Lessons Learned Building Internet Era Communities - From Open Source Projects to US Presidential Campaigns

Drupal's first big deployment was for a US Presidential campaign: Howard Dean in 2003. That campaign rewrote the rules for presidential campaigns, outraising incumbents and pioneering the online grassroots model that Obama used to win in 2008 and 2012.

It turns out there are many commonalities between building communities as part of online software projects (like Drupal) and for presidential campaigns. This talk will distill seven lessons I've learned on the front-lines of US presidential politics, as part of the Drupal community and as a participant and leader in other online organized efforts.

I gave a version this talk as the GovCamp Keynote in 2014 (you can see my slides attached).

My background:

I started an open source project (DeanSpace) based on Drupal for the Howard Dean presidential campaign in 2003 and then went to work on the Dean Campaign web team. After, I started a non-profit called CivicSpace with Neill Drumm to build Drupal-based software for the non-profit sector. Most recently, I co-founded Chapter Three (a Drupal agency), Mission Bicycle (a bicycle manufacturer powered by Drupal Commerce), and am now a co-founder/CEO of Pantheon (a website management platform for Drupal). I've been involved in numerous open source communities such as Drupal and online organizing efforts like the Dean Campaign, and the Hurricane Katrina people finder project.