This Monday I attended the Digital Democracy Teach-In at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Originally I was going to tag along on Britt Blaser's introductory session to talk about campaign games, but at the last minute Joe Trippi signed on to do the first session. Recently ousted, his talk was "Down from the Mountain: My Experience with the Dean Campaign."

danah boyd was there and shared her reaction to Trippi's message.

Dean's success or failure notwithstanding, in the wake of the Dean for Iowa Game, I think the overvaluation of quantitative results is one of the principle lessons I learned vis-à-vis political games. As tools for enacting political speech, games have great promise. As implementations of tools for digitally distributed outreach, games also have great promise. But there is greater potential for games to represent concepts from political policy through a new kind of experimental, experiential encapsulation that goes beyond mere viral marketing. It's important that we political game designers keep in mind that what we really want to culture through games is debate. Our game was a fairly directed experience meant to motivate existing Dean supporters. And we have some evidence that it did this job pretty well, primarily because it concretized the otherwise abstract notions of outreach and actionable campaigning. But policy was very much absent from the game, and intentionally so. I don't consider this a design mistake, but it does underscore this issue of quantitative versus qualitative campaign action.

Something I took away from Trippi's talk is that it would be folly to expect that digital democracy as such could be sown and reaped in the same election cycle. We still have much work to do.