Personal Democracy Forum
Day One - June 23, 2008
Lincoln Center, New York City
Opening remarks
Micah Sifry
Reboot the political system, applications are not responding – white house, congress, city hall, mainstream media
We’re already seeing these effects – small-donor fundraising has affected this race
The media is starting to open up
Thanks to the social web, we have systems for identifying and spreading important news
Makes it harder to do one thing and say another
The transparency movement is making Congress open up
Changes are bubbling up into the governments
Bureaucrats are blogging, and agencies are responding to comments on their blog
Citizens as co-creators of government
More questions than answers
The wisdom of crowds, we have a wise crowd here
Zephr Teachout
Howard Dean ‘04
Arendt says that a democratic system brings the ability for each person to renew
Witman: “I sing the body electric”
Technology won’t unfold democracy by itself
The future will be a function of what we choose to value
There is a good future and a nightmare future
Two kinds of innovation: An industrial way vs a democratic way
Both are very American
Industry praises efficiency, the cleverness of extracting resources – talking in numbers is the language of industry, x million in facebook, y in fundraising
Allocating labour, what are the untapped labours
In democratic mode, we’re interested in allocating power, citizens instead of volunteers
Use technology not to build industrial campaigns, but architectures wehre people have power and the ability to begin
The model: American associations, (Europeans didn’t have them, de Tocqueville noted them)
Big, small, commercial, recreation
1955: 5% were presidents of a volunteer associations
The power to change the structure of society, these 5% have access to a channel of power
Group-forming
Right now, massive transporation changes
80 years ago, there would have been many, many small groups across the country lobbying for changes
Now, this is even easier. Measure the internet by this standard: how many local groups have occurred? How many bus riders know they have the power to begin?
The question today: is what being distributed industrial or democratic? Tasks or citizenship? Does it cross class?
Ends with Whitman poem: “As I Walk These Broad, Majestic Days.”
How to visualalize the poticalize blogosphere
Anthony Hamelle
Linkfluence
We’re used to the geography of traditional politics
It’s easy to see influence with physical crowds
How do we do this on the internet? We’re a research institute specializing in the social web
We have web territories, represented here as nodes
Use social graph theories to track the influence of websites
<shows graph>
Conserative blogs are slightly more influential than liberal, in terms of links
We measure by linkbacks, like Google.
For the Dem primaries, lots of candidates got traffic, but only Obama’s had influence, was being linked back – now all the candidates are doing this
Another graph showing the interest of keywords among conservative and liberal blogs (e.g. “public financing)
Matthew Hurst
Microsoft Live Labs
When worlds collide: social media, mainstream media, and politics
What can we do if we aggregate all the social network data out there?
Blog 101: when you post, there is a lot of information – the title, the content, the location, what else has been published, etc
<variety of graphs showing interconnectedness of blog>
Dem and GOP bloggers, talk about their blogs and their parties. They both are really concerned with keeping their parties true to its ideological bases - apparently moderates don't bother blogging?
A new media system? Or old wine in new bottles?
Chuck
Defeo
Townhall.com
Republican
1765: John Adams enters political life, a dissertation on the canon and feudal law, all about power. The people try to place limits on those in power, but they always try to shake it off. Loved the press – it should be easy, cheap and safe for anyone to present their thoughts to the public. Sounds a lot like blogs.
After that, we had a consolidation of media. Adams didn’t say we need 1 paper per town, or 3 networks. He said any person. This didn’t happen until the internet.
This is the many-to-many model. Phones are one-to-one, tv is one-to-many. Many2many is a lot more complicated.
1960 was the tv election – when will the internet election come? We never should have been waiting for that moment. It was a bad moment. It meant one too many dominated our system. It meant candidates talked at the audience, instead of a dialogue.
When I was in college, I wanted to go to DC, that was the arena of ideas. That’s no longer true. Democracy as a rich core surrounded by a collection of individual diversity. TV brought us the core, now we can lift up that individual diversity and spread it to a mass scale.
It’s only been 12 years since 1996. This is still really early.
Now that we have more people participating, is it good for our nation? I don’t think there is much more apathy left in this country, on the left or the right. I would also say that core is strengthened and maybe expanding as greater communication happens.
What’s lost in the crumbling of the one-to-many model is the ability for a limited few to control what we believe to be true. I could go back to Plato or Voltaire: this ideal has been laid out for centuries, but now we can achieve. The revolution is happening, and we’re all part of it.
Arianna Huffington
Huffington Post
A new media system? Or old wine in new bottles?
It’s a mix, it’s not entirely new wine. This is good, there are things worth preserving. We try to keep these best elements at the Huffington Post – through things like fact-checking. The old media has given up the pursuit of truth for fake neutrality. E.g. global warming. We wasted years debating global warming. Again and again the war in Iraq is being presented as a mixed big – this is like a doctor telling you have a cancer, but your acne is cleared and you saying the diagnosis is a mixed bag.
New media: transparency, accountability, community.
At the Huffington, everybody knows which writers were supporters and donors to Obama. This is better than Washington journalists pretending to be neutral and then using anonymous sources to reflect their own bias. This happened during the leadup to the war when a journalist refered to Libby as a ‘former hill staffer’.
It’s not enough to break a story and tell the truth once, you need to follow the story. This is where the OCD new media plays a role, as opposed to the ADHD of the old media.
Community is a great gift of new media. We make great efforts to preserve a civil community. We have 30 part-time comment moderators. The anonymity of the internet is problematic – we haven’t found a technical way to do this.
If you want an example of how things go wrong, it comes down to human nature. The more access bloggers are given, the more tempted they are to profit from this access. If you want to see the fall of a great journalist, look at Bob Woodward. Went from dethroning a president, to supporting and enabling an immoral war. Given unfetter acess to the white house, and completely missed the story. Awed by access to power. He later claimed that Bush changed, not that his reporting was biased. This shows how journalists really believe they’re not neutral.
