Open Source as Practice and Ideology: The Origin of Howard Dean's Innovations in Electoral Politics

Extending an emerging body of work documenting the migration of technical production models into other domains of social activity, this article analyzes how “open source” works at the levels of both practice and ideology. Through interviews and analysis of public documents relating to Howard Dean’s run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2003–2004, this article reveals how many Internet Division staffers drew on open source projects such as the collaborative building of the Linux operating system as a model for their campaign work. In the process, they helped create a series of technical and organizational innovations in online campaigning that have subsequently become core features of electoral politics. At the same time, staffers strategically and publicly deployed the frame of the “open source campaign” as a cultural resource. Situated within narratives of the new economy and participatory democracy, staffers’ framing of the campaign as a radical techno-democratic effort provided journalists with an interpretive framework for understanding Dean’s run and helped mobilize specialized volunteer constituencies. Given that the campaign was not as participatory in substantive domains as this frame suggested, the article also reveals how the label of open source worked ideologically to elide dynamics of organizational power.