John Battelle comments on Google’s recent moves and concludes they are joining the “architecture of participation”:

…what really distinguishes open source is not just source, but an “architecture of participation” that includes low barriers to entry by newcomers, and some mechanism for isolating the cathedral from the bazaar. This architecture of participation allows for a real free market of ideas, in which anyone can put forward a proposed solution to a problem; it becomes adopted, if at all, by acclamation and the organic spread of its usefulness.

All of the most significant open source communities have some centralized “cathedral” elements — look at the way Linus controls what goes into the Linux kernel, or the way Larry Wall controls what goes into the design of Perl. But the most successful open source communities surround that cathedral with a bazaar that is significantly open. In the case of Linux, this is the original Unix architecture, a set of “small pieces loosely joined” (to quote the title of David Weinberger’s book about the architecture of the WWW). In the case of Perl, it was CPAN, as much as anything.

Tim O’Reilly: The Architecture of Participation: 4/6/2003

In this, I think he nails why the Dean campaign was so effective utilizing Meetup.com. Meetup.com was the Dean campaign’s “bazaar” that indeed was a set of small groups, loosely joined, but united in purpose. It’s why his organization, Democracy for America, is still alive and kicking now, and if it doesn’t lose its way, will continue to do so for a long time to come.