Q&A
What’s an example of how you’ve done better?
Huff: We stay on the story. Lou Dobbs Watch keeps track of his lies. We hire professional journalists to break stories.
Is there evidence that outsiders are reading your content?
Huff: Perez Hilton linked to us, and 8% of those people stayed on as readers. New content brings new readers all the time.
What keeps blogs from becoming the new talk radio?
Chuck: It’s difficult to establish the truth.
Huff: Truth is non-controversial. The right used to criticize the left for being relativist, and look now. We keep hearing how we don’t know whether Iraq is a success, etc.
The traditional media is quite nationalist – will new media shake that?
Chuck: the infrastructure isn’t there (he seems to think non-nationalist means Iran, China, N Korea)
Huff: global communication is happening. Facebook, blogs. When I go abroad, I see a longing to re-embrace America. Obama’s face drives newspaper circulation in the UK.
Clay Shirkey
Politics as if everybody can participate
Thesis of the book: Group action just got easier. Transaction costs have been so high historically. Internet & mobile phones lowers transaction costs, so there’s an explosion.
Politics is not governance. Governing takes place away from the political arena. So how do we harness these tools?
On 2006 on Livejournal, there was a post for a flashmob in Belarus. They walked around downtown Minsk eating ice cream. Black-clad secret police dragged them away. The problem with the group eating ice cream wasn’t ice cream, but the group – no organizations allowed in October Square. The dictator learned his lessons from other democratizations. I can block the area of political expression, the public square. There was no secret to penetrate. When they entered the Square, they weren’t a group, so couldn’t be stopped. This people took a tool that in the west is for bored hipsters, and turned into a source of political action.
Media holds out the possibility of co-ordinatin. Media leads actions, action leads media. They brought their cameras, wanted the state to react in realtime, document it and spread it to the world.
Lots of examples: 40K kids in LA walked out against immigration reform, Facebook organizing against the Canadian DMCA. Most of the stories of real-world collective action rely on stop action. Getting an external group to capitulate in someway. Is it just that it’s easier to stop things than start things?
The amount of starting and sustaining energy is astonishing in the organization of subcultures. Lego figure modding, homeschool buyers co-op, Tax almanac wiki.
This is still a collective action problem: everyone benefits from the gains – everyone will benefit when the Belarussian dictatorship falls. So it’s hard to see the benefits.
Classic example of collective action: barn-raising. Not a commercial transaction. Why would I spend my labour on it? I owe you a favour, or vice versa. Barn-raising happens in a community where the density of mutual favours is enough to act as a support for collective action. Also, contuinity – you’ll still be around in a year. This sounds exactly like the opposite of the internet.
I don’t know what it will take to bring this density and continuity, but I have a hypothesis. In 198x, Xerox delivered a printer to MIT without a manual. Richard Stallman saw this as a bad future, started the Free Software Foundation and open source. This licensing regime (copyleft, viral license) allows open software to work. This regime is missing in lots of other collective action.
What would “licensing” look like for other collective action? Some examples: Do Tank, virtual corporations in Vermount. Corporations is how states recognize the work of groups. There are costs – filings, structures, etc. to get state recognition. This project (David Johnson) allows state recognition of virtual corporations – online filing, no HQ, etc.
Community interest companies. Lots of shareholders care about ethics, but law doesn’t – a new owner can change direction. This allows permanent, non-revocable social goals for corporations – irrerversible for future owners.
Meetup is working on something…allowing groups to co-ordinate. Atheist alliance international. They can lobby for policy outcomes, but they can also create outcomes. Imagine in Jimmy Wales had to protest outside Britannica to get the wikipedia he wanted.
Question: How do we take the energy for production and sharing in groups and take it to the real world? If we don’t, this is only a partial revolution
Internet directors
campaign – people from each campaign (Obama, Clinton, Edwards, McCain, Paul, Romney + 1 other)
Did your candidate understand the importance of the internet?
All panelists: yes.
Was it Obama’s decision not to engage with netroots blogging?
That’s not our strategy.
Why does Obama have more facebook friends than McCain?
Just because you don’t facebook supporters doesn’t mean you dno’t have supporters. Obama beats McCain 4 to 1 on facebook friends, but they’re tight in the polls.
Official campaigns are less important than in previous elections, independent supporters doing their own thing are getting more power
What technical feature impressed you the most about an opponent?
All: the Obama distributed call center.
Edwards manager: “McCain doesn’t use a computer.”
McCain manager: “You don’t need to use a computer to understand how the internet works”
Crowd laughs.
Edwards manager: “Try explaining Facebook, Twitter, Google to your grandmother and see how that works..”
Crowd: ooooooo
Online voting?
Paul manager: Not a high enough time cost, people won’t take it seriously.
We still don’t know whether this is a new tool, or actually transformative.
Breakout session: Data geeks unite! Building the new tools for getting out the vote, getting out corruption, and going hyperlocal
Catalist
Mission: to build permanent infrastructure for progressive campaigns and candidates. State of the art tools. Using lifestyle data, niche marketing. Works for clients such as congressional campaigns. Ran an application that allowed people to check if they are duly registered to vote. Taking silos of data that exist across organizations (and internal departments) to create a virtual data warehouse. Can run data sets to see overlaps in different variables: e.g. Republicans and indepdents in NH who value choice.
Sunlight
Digitizing more data, making data more accessible, interoperable and fun. Good interaction between developers and other staff. Biggest non-profit funder of database sets? Have an open API. It’s not about access to our data, but a layer to create a directory of datasets, so they don’t need the overhead costs. Creates a widget which can be embedded into any site to show information on congressional reps.
