In The Wiki-Way to the Nomination, New York Times writer Noam Cohen writes that the grassroots, bottom-up style of organization that Barack Obama’s campaign – and the candidate himself – have embraced may make him the first “wiki-candidate”.

What sets him apart is his openness to contributions from those working outside the campaign organization. As he described it to a Time magazine reporter last week, “We just had some incredibly creative young people who got involved and what I think we did well was give them a lot of latitude to experiment and try new things and to put some serious resources into it.”

Mr. Obama’s notion of persistent improvement, both of himself and of his country, reflects something newer — the collaborative, decentralized principles behind Net projects like Wikipedia and the “free and open-source software” movement. The qualities he cited to Time to describe his campaign — “openness and transparency and participation” — were ones he said “merged perfectly” with the Internet. And they may well be the qualities that make him the first real “wiki-candidate.”

(via theConnectedRepublic.org)