Ars Technica published a solid piece on the internal dialogue conservatives are having about the party's future. A vocal faction in the grassroots is pressing for a greater emphasis on "outside-the-beltway" input from Silicon Valley folks and others who come from a tech background rather than a political one.

It's worth noting that the folks on the left Erickson acknowledges as models actually tend to be people with political backgrounds who learned some tech, not the opposite.... You need some people with serious kung fu on your team. But that's probably not the bulk of what a tech strategy is actually going to involve. Especially if you're talking about exploiting social media, a big part of the task is leveraging tools other people have built without any particular partisan agenda. That means thinking of innovative ways to think and use existing tech more than rolling out your own redundant ideologically-branded version of a popular site. (Cf. Conservapedia.)

That last point is an important one. It's worth noting that Erick Erickson, one of the drivers behind the 'rebuild conservatism: we have the technology!' push is the founder of RedState, a me-too clone of DailyKos that launched using the same open source software platform and the same group-blog model. One of the remarkable qualities RedState has demonstrated is message discipline: members who deviate from the site's party line are blocked or banned quickly. One of the most memorable instances involved the ousting of Ron Paul supporters during the Republican primaries. Months later, they complained that they were stymied trying to find volunteers to maintain their tech infrastructure. Turns out, one of the people who'd written the software went off to help build Ron Paul's web site.

That kind of scenario implies a deeper issue that might need addressing. The political left (or at least left-of-Republicans), for all its enthusiasm towards building tools, has a long history of grass-roots organization. Even more important, it has a long history of integrating lots of diverse sub-groups with sometimes messily conflicting ideals. While that makes message discipline across an entire political party (or even a web site) difficult, it means that they are, as a group, already comfortable with the wild west nature of distributed social tools.

The right has traditionally relied on church-based social connections for its own grass roots mobilization: witness Huckabee's showing in Iowa during the primaries, based solely on canny leveraging of area churches. And the Church has faced similar challenges trying to figure out how to leverage social media tools. It came up recently in another discussion about Christian-Branded versions of sites like YouTube and Twitter.

The impulse to clone an existing "thing" and slap a culture-specific label on it is strong. Unless the people you're hoping to empower with the tools are familiar (and comfortable!) with the way they work, you're just throwing code into the wind. It's interesting to watch this kind of a discussion play out in a semi-public way; I imagine it must have been similar as political parties tried to figure out how to best leverage radio and television...

UPDATE: Erick's post on RedState is actually a better summary of the issues they're facing than my one-liner gives him credit for. He's pointing out many of the same problems with magic tech-bullets, but he engages in the traditional RedState game of "No, the LEFT is top-down, WE'RE bottom-up!" when discussing the social differences in the activist base. Ah, well...

So everyone's buzzing about the official announcement that Movable Type 4.0 is now available under the GPL license. For those who haven't been paying attention for the last couple of years, MT was the killer app for bloggers who wanted more control over their site and didn't have the time or the inclination to roll their own.

The release of Movable Type 3 alienated a lot of users by (gasp!) charging for multi-author blogs and installations with more than 3 installed blogs. It wasn't a big deal for most people, but it priced a lot of midrange hobbyists out of the MT world and set up the pins for Wordpress's ultimate domination of the universe. Movable Type remains a very strong multi-blog management system, and it has a great ecosystem of extensions. There's also a large pool of designers familiar with its purely tag-based templating language. The licensing hiccups with version 3, though, left a lot of individual users wondering if future penny-pinching would result in a squeeze for more licensing fees from smaller blogs.

The official release of MT4 under the GPL eliminates that fear, and opens up potential for adaptation and enhancement that's previously been off-limits. While MT's source code has always been available and hackable for its customers and users, it was "free as in beer," not "free as in speech." In other words, the modifications I made to enhance it couldn't be distributed to other users as "Enhanced Movable Type," nor could I distribute a copy of MT pre-configured with popular extensions.

While this isn't a big deal for many users, it's a big deal for interoperability with other GPL projects like Joomla! and Drupal. Those projects can now legally build bridges to the MT sourcecoude, integrating MT blogs into larger solutions like portal sites and intranets. It will also make the next version of Gutenberg, my Movable Type compatibility theme for Drupal, quite a bit easier to maintain. Why? I'll be able to legally include some of the MovableType base stylesheets in the Gutenberg download, making that theme usable from the moment it's installed, rather than pointing users to a separate download. It's a small step, but an important one, towards making multiple blogging systems compatible with each other for designers.

This principle goes both ways -- it's now possible for SixApart to make use of a large pool of GPL code that's in use in the wild. While I'm sure that wasn't their motivation, it's a nice door to have open. For companies like SixApart, where hosted services and corporate support contracts are the primary revenue stream, this approach is win-win. While it may not bring the legions of WordPress users back to the fold, it's a great moment for SixApart and Open Source software.

When you're working on a really, really good team with great programmers, everybody else's code, frankly, is bug-infested garbage, and nobody else knows how to ship on time. When you're a cordon bleu chef and you need fresh lavender, you grow it yourself instead of buying it in the farmers' market, because sometimes they don't have fresh lavender or they have old lavender which they pass off as fresh.

--Joel Spolsky

It's always fun discovering bugs in your code that make you wonder, 'How did this ever work?' It's like going on a road trip, and noticing a funny chunka-chunka-chunka noise your car makes whenever you take it over 65mph. You get home, and you take it to the mechanic and they open the hood and say, 'Oh, well, here's your problem. The engine's been replaced by a wedge of cheese.'

On the one hand, it's comforting that the solution is so simple. On the other hand, it raises a troubling question: 'How the frack did I drive 450 miles in a cheese-powered car?" It takes a while to regain one's trust in the idea of a predictable universe.

So we're fortunate enough to be working with Oracle at work this week. Oracle, for those not in the know, is a database system created with the sole intent of demoralizing its users and funding the construction of second homes for 'Oracle Consultants.'

During the installation process -- the installation, mind you -- I encountered the following error. Clearly, it is a model of brevity and simplicity.