Really into restful web services. Using REST to make data pages accessible, interoperable.
Outside.in
Indexing the internet by location. Claims to be “post-editorial” but only allows people to post content within the US. Cares about neighbourhoods, not geodata.
Voter Genome Project
Dems have won on open connectivity, but have lost on proprietary tools. The collapse of ACT systems lost the election for Kerry. Dems paid $12/vote, while GOP paid $3/vote. V from Vendetta quote. Dems do not have a system adequate for a national micro-targeting effort in 2008. Systems need to be truly open, affordable, open to quality control, encouraging innovation. Us + Catalist is 50 people, but that’s not nearly enough people for this kind of data. Shows slides from Scent of a Woman and the Devil’s Advocate. Private vs public voter file: what kind of leaders will they produce? How will they use the information? Control vs capability. Whose party is this? It’s one thing to not sell your data to republicans, but what about competing Democrats in primaries? Wont you be tempted (like Keanu in the Devil’s Advocate). This will determine who leads our party.
Q: Where do you draw the line?
A: Personally, I would put all data out there.
Q: Who pays for it then?
A: The DNC has already paid for it. So publish it. Datasets are not patentable/copyrightable – there’s a reason for that.
Q: Isn’t this data subject to commercial licenses?
Sunlight: Biggest challenge is reported vs generated data. Generated data comes automatically from transactions, while reported data is self-reported, needs a lot of uptake, less accurate. Instead of creating a new reported dataset, we should work on cleaning up generated data, because it’s falling from the sky. Once that’s done, we can talk about what reported data needs to be addressed.
Breakout
session: Profiles in anti-competition
Adam Green
Civic Communications Director, MoveOn.Org
Moderator
Why is wireless spectrum important? Right now there is a guy inventing a program that would allow to scan the barcodes of products and give you all kinds of consumer information. These kinds of applications haven’t come along because the phone companies have an iron grip on wireless, and only allow profitable applications. My goal here is to find more useful examples of this kind of innovation which is being held back.
Amol Sarva
Wireless Founders Coalition
It’s hard to think of an industry as uncompetitive as wireless. My spiel is about the 700mhz spectrum. Used to be tv spectrum, they decommissioned. The best spectra are the low ones, go through walls, etc.
So if this spectrum is open, why not make it do some good, not just focus on profit? Cell phones are not open. Widely-reported that Google bid on the spectrum. Super-exciting year, new open access restrictions, but sad ending. Google put in minimum bid, Verizon paid more (but still less than market value), it’s over. Now we have to hope Verizon follows these rules.
Christopher Libertelli
General Counsel, Skype
Skype allows people to talk on the internet for free. Runs on Windows, Windows Mobile, Mac, Linux. That platform-independent approach is what we’re trying to bring to mobile. The history of new technologies pushing out old is a long and sad one. Edison’s phonograph challenged player pianos, AM was threatened by FM. Right now, wireless is threatening revenue streams. Skype filed a petition known as Skype Carterfone petition. Carterfone decision opened up terminal equipment to competition. This is not true of wireless.
Digital controls and legal controls through terms of use. The 700mhz auction is a step forward, but only a first step. Consumer choice and competition are two issues. Also an FTC issue, but my company is 3.5 years old, but it would take as long to get through this complaint.
Mary Hodder
Napsterization
A place where people can share and recommend videos. Spider the web, index it (like Google) – but videos are different. Video-hosting companies prevent this spiders. We made informal deals because they trust us. They haven’ given the data to Google, because they’re terrified of Google. Google announced it was starting video search. But I knew this wouldn’t work, no access to data. This announcement worked to freeze funding through, since no one believed Google couldn’t do it.
Example: Comcast blocking p2p protocols. The wireless internet is closed, and now so is wired. Couple years ago, phone/cable companies announced that certain companies could pay a premium to get preferential treatment on bandwidth. Have to cut a deal. They could do this because of political influence and limited competiton – at my house, only 2 options. Companies are saying that we don’t need to worry about competition, since we have the ATC.
Problems: antitrust law has been abandoned by this administration. Even if it’s not anticompetitive, it’s discriminatory.
Comcast: Last year, a guy in Oregon name Rob was trying to share a public domain video over Gnutella, determind it was being blocked. AP confirmed this with tryin to share the KJV. Torrents are used for both legal and illegal purposes. These protocols compete with the cable companies online and offline services, so a competitive threat. NASA uses bittorrent to deliver HD photos of space. This does not compete, therefore doesn’t trigger antitrust.
Beyond competition and innovation, we have freedom of speech. Antitrust rules not concerned with this. PCF uses bittorrent for its 3500 Miro channels. These users are not interested in economics, it’s a non-profit. These creators and consumers would not be protected under anticompetition. Need a broad, open neutrality principle.
2 problems with Skype: contractal agreements, where ToS prohibits voip. Secondly, cripples handsets, just handset manufacturers and carriers collaborate.
Carterphone: allowed other companies to compete with ATT’s phones, brought us the modem, brought us the internet.
What is the policy solution? What should the FCC do?
-impose on all spectrum carterfone requirements
-impose it on new spectrum only
Wifi is an unlicensed band. As long as the manufacturer respects the rules, no license needed to create devices. Tons of spectrum in the TV space that could be used for unlicensed data.
Other things that have been blocked: slingbox. Verizon blocked them, MPAA sued them for forwarding your own tv to your phone.
Miro is competitive with a lot of small companies – this gets them access to GNU code, and allows “investors” to write off their donations. This angers startups, who want to complain to the IRS that Miro is competing with for-profits. This is another form of anti-competitve behaviour.
What rules are in the new Verizon spectrum?
