Wampum

People who "do" ICANN (I do) and who "do" IPR on the net (I did, or do, indigenous IPR on the net) and who "do" whatever "Internet Governance" means (your guess is as good as mine, either because its a democracy, or you're powerless too), have a connection with Harvard Law's Berkman Center. The connection may not be fond, but periodically over the last five years DNS people talk through Berkman's facilities to each other, and to the IPR and IG parasites ... um ... other stakeholders.

It seems to me that what is happening now -- Rebecca MacKinnon's confab on ethics, or Debugging Scoop internals with WitchFinder 2.0 is wildly irrelevent.

Two guys worked their technical tushes off for a post-modern Democratic primary campaign and managed to provide some of the platform that the content weenies managed to get significant mindshare in the run-up to the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, and all that managed to net them was boarderline five figures. That's mid-four figures a piece for four to six months of everything.

As tragic as that is, it seems that their pay may be at the high end of what network and systems people working the campaigns made.

I offered to help the Clark campaign, and I was going to be making two grand a month, maybe, to make lots of Linux boxen in colo'd facs provide highly reliable content delivery systems -- instances of Mysql or Postgresql and lots of XSL gunk-munging and happy Apache servers presenting a seamless sea of virtual hosts all DNS'd out into a web page, blog and a mailman instance at every precinct captain's mouse click, a scalable content playground for the content people to message and maintain on, and do the cisco IOS work to make a campaign as resilient and multi-homed as a cautious COLO or ISP would want.

But that doesn't seem to be the way of the future for Democratic campaigns. All the money went to the out-sourced address-list outfits for direct mail, or the out-sourced slick-in-the-wrong-direction (even Kucinich's) sorta-like-television website ad firms, or completely divorced from the interactive peer-to-peer model and thrown into the broadcast air, like pixie dust, or plutonium, still circiling the globe since Eisenhower's time, to land glowingly on every pair of rabbit ears or coax jack in targeted media markets.

The tragedy playing at the Berkman, and elsewhere on both sides of the radio dial in Left and Right Blogistan, is that spending the primary season surfing on water would be no less effective a means to personally contribute to a primary or general election Democratic campaign than blogging, and when actual expenses are figured in, not very much more expensive as a way to temporarily leave real life. The real money in Democratic campaigns is still in the media buys and the direct marketing buys, and everything else, activists of all ages, abilities, and incomes, are taken on chum.

The real outrage is that Markos and Jerome didn't make a living wage working for a campaign that hoovered the lint from the pockets of the Deaniacs, and they wouldn't have been any better off working for any of the competing Democratic campaigns.

Yes, it does appear that the Democratic campaign art is skipping the laptop/workstation/rackspace technical generation and going straight for the the 1964 Daisy loving boob tube, and there's not a damn thing any of us can do about it, except plan a nice relaxing vacation for the Fall and Winter of '07. I'm partial to Paris. MB will want someplace warmer, and by then Grace will be even more opinionated, and Kezzie will be three times the Terrible Two she is now.