organized by the campaign but was instead a supporter generated “cashmob”. (The supporters actually referred to it as a “money-bomb”.) The Paul campaign took advantage of their supporter’s enthusiasm by creating the most transparent campaign finance decision possible: to publish in real-time each online donation as it happens. By making their campaign finance transparent the Paul campaign encouraged their supporters to do their own work by showing them exactly what they were accomplishing. It’s Howard Dean’s bat on crack.

Not only does this enable supporters to keep track of their tally for the work they are doing it also brings the attention of those who would normally ignore the Paul campaign site. Last night I found myself, in no way interested in Ron Paul the candidate, watching the total amount of money raised tick up as the names and hometowns of donors flashed across Paul’s campaign site. What I was seeing was a campaign giving control to its supporters and letting them be the story.

Araba Sey and Manuel Castells write that, “by changing the direction and the content of the flow of information through the use of the Internet, the range of political actors is broadened, new avenues of collective mobilization may appear, and a different format of debate may take place, transforming the political scene that had been framed by the one-way communication systems of the mass media era.” Jerome Armstrong at MyDD explains how the Paul campaign is tacitly encouraging this kind of behavior:

Look how, on his website, how Paul pushes his supporters out onto the social networking platforms of Technorati, del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Stumble Upon, and Newsvine.

Its a brilliant tactic, because rather than having to develop these costly platforms that take up valuable time, or rely upon closed vendor systems that use laggard technology, the campaign just uses the existing infrastructure built by others for that specific vertical. There is no RonPaul2008.com community. Instead, it exists out on the web, outside the campaign website walls. So rather than all their own supporters talking to eachother, they are forced to congregate in places where others that don’t support Paul gather. Evangelize. Outreach.

If you’ve been on Digg this year you’ll notice the proliferation of Ron Paul related Diggs. Paul is also the only candidate who appears to be using Meetup, a highly successful strategy of the Dean campaign. But a big factor is the simple decision to make his campaign finance haul transparently available in real-time is truly an empowering decision for his supporters. Allowing access to previously privileged information to those who may care the most enables greater activity across the board in support of the candidate.

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My continuing joke about Ron Paul around the Sunlight office is that he would win in a landslide if all of his supporter’s MMORPG characters were allowed to vote. (That’s massively multiplayer online role playing game for those not hip to the slang.) All jokes aside, it appears that Paul’s supporters can sure raise a lot of money. In the 3^rd Quarter of this year Ron Paul raised just over $5 million putting him slightly behind a former frontrunner John McCain, who raised $6 million. Paul has now set a goal of raising $12 million in the 4^th Quarter and is using his Web site to show progress in achieving that goal.

Where Howard Dean had his bat Ron Paul has his Statue of Liberty. The Statue measures the amount raised so far, updating in real time, as Paul reaches his goal of $4 million in October. While Dean and others used these kinds of visuals tools to highlight fundraising during a key period this kind of fundraising transparency has never been done in real time over an entire quarter. Paul’s Web site also shows the names and hometowns of the donors. All of this data cries for one thing and one thing only: user generated content!

Paul’s Internet supporters instantly took all of this information and created their own site, RonPaulGraphs.com, which breaks down the fundraising into tons and tons of graphs. Here’s a couple of my favorites:

Patrick Ruffini went a step further and pulled all of the names and hometowns of donors into an Excel spreadsheet and proceeded to map the data. It looks like this:

This is all really interesting stuff and it really shows how much of the Ron Paul campaign is being fueled through online innovation by citizens and not campaign staff. Paul’s fundraising transparency allows citizens, supporters and non-supporters alike, to engage in his campaign in new ways, see the real time graphs above, that more traditional campaigns do not.

Now imagine this kind of real time transparency for members of Congress and their fundraising. We could have MAPLight in real time. Or if lobbyists had to disclose their meetings in real time we could really map influence in Washington. Ah, the benefits of real transparency.

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The Reason Foundation has been getting the presidential candidates to talk more about transparency on the campaign trail by asking them to sign a pledge to run a transparent administration and fully enforce the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, also known as Coburn-Obama. The FFATA requires the Office of Management and Budget to disclose all federal funding contracts, grants, and earmarks in a searchable database. The Sunlight Foundation was a part of a coalition of groups that worked to pass the bill, in particular working to out the Senator with a secret hold on the bill. So far, three candidates - Barack Obama, Ron Paul, and Sam Brownback - have signed the pledge. It’s great to see transparency taking a hold as an issue in the 2008 presidential election. Hopefully, we’ll hear from more candidates on the issue soon. For now, check out below for the statements made by the three pledge signees.

Sen. Barack Obama: "Every American has the right to know how the government spends their tax dollars, but for too long that information has been largely hidden from public view. This historic law will lift the veil of secrecy in Washington and ensure that our government is transparent and accountable to the American people. And I will be proud to fully implement and enforce this law as president."

Rep. Ron Paul: "Signing the Oath of Presidential Transparency was a no brainer for me. I will aggressively pursue full openness and accountability within my administration if elected president."

Sen. Sam Brownback: "Americans need to feel they can trust their government. As president I will continue my record of supporting policies that increase government transparency and boost confidence in our democratic system."

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