Zack Rosen mentioned deanspace.org on the rdfweb mailing list. Deanspace is a community site for grassroots supporters of the Howard Dean campaign. Deanspace also offers an out-of-the-box CMS distribution for grassroots groups to get up and going with their support groups (e.g., «Bengal Tigers for Dean», «Minor League Switch-Hitters for Dean», «Planaria for Dean»).
Deanspace itself is a pretty interesting wrinkle on the campaign landscape. But the Deanspace distribution is actually very interesting: take a stock drupal (PHP/MySQL-based) CMS distribution, customize it to make it a Deanspace CMS, and release it to the community of grassroots Dean supporters to start their own grassroots websites. Neat!
But that's not what Zack came to rdfweb to talk about. Instead, he came asking for some input on MetaDean - an aggregator of sorts to keep track what's going on in the network of grassroots Dean advocates.
Wow. The Dean candidacy doesn't mean much to me at the moment. (The race only gets interesting when it's down to the final ballot. And even then...) But the way the grassroots mobilization is using and pushing the net to get their guy elected is truly amazing. I can only wonder what kind of fallout Deanspace and MetaDean can generate for community building and semantic web type projects when this thing is over.