They’re pretty vague. I should be able to create something and put it out there. We’re skeptical because of the death the local caller competiotn (CLIC) thing in the 90s. This is too easy to kill.
ODI is Verizon’s new “open” system. But it’s still permission-based. CLIC was hundreds of regulations, ODI is down to 50. But still a problem.
We need regulation. We can’t trust corporations to get religion. Need the threat of regulation.
USA is 15th in the world in terms of broadband adoption.
Why isn’t Silicon Valley stepping up to the political game?
-libertarianism
-benefits spread over millions of people, low per capita benefit
-new companies “don’t want to act like incumbents”
-you need to form PACs and give money to get influence – this is repugnant
-VCs and the tech communities think that “we can route around” regulation
Plenary session: Interview with Elisabeth Edwards (wife of John) via Skype
Discussion re: the primaries, a lot of complaining about “the mainstream media”.
Day Two - June 24, 2008
Day Two
Michael Waldman
Brennan Center for Justice @ NYU Law
Brennan Center: public policy think thank, litigates for habeus corpus (Gtmo) and voting rights.
Named after Justice Brennan, great liberal justice who thought the constitution was a living document.
This book offers solutions and to inject people into the dialogue. This title is homage to the pamphlet the Thomas Paine pamphlet “Common Good” (sense?) – proposed the idea about consented to being governed.
Democracy & its health is not just one issue on a laundry list, it’s the issue and it always has been. It’s a thrilling time – the rise in voting rates, the explosion of small donors, level of energy & activism. That’s the good news.
The bad news: the systems through which we express this will are broken. Public trust lower than Watergate. Number of lobbyists has tripled.
It was Mark Twain, not Jon Stewart, who said there is no American criminal class besides Congress – so this isn’t a new problem.
Changes comes in radical shifts – evolution doesn’t happen over million years, comes in big changes. George W Bush has created the atmosphere for this change in the US. We need an inventory of ways our system does and does not work. This book goes through 7 specific steps that would help change the country.
#1: Voting system is rife with disenfranchisement. Florida in 2000, Ohio in 2004. A solution is now available thanks to information technology: we can move to universal voter registration. This is how other countries operate. There is a list thanks to the Help America Vote Act. If you’re on the list, you vote – if not, you can add yourself on election day. This is the law in 8 states now. This kind of system could add 50 million voters. The Brennan Center is pushing with over groups for this kind of legislation. This proposal is the centerpiece.
Electronic voting: we convened a group of computer scientists, they agreed the system is completely insecure. Another thing we can do is change election day. There’s nothing in the constitution re: Tuesday in November – this is an agrarian practice, since the Sunday was the Sabbath and you needed a full day ride to get to the county seat. Why not have mail-in ballots? All kinds of problems with people working, distances.
Campaign finance: we have the craziest system in the world. Candidates spend more than 50% of their time fundraising, to pay for airtime that’s free everywhere else. This, of course, leads to corruption.
Despite Obama, on Capitol Hill, the small donor revolution is just a rumour. 90% of contributions is coming from lobbyists. We support moving to public financing – this works in Maine, other states, and the presidential campaigns for 30 years. The first 5 elections on fundraising, 3 times an incumbent was defeated. No congressional district is this competitive.
There’s a new bill in the Senate which would create a big block of public funding – this would be good, but just a start. Could still have freedom for small donors: allow up to $100. Or, like in municipal NYC elections, personal contributions are matched (at a ratio of 4 to 1). This doesn’t end corruption, but it forces politicians to do grassroots organizing.
Imagine the combination of universal voter registration and public financing.
Electoral college: 4 times the popular vote winner has not been elected president. This isn’t partisan – in 2004, Bush beat Kerry by 2M votes, but Kerry came quite close in electoral college. The system allows campaigning in a very small number of states. This book looks at campaign time & money in the past 5 weeks of the election – very narrow number of states.
Make every vote count, give every citizen an incentive to be engaged. Constitutional amendment could abolish electoral college, but also can get around this by the state compact of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Make the college something we learn about in civics class.
Q: Gerrymandering? Is this on the list?
A: We talk about it in the book. Another way the system is rigged. Gerrymandering has got a lot easier thanks to computers – used to be rare, required a lot of skill, now really easy. Tom Delay engineered a mid-census, mid-term gerrymander in Texas. SCOTUS approved. How can the process be changed? Take the linedrawing out of the hands of politicians. Create a commission, like Iowa or Arizona (more competitive races here). Proposals have died on the ballot. It needs to be bipartisan and nationwide. Side note: prisoners are counted where they are incarcerated, not where they are from, so even though they don’t vote, the population counts are distorted, the NY state senate is Republican when really it should be Democrat by a narrow margin.
Q: These boundaries are clearly being violated in gerrymandering.
A: Yep.
Q: What do you think about citizens’ assembly re-districting?
A: I have to count myself as ignorant on this topic, but some proposals are coming closer to that model with more randomness.
Q: What’s the role of technology in universal voter registration?
A: Technology has made it possible. It can also help build a political network to pass this. There are endless ways to create this list. They are flawed, we’ve been fighting these problems – so you don’t get disenfranchised by a typo. There are ways to use existing lists, so no privacy violations. Also could use census date, like in Massachusetts.
We are trying to launch an interactive discussion on our website. Bloggers should sign up for our mailing list.
Q: The expansion in the contributor base is a good thing, but the vast majority of people have never donated. We are working to make it easier for people to donate and comply with FEC and county rules. This is my URL.
A: Awesome.
Q: I’m from readthebill.org. the FISA process shows that Democrats are just as willing as Republicans to fast-forward the process. We want to require more time to read the bills, post them online. Do you support that?
A: There would be details, but that sounds like good common sense. When I worked for CongressWatch, access to the bill determined power. Is 72 hours enough?
