Today, field operatives who cut their teeth in the Dean campaign are running, or playing huge roles in, several of the most important early primary and caucus campaigns for the top Democratic candidates. The way all field operatives in this campaign season work has been completely transformed by forces that were first unleashed in the Dean campaign.

Zephyr and other writers in this series have picked apart the subtleties of distributed tasks vs. distributed power and other philosophical questions. Those are important subjects. But I'd like to step back and recognize a fundamental development that first appeared in the Dean campaign that has helped to change everything about campaigns: the simple expectation that one should be able to get involved in a campaign by signing up or searching for events online.

Long before the year 2000, people were already going online to buy everything from books to airline tickets, trade baseball cards and recipes, and find roommates--or soul mates. But in the 2000 presidential election, people did not, in significant numbers, go online to volunteer--or even to donate.

In hindsight, we can see that the web was plenty "mature" enough to serve in that capacity. In December, 2000, I wrote about an experience I had, organizing smart mobs around the Florida election crisis. The events drew tens of thousands across the country, with no organizational infrastructure other than a web page and a free online listserv tool. Just a few months later, MoveOn would start to organize nationwide distributed lobbying days and, soon after, huge waves of online-organized house parties. At the same time, MeetUp was picking up steam and showing that even without any institutional impetus, people would use the web to get together in person. All of this could have played a major role in the 2000 campaign if given the chance.

But it's not fair to blame the 2000 Bush and Gore campaigns for failing to figure out how to use the web to drive organizing. Innovations online don't happen because some smart person or organization sees unrealized potential. It happens because there are thousands of people out there all trying things that, for all they know, could be really stupid ideas--it just happens that a few of them aren't. Sometimes--maybe most of the time--the most irrational, muddleheaded people are the ones who hit the jackpot.

But the Dean campaign (and don't forget the Clark campaign!) did something amazing and far ahead of its time by importing cutting edge developments in online politics as well as unleashing a wave of experimentation internal to the organization (enabled by plenty of those irrational, muddleheaded--and fabulous--people!). Even if the campaign itself had ignored the Internet altogether, a lot still would have happened on MeetUp and on the blogs. But the campaign changed everything making itself a full participant in the revolution.

Joe Trippi gets the credit for allowing that process to flourish from very early in the campaign. But dozens of staffers get the credit for getting into their cars and dropping themselves into the campaign--often without any connection to the campaign at all, let alone a job offer. And thousands of volunteers and local staff around the country get the credit for leading, in concert with the campaign, in the midst of an incredibly chaotic process.

All of these participants imported strategies and tactics that were already known to work: such as driving supporters toward online fundraising goals, and organizing supporters into face-to-face gatherings using online tools.

But they also engaged unrecognized forces. Trippi let 100 flowers bloom when it came to technology and the Internet. Sometimes is was an agonizing process.

I'll never forget the hours I spent, during my very short leave from MoveOn to visit the campaign, with one senior campaign advisor who was possessed by a particularly dumb idea. He was convinced that the campaign could get all Democratic voters (all 60 million of them!) to sign on to the Dean email list. He showed me the math on a big white board in his office:

"If our 50,000 supporters all invite five people, we'll have 250,000. If they all invite five people, then we'll have 1.25 million..." And so on.

"Why not just keep going and get everyone in the world signed up!?" I asked.

"Zack, I'm trying to be realistic," he said, missing my sarcasm.

Though not like he hoped, the supporter base did explode. By the time Iowa came, there were hundreds of thousands of people signed up on the Dean campaign central email list. Hundreds of thousands of others were engaged (probably much more engaged) through blogs, MeetUp and local email lists run by Dean staffers and volunteers. And who knows how many were just showing up for the first time, in those last exciting days, and finding a way to get involved by doing something that was almost entirely new in politics: typing in their zip codes and finding events near them.

The campaign's embrace of this new medium was four years overdue for the political world. And yet, judging by the amount of real innovation in the 2008 cycle, Dean's Internet campaign was in some ways far ahead of schedule. Either way, the campaign found itself with a massive number of active bodies on its hands in the final months of the primary campaign.

Traditional field organizers on the campaign were by in large unprepared to deal with this development. In Iowa, they tried to put them to work in productive ways, but their numbers burst the field operation at the seams and there was chaos. In New Hampshire, the crack field team mostly kept all those "Internet people" out of their operation. If the only choices, given the circumstances, were chaos with "Internet people" and organization without them, then the New Hampshire team made a good choice. And some astute observers watched with amazement as the Dean field organization in New Hampshire hung together and clawed its way back up in the polls even as Dean's immortal scream played in a continuous loop on every television channel.

When members of the New Hampshire Dean team showed up at the Kerry campaign (I showed up at the same time), some of them were still saying, "We don't want any of those Internet people."

But that changed after a few months. The lesson finally sunk in and their national field plan began to incorporate people who came into the campaign by signing up online--a group numbering in millions, if you only counted the Kerry email list, by June 2000. By my unscientific sample from several states in September and October, more than half of the people showing up at canvasses and phone banks had found their way there via the Internet.

In 2008, however, every single field plan--even those created by the most old-school of old-school field people--has been created with the expectation that a whole new population of campaign workers would be recruited through the web. Campaigns no longer see a category of "Internet people" as separate from everyone else.

Different campaigns are handling this new reality with different degrees of creativity and success, but they are all handling it. And, on the Democratic side, many of the staffers who are doing the best at this are those who got an early start in this game somewhere way back, when history was being made, in the Dean campaign of 2003 and the first days of 2004.