On Opposition Researchers

Scruggs on opposition research,

The people who know how to do opposition research are organized anarchically. You cannot get them to form something like a think tank. They are a close equivalent of a volunteer fire department. Most of them have jobs and commitments outside the field of research. As another, looser metaphor, think of them as an organization of Cincinnati, who have set up their network to preclude a permanent hierarchy. Most of what it is done gets done with ad hoc leadership. This is one way to prevent institutional corruption and time serving.

Very helpful, Mr, Scruggs, thank you.

Comments

[Gerry]

Let this comment to Scruggs post, but it needs to be here too.

Continuing in analogy, you can buy them equipment, maybe a firehouse to keep it in and help them pay for their kit and training, but they are self-starting and self-organizing.

Ask the question, "What supports do they need to do this important work?" Creating the sort of training/collaboration spaces that Jay proposes would be very helpful indeed. A school with tuition and financial aid for anyone without family money seems like a great model once you have an established institution. How to get there is a more difficult matter.

I still think we need a marketplace of sorts for these sorts of initiatives. Where people can pledge support for different efforts which then trigger into action when a threshold is reached. That would be a great support system for anarchic network growth.

[phil]

Gerry, the technology for this exists, right? Chipin.com?

[Gerry]

It is starting to be. We (Jean, Arthur, me, others) view their currency platform as part of this. All sorts of systems could use that as a platform with the architectural effect like blogs, distributed control, implementation, deployment. It's the super-rss-glue that is key and must be shared by many applications and implementations.

Stand alone experiments are in place now. Scruggs mentions one in his comment to this on UFOB.