Good piece at Wired by Gary Wolf making the parallel between the Dean emergent democracy network and Isenberg's "Stupid Networks" concept.

Make the network stupid.

The Dean campaign is a network rather than an army, and that is one of its strengths. But it's a stupid network, and that's also a strength. Stupid is meant in the technical sense, defined by David Isenberg in his classic telephony paper, "The Rise of the Stupid Network." Isenberg advanced the principle that under conditions of uncertainty, a network should not be optimized for any set of uses presumed to be definitive. Instead, the network should be as simple as possible, with advanced functionality and intelligence moved out to its edges. For the Dean campaign, this means that hundreds of independent groups are organizing with very little direction from headquarters.

Dean's network may not be globally optimized toward getting him into office: there are likely to be hundreds or thousands of locally optimized purposes that partitions of the network dream up.