Politics and the Net: What about the software?

Wired News reports that Gen­eral Wes­ley Clark entered the race due largely to online prompts to do so. This is another exam­ple of how the net is affect­ing pol­i­tics in a rad­i­cally new way. This rep­re­sents an inter­est­ing twist in what has already been a fas­ci­nat­ing year in terms of the net’s influ­ence on the polit­i­cal process… and it could have some impact on soft­ware delivery.

The Wired arti­cle points out that this is just the begin­ning, though. Draft­ing a can­di­date is a very dif­fer­ent thing from try­ing to get that can­di­date to be elected and it is obvi­ous that the Inter­net will be a crit­i­cal ele­ment in estab­lish­ing who the nom­i­nee will be on the demo­c­ra­tic side of the 2004 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign and will prob­a­bly be a crit­i­cal ele­ment in the over­all campaign.

New tools like weblogs have enabled peo­ple to have a clear impact on the pres­i­den­tial process. Mov­ing for­ward, the use of tech­nol­ogy is only going to increase and pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates might find them­selves in a state where they become soft­ware pro­duc­ers to gain an edge over their com­peti­tors. Once that hap­pens, one could start ask­ing ques­tions relat­ing to use and dis­tri­b­u­tion of the soft­ware they create.

Should it be open-source? That would be a good idea from an ide­o­log­i­cal stand­point but a poten­tial dis­as­ter in a race as it would allow one’s com­peti­tors to quickly play catch-up. Should it be com­pletely closed? If that’s the approach taken, good soft­ware devel­oped dur­ing a pri­mary race would not nec­es­sar­ily be used in the gen­eral elec­tion, pos­si­bly hob­bling some good poten­tial for the win­ner of a pri­mary. Should it be turned over to the party (either Repub­li­can or Demo­c­rat) after the nom­i­na­tion con­ven­tions? And if that is the case, will it be used as a new bar­gain­ing chip in pol­i­tics? (Imag­ine a cam­paign say­ing “Well, we’ve built this great soft­ware plat­form to do X and we will turn it over, along with sup­port from our peo­ple, if you give me Y posi­tion in your campaign”)

And what about sup­porter lists? Let’s say that one can­di­date ends up with a mil­lion sub­scribers to his/her RSS feeds. Should those feeds then be redi­rected to the feed of the pri­mary cam­paign win­ner? Or are they just falling under a single-use goal in the primaries.

Last but not least in the thoughts I have on this is the ques­tion of dig­i­tal preser­va­tion. Since we are talk­ing about soft­ware appli­ca­tions here, how will those be pre­served for future gen­er­a­tions of his­to­ri­ans? The use of tech­nol­ogy will have an impact but where will those col­lec­tions sit in the future? Should all the soft­ware be turned over to the Library of Con­gress at the end of an elec­tion process? or should a non-profit orga­ni­za­tion like archive.org hold them? And if those are turned over, what lim­i­ta­tions would be put on using the code?