Protest movements as platforms

Ben Hyde commenting on John Robb's Weblog

The goal of all political activism is to activation of the political muscle of the movement. The outward facing goals are always secondary. To put it in high tech terms - the highly cohesive and activated political base is like a platform; it has no goal beyond creating a rich option space for actions and a sense of urgency to take action to execute those options.

When you create a platform you select some options and highlight them to make it easier for developers to visualize what is possible. That increases their awareness of the rich option space and it acts as an accelerant on their taking action. When you create a political movement you select issues to focus on for just those reasons; but the you have different names for the actors. Activists and voters substitute for developers and users. In both cases a modicum of fear to drive people to action can be useful; with luck you can get your competing platform/movement to do things that frighten users/voters developer/voters. Microsoft did that for open source. The current immigration crack down talk has done that for the immigrate movement.