Q: We’re giving out books in exchange for your signature!
Q: I live overseas, fascinated by universal voter registration. I hope you have lots of strategies. Overseas and military voters are being disenfranchised – people don’t realize that you keep your voting abilities (not like the UK, where it entrophies). What people don’t realize is if you have children overseas and they are Americans, they have to pay US taxes. However, these children born abroad can’t vote, despite being Americans. Please add this to your list of electoral concerns.
Q: I like these policies – but they all seem contrary to the interests of candidates. Do we need more citizen instruments, like referenda in California?
A: In those states, that’s often the best way to do it. But some redistricting referenda have been doomed by vested interests and money in the same way as elections. We need a lot of strategies.
Q: What are some examples of where citizens have managed to this done? These proposals come all the time, nothing every happen.
A: At the national level, not much progress, but lots of innovation at state level. Often because of a scandal. In Conneticut, the governor went to jail – so citizen groups could push the legislature to impose campaign finance on themselves. In Arizona, clean money laws were put on the books by referendum. Since Florida 2000, more people are starting to understand the problem with e-voting machines. We supported a bill which required paper trails – this was blocked at local levels, but across the country, groups pushed local Secretaries of State. When it comes to the issues, there is no Dems or GOP, just an incumbency party. But at the same time, lots of politicians would love to be a in a different system- if they could shake off the incentives.
We are launching our website today, brennancenter.com, please let us hear your opinions and those of your readers.
Douglas Rushkoff
Open Source Democracy
The construction of personal democracy: looked at in certain ways, this is actually the problem. There is no personal democracy, it’s an oxymoron. The illusion of personal democracy has been an obstacle to true democracy. Both of these ides come to use from the Renaissance. The idea that all these innovations were based on is the notion of the individual. So the rights of democracy that came out were also individual-focused. The Enlightenment was the expression of individual white men. For every enhancement of the rights of the individual came an increase in central authority – divide and conquer. The less collective consciousness, the more we are out for our personal stakes and self-interest.
The media, from the printing press onto all our top-down media, is great for projecting mythology that support this idea of self. This is why we live in the age of branding – speaks to the individual. Movements are about appealing to the individual inside each of us. It’s not the network, it’s the people. The problem with all these motivations is that they are desocializing and individuating. That’s the nature of branding. You can’t sell me jeans if I already have other great things.
There’s abstract hope for movements like Obama, but also personal interests. Is there a place for me in this?
The value in my Renaissance, the value comes from the periphery, not the center. You don’t’ create value by going to DC and working in the Oval Office. That’s a myth. The real glory would be tiny, small, real things. The glory is in the doing. Not the narrative of crisis, climax, release – it’s continual participation.
The introduction of the printed word freed us from hieroglyphics. But it didn’t bring literacy, it brought the ability to hear – the priest would recite the Torah. Real people fell behind the promise of their renaissance. God said to Abraham: you shall be a nation of priests – so people who can write and read. The printing press brought us an elite of writers and more readers. Now we’ve got the computer, and everyone can blog. Writing is not the tool that’s being offered. The medium is programming. If we think writing is the main promise, we’ve lost it again. It was the last renaissance’s promises, and we need to take it, but it’s really programming. Writing is like voting, provides feedback, easy to do. Not just enough to write, but to reprogram the culture we live in. It can be changed, is not a product of nature. The goal of the Obama movement should not be to be part of the administration, but to change the way we vote.
Consider yourself invoked.
The Rise of a Civic Generation
Former policy advisor to Al Gore, new book Millienial Makeover
I have more optimistic commentary than Doug. There have been influential generations before (Civil War) and they’ve been able to reshape America. This is one of those generations, this is going to happen again.
Millenials: bought between 1982-2003. There are 100M in US, 1/3 of all Americans. Largest generation in American history. Ranks are swelling through immigration, and relative strength increasing as other generations pass. 40M eligible in this election, and their participation is getting higher (just ask HRC). Rates have been going up steeply since 9/11 and are predicted to be on par with older generations soon. The GI generation voted twice as high as its parents, and did so for the duration of its existence.
If you think about FDR and radio, Nixon and television, this is the pattern we have in the book. This technology helps a new generation mobilize in a way the older generation doesn’t get, so they have more influence as the change occurs.
We predicted this political makeover last year based on a theory of cyclical generations – put forward previously in the book “Generations”. The Greatest Generation helped conquer the Great depression and fascism. The next generation, 1925-41 is little known – only generation not to have elected one its own as president (except maybe McCain). Next come Baby Boomers, the idealists. Their arrival in America brought the movements and causes of feminism, Vietnam, civil rights. While we associate generations with new movements, but they are usually split between those favouring the new and the old (this is why we now have the culture wars). Next, Gen X, 1966-1982: small in numbers, withdrawn from the public battlefield, focus on things closer to them. Finally, the civic generation – it has group orientation, believes in collective action. Wants to rebuild institutions that declined in previous 40 years.
1968: our last realignment, 40 years ago. Liberals remember this well, but Dubya and Bill Clinton were both boomers. Nixon did win. This tremendous conflict produces gridlock thanks to two parties trying to impose their ideologies on everyone.
Heckler: Half the boomers couldn’t vote in 1968.
Morley: I know. They’re still influential, like the millenials now.
Compares magazine covers from 1990 and 2000 to show contrast between Gen X and Millenials. Gen Xers wear black, don’t look at each other. Mills are hugging, we are bright colours.
Millenials: they are more ethnically diverse in US history – 40% have non-white background. This has a tolerant attitude to divisive issues. They are Democrats by 2 to 1. This is not a matter of youthful enthusiasm – these margins didn’t exist for Gen Xers. First generation in 40 years to have a plurality identifying as liberal-progressive.
