When Henry Poole met Dennis Kucinich last May, politics fused with passion and technological savvy. What emerged from the meeting was an electronic presidential campaign, run in part from a room in a house that was once Berkeley’s best-known radical commune.

“We’ve created the basic technological infrastructure for a national campaign, an online fund-raising system, e-mail, and the software for e-mail campaigns,” Poole says.

Among his creations are Kucinich’s campaign website, www.denniskucinich.us, his electronic bulletin board, us.denniskucinich.us, and a WIKI—a site each user can edit, alter, or otherwise contribute to—www.civicactions.org.

While the city on the Bay is a long way in time and space from the Oklahoma plains where Poole was born 40 years ago, politics was in his blood from the start.

... Arriving in Berkeley five years ago, he found a grand old house on Ashby Avenue that only later he discovered had once been home to the city’s notorious Red Family commune--the hotbed of revolution presided over by Chicago 7 radical and later Democratic state legislator Tom Hayden.

Poole’s revolutionary impulses follow a gentler course. Now 40, he’s a longtime member and current boardmember of the Free Software Foundation. “It’s a huge group of people working around the country on free software, which is a very important issue,” he says, quiet enthusiasm evident in his voice. [ continue reading ]

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