Writes Jay Roberts:”I started thinking about the economics of the unofficial campaign when I saw the results of the supporters who whipped together a full page ad for the Ames paper in a couple of days. Wonderful result that would have taken weeks and lots of ‘buckage’ from a PR firm, assuming that they could even put together something as good as that.
“Anyhow, the unofficial RP campaign has a lot of similarities with open source efforts, which I deal with a lot in my startup software company. The dispersal of effort among dedicated volunteers can produce excellent results. We see that in open source, where the best of the applications are better than direct commercial competitors.
“Given that much of the RP unofficial campaign has arisen on the net among the tech savvy, the similarity between it and open source organizing principles is hardly coincidental.
“However, open source doesn’t always work – the next biggest thing for some years has been desktop Linux, which remains problematic. Office applications are pretty lame, and open source has utterly failed in the CAD arena, despite this being a huge and interesting area. So one could be worrying, is a campaign something that works as open source, or is this just a lot of wasted effort that could be better spent elsewhere, or what sort of decisions are all these loons going to be making and can they be trused?
“Well, the real beauty of open source is that in addition to producing excellent results in certain areas is that it also ends up being a very efficient allocator of resources. Loser projects never get very far because the participants bail or don’t attract much participation in the first place. Collectively, the herd generally spends its resources on winnable battles much more efficiently than commercial/government development efforts, where loser projects can stagger on for years sucking up resources.
“So it is nearly paradigmatic that big efforts by the unofficial campaign will be successful, it is the collective betting by the participants that gets enough resources to initiate a project. And we’ve seen this so far in nearly all the issues that this group has focused on – online polls, SC, Iowans for Tax Reform, etc. Bad ideas just languish on ronpaulforums.com without any takers.
“Sort of fascinating to see this in action.”
10:30 am on August 12, 2007