So this election will be a civic makeover. People in both parties will have a positive attitude towards the process, high turnout rates, less ticket-splitting. Independents will not determine the election, since they are in decline.
Civic realignments focus on long-standing economic issues and political institutions, foreign policy. Percentage of wealth held by top 1% was sharply reduced in 1932. Claire McCaskill forget about gays and guns, focused on minimum wage. She won, the country moved on.
Millenials’ optimism will allow us to overcome the greatest challenges we face.
Lawrence Lessig
Stanford Centre for Internet and Society / Change Congress
Deity
Going to take about a problem, your problem, our problem, a pattern we’ve gotten used to. The pattern of 4s: every 4th year, there is an explosion of democratic activity, and we go back to sleep. As if in 1 year, we can save us. But it won’t. The problem is we depend too much on this 1 year. We need something better than a Thursday night out.
Framers of US constitution were obsessed with independence (of 1785, not 1776). The dream of the republic was going to be a failure. An extraordinary corruption was going to seep through the nation. A lack of dependence had been lost. They sought non-independent representatives. Institutions and constitutions against dependence.
They failed. Many were drawn to govt for venal reasons. Webster was paid by a bank while Congress was considering regulation. Bribery not a crime in 1853. 19th century was awful. No golden past. Today is better.
Even though today, the individuals are better, the problem is much worse. Because, govt is much more significant. Critical to national problems, more pervasive. Returns are higher for lobbying than competition.
This the dependence the founders feared. Reagan: democracy only works until voters give themselves largesse. But the problem is not the poor stealing from the rich- it’s the opposite. It’s the rich using power to capture government and steal from the poor. AS long as we have private funding of public elections, this corruption will continue. Even among good people.
So what? What are the harms?
Telecommunications act: vice-president Gore wanted to restructure, deregulate. But how can we raise money from the telecoms if we deregulate them?? For those on the right: how much extortion spending is out there? How much are you willing to tolerate for private funding? For the left, the concern is the wrong answer.
There are easy answers. 2+2=4. Spent a decade fighting copyright term extension. My question: does it advance the public good? Milton Friedman signed our brief say it didn’t - this was a ‘no brainer’.
Nutrition: WHO set standards on nutrition, 10% of daily caloric income from sugar. Sugar industry went ballistic, members of Congress threatened pulling funding from WHO. So nutrition board set the standard at 25%. This is an awful diet. This is an easy question done wrong.
Global warming. Consensus on main issues. 0 peer-review articles questioned this consensus. 53% of popular media articles did. Govt got this wrong. Core questions.
This is a profound cost on the way government interacts with our society. It’s not just a problem of big govt or wrong answers. It destroys the conditions for trust.
Dissenting view on a report on the health of stroke drug. It was purged. The company behind the drug had given the AHA $11M. Everyone knew this eroded trust. Compare this to politcs.
March 4: reject telco FISA immunity. June 20: passed. 20 members changed vote, why? The contributions from the industry for these 20 members is double that of those who didn’t. Maybe they were honest, but how can the public believe?
This is the condition for trust.
We need more than Thursdays, ever four years. We need more than hope, we need a sustained effort. Not just Change, but Change Congress. Bipartisan reform movement. Leverage the reform work of others, a Google mashup. New tools and GNU tools.
There’s a voluntary pledge, like with Creative Commons. Give those in power a chance. We need to go tag the people who won’t take the pledge. Make a map of the answers to these questions. Target and fund this reform.
I come here because this project requires you and your skill. In order to build this system, we need the insight from this movement. We need you to join us.
End: There is a flaw, a dependency. We won’t Change this dependency through Thursdays. We need to break our dependency on these Thursdays, this thunder, if we’re going to break their dependency on money.
Think about alcoholism. We all know of pain from this dependency. An alcoholic knows he can’t solve other problems until he solves alcoholism. Not the most important problem, but the first. This is the same. Let’s fix this problem first.
Jonathan Adelstein
Commissioner, Federal Communications Commission
We need affordable, hispeed connections to every American. It’s the biggest infrastructure challenge of our age. We need to make sure everyone benefits. The market doesn’t necessarily allocate internet as it should.
All the big issues of 08 election are linked to internet: outsourcing, economy, health care, education, public safety.
The benefits of internet are much bigger than simple profits. Opening up government is one of these externalities.
3 million people contacted us to block media conglomeration. Lessig was right about corporate influence – the act I oversees mentions the public interest 112 times, but doesn’t matter.
Let’s have real peer-reviewed data when evaluating media ownership. Let’s draw on the wisdom of crowds. Bring the energy of 08 campaign to open up government.
Steven Clift
Edemocracy.org
Tons and tons of other countries have all kinds of government services available online that are superiour to the US. Estonia, Mongolia, Poland, Australia. In Estonia, you can easily find out all the government data held on you across 75 agencies. Maybe 50 years of communism helped them get the point.
Blogs are great, but we need to be able to interact with government that we own.
Lessons to share:
-those in power will not open up unless they are required to. Executive orders, rules, legislation. We need to express a demand.
-the US is #1 in e-politics, making noise and raising money. But that’s a mismatch. Politics is geographical, but our expression is national, so there’s a disconnect.
-candidates need to make commitments to e-democracy before election day. Fresh office-holders have 6 months to move before the borg absorbs them.
-open meetings. It’s pretty obvious this should be openly shared. Agenda, minutes, all should be online. Digital recordings of ALL meetings.
- e-notification. Timely access to information. Google Alerts for government information .
-public hearings online. Aggregate opinions through something like rating. This should be required.
-more projects like Open House Project – electronic barn-raisings. It’s an embarrassment we need to rely on scrapers, instead of government putting their data out there.
-connect the interventionists.
Millions of people are moving their lives online. Government needs to come to us online. They must be able to listen. Our generation(s) has an opportunity to make democracy work better. Stop pushing the delete button on democracy.
Shelia Campbell
USA.gov
Shows slides of future USA.gov.
Challenges:
-24,000 govt websites, some with more than 1M pages each
-common problem: walls of text talking about how great website is, since they are treated as a PR websites (possibly due to staff coming from campaigns)
-people want to accomplish small tasks, they are productivity losses if they can’t get them done quickly
Civic Technologies and the Future of the Internet
Jonathan Zittrain
Harvard Berkman Center / Oxford Internet Institute
Civic technology: succeeds to the extent that people are willing to make it succeed
Non-civic: succeeds if people aren’t that in to it
Web: you don’t know how many people are online – unlike Compuserve and AOL, where they needed to track time usage
Hourglass architecture diagram
Internet routing is like crowdsurfing, passing the packets along – this is an insane way to build a network
Have to trust strangers to help you without contract, just because it’s a neighbourly thing to do
The internet relies on neighbourliness to defend itself
Pakistan ordered ISPs to block Youtube. One ISP sent the signal out that it was Youtube, so became a destination for all packets. Within 10 mins, youtube was unavailable to the entire world. The most popular website, the biggest company shut down by a single ISP because it lied to the mosh pit.
NANOG – North American Network Operators Group – strategized how to deal with this, the Thin Nerdy Line. Not just true for tech stuff, also civic interests. Wikipedia is 10 minutes away from destruction. Spammers, vandals. It isn’t defended by technology, but people. Uses a very flat reporting structure. These are obsessive compulsive people who want to help. Hard labour in the trenches knocking down the barbarians at the gates. That is a civic defense structure.
Apple II. Generative, the vendor doesn’t have to give permission to allow innovation. You give it code, it runs the code.
Tech attacks are on the rise. How do we stop? Pass a law banning attacks. Or come up with technical solutions. Hilarious anecdote re: Smartenforcer & Symantec – this is not a good solution. They are the Pinkerton security of the internet.
If we don’t come up with a solution, then we have lost civic technologies. Otherwise the crackdown will ensure. No more flying toaster screensaver at your work computer – you don’t have the freedom to do this.
Information appliances lack generativity. Tivos, iPhones. Steve Jobs wanted to control everything. Then he opened up the software development kit. But this not like coding a PC – it has to go through the itunes app store.
The iPhone is gorgeous, but it’s not a civic technology.
Facebook & Google apps: they reserve the right to terminate any program at any time (thanks to good lawyers). Can you imagine if Gates could have done this to Quicken? But the dark energy of the net is going towards these applications.
Hybrid technologies, Yelp and Digg. Service offers to buy Diggs. Wikipedians identify with the project, would they be bribed to edit? I don’t think so.
Think about a toaster, but designed like an iphone. You come down one morning and there’s been an update to 3 slots. Next day, back to 2 slots! Then it makes juice. I didn’t buy a toaster, I bought a breakfast-oriented relationship with service provider.
Tivo and Echostar. Tivo sues Echostart for patent infringement successfully. The judge signs a single order and blanks every single Echostar around. Gone.
Example number two, OnStar. Offers emerg services. FBI demands that Onstar reprograms a car with bad guys so the mic records all the time. Not very many conspirators needed, just one gatekeeper.
The Company v USA: won on a technicality that if all content goes to the FBI, legit cries for help couldn’t be answered. This bug can be fixed.
There was a moment in our history when we depended on civic nature for law enforcement – the posse. This is how slaves were supposed to get returned from the North to the South. It turns out people in the North didn’t show up to these posses. The law require co-operation from people – this is a check on bad laws. Law requires effort, effort require co-operation, this is a barrier to bad law.
With non-civic technologies, this isn’t a concerned. Only 3 possible FM stations in DPRK. People are floating solar FM radios across the DMZ.
What keeps us safe is an agreement on right and wrong and the ability to call it as so. We should look carefully at laws that normative suasion won’t work on.
Generativity across layers. Even the social layer has produced CouchSurfing. If it go popular, you would need a civic defense model, because crooks will notice. Hitchhiking was fine, then it was scary, but now it’s reborn with the rides section on Craigslist.
We want to build institutions that embrace civic defense. StopBadWare.org – sends your machine vital signals back to monitoring. OpenNet Initiative.
Robyn Chase
Zipcar Co-founder
For entrepreneurs, problems are opportunities. All these problems based on the end of abundance – global warming, congestion, infrastructure.
Cost-benefit analysis. We try to reduce costs. We think of ownership – everything we use has to be owned. Car, pools, proprietary networks. But sometimes the costs are enormous, and you just want a slice of the benefits. This how social networks are taking off.
With Zipcar, we changed the cost equation. Only pay for the 2 hours/day you use the car. There are unforeseen benefits – I can use a different kind of vehicle depending on each use. This is the platform people are working on. Take the concepts of Web 2.0 to material things – and we need to do this a lot because of global warming.
Goloco, my other startup. Ridesharing. Excess capacity.
In Bogota, they close roads on Sundays and let people walk, skate, cycle. Found an excess capacity.
My husband is working on something where you share your router’s excess capacity for an Obama 08 event.
Highway system: gas taxes aren’t working because that use will decline. The answer will be user fees – like congestion pricing. I want to use devices like Onstar to allow for charging highway usage, like the EasyPass.
This is how we can deal with these challenges – resource constraints, population growth, global warming.
Gilberto Gil
Minister of Culture, Brazil
Since 2003, when I took office, we’ve been looking into digital technologies as cultural phenomenon. Insisted on the role of culture in policy-making. The value of cultural diversity in the equation. Using the day to day inputs of technologies, without the drawbacks of classical revolutionary action.
