The metaphor of choice for Howard Dean's Internet-fueled campaign is "open-source politics": a two-way campaign in which the supporters openly collaborate with the campaign to improve it, and in which the contributions of the "group mind" prove smarter than that of any lone individual.

Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi has admitted on numerous occasions that his time in Silicon Valley affected his thinking about politics. "I used to work for a little while for Progeny Linux Systems," Trippi told cyber-guru Lawrence Lessig in an August interview. "I always wondered how could you take that same collaboration that occurs in Linux and open source and apply it here. What would happen if there were a way to do that and engage everybody in a in a presidential campaign?"

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