Traditional politics is failing in advancing democracy and social development. The rise of peer2peer culture (and counter-culture) will challenge this. Governments will acknowledge sooner or later. What I see in Brazil is that these new movements don’t come from traditional politics, don’t depend on representative democracy. Operate outside electoral system, and influence it to some degree. People are more eager to engage in new and proactive way.
21st century technologies present a huge challenge to regulation. This obliges us to reinvent the way we do almost everything. The distribution of intellectual property is the best way of democratizing knowledge in the history of mankind. But we see regulators everywhere bluntly calling this ‘piracy’.
Many corporations and governments around the world have positioned themselves conservatively, and are trying to block the new. Every revolution brings this reaction. Digital distribution of IP presents a threat.
We must be ever-vigilant as technology can be used as an excuse against society and individuals’ interest. We need to humanize and politicize this technology. Regulations need to ensure open access to knowledge, not just business as usual. Quotes Lessig on preserving the open nature of the internet.
Today, in Brazil, we have people using new technologies. This is a breath of fresh air, a sign of an emerging creative society.
Van Jones
Green for All
My powerpoint is usually ‘the powerpoint Al Gore would do if he were black’. But let’s talk about the hope that I have.
There are two problems we cannot opt out of: the economy and the environment. Hansen announced today we are really at the last moment for global warming. I used to think global warming was about polar bears. Then Katrina and California wildfires came along. Most of the people who died in California were Latino farm workers. They didn’t have cell phones – the governor called everyone with a phone and told hem to get out, so they burned alive in the fields.
We’re about to experience stagflation. We’re going to get a new president, but stagflation is not kind to presidents, think of Jimmy Carter. How do we deal with this? Well, if drill our way to new oil, we’ll burn the planet. If we don’t, people will summer. How can we grow the economy with burning the planet?
The answer is to create a green economy that’s prosperous enough to lift people out of poverty. Millions of houses need insulation, solar panels. That’s a lot of money. A World War 2-level program to kickstat economy, diversify our energy sources. What’s in the way of the Green New Deal? All those people don’t know each other, haven’t worked with each other, can’t get in touch.
All the parts are there to save the world, but there is no platform linking people. You all are the ultimate solvers of this problem.
My fear about digital revolution: we’re getting more and more data, we know the iceberg we’re about to hit. But how do we aggregate this wisdom – not data – to create social capital and social networks. Connect the PhDs and the PH-dos. Combine the green and digital revolutions, and we can have a political realignment.
If we stand together, we can finally live up to these problems. Connect people who most need work to the work that needs to be done.
Hyperpolitics, American-style
Mark Pesce
University of Sydney
1. Hyperconnected.
Our genome has been the same for 50,000 of 60,000. The sapient paradox – why didn’t we construct technology earlier? We had the kit, the hardware, but it took 50,000 years to build the software. Then it overflowed. First into civilization. Then you get cross-civilization transmission, across latitudes (Jared Diamond, Eurasia axis).
Civilization was very innovative when it appear 9,000 years ago. But it became stable and conservative – not really changing. But then Gutenberg came along. Thus another way to share knowledge. Peer review was a radical form of sharing.
This created cities, mass markets, mass society. Liberalism is the ideology of this era. The Economist: halfway there. In a decade, we went from half the planet never making a phone call, to half the planet owning their own phone. By 2010, 75% of humanity will be connected. Mobile phones may be the most potent development tool ever.
We think of them as social, but for those who have never been connected, it brings the power of sociability. Until recently, no correlation between cell phones and economic growth.
The beginning, not the end. We had the Web for a decade before figuring it out. 6 year gap between wiki software and Wikipedia – we needed to figure it out. SMS was dismissed by telecoms as a sideshow. Now humanity sends 43B messages per annum.
This is transforming the social landscape of human culture.
2. Hypermimesis
Children are experts in mimesis, learning by mimicking. Chimp toddlers are better at cognitive tasks, but human children are better at aping. This is our advantage.
Successful behaviours will get incorporated into a global kit. And now we have access to the behaviours of more people than ever before.
A decade ago, this hardware was new and unknown. Now behaviour is distributed globally and instantly. This creates the kits for a new civilization, we learn something with every text message.
What does it look like? Fluid, flexible, mobile, pervasive and inexorable. Sounds very liberal. Facing opposition from conservative forces. But every law that is designed to limit human information has failed.
China has admitted it failed at censorship, now trying to work through self-censorship, internalizing the threat. Record industry couldn’t shut down P2P. Bloggers took down Gonzalez, as USA attorney general, despite DC establishment. Couldn’t happen a decade ago. We’ve been shoved into a post-modern panopticon, where everyone can see and learn from everyone else.
Any trend multiplied across the 3.3B is going to be big. Wikipedia is the first attempt to encapsulate the sum of human knowledge. Not just academic and scientific success. The calculus has shifted from the liberal area, where knowledge is hoarded and use for power. The returns of altruism beat the virtue of selfishness.
But Wikipedia isn’t transparent or democratic. Wikipedia is controlled by Wikipedians. New articles are getting rejected. Growth has slowed, may sometime stop. Pedians claim they are holding the line. Think they’re holding it pure. This is a highly conservative impulse. Befits archivists and librarians. But these mechanisms are not conservative. Use sock-puppets, back-channel, non-transparent channels. The Register exposed this.
Now hypermimesis kicks in – other groups will mimick these same techniques. So now Wikipedians will either fossilize it entirely, with a conservative response, OR learn to embrace the chaos.
This is the same challenge we all face every day. All our liberal institutions are backed against the same buzzsaw.
3.No Governor
I was taking pictures of an airport information device at San Fran airport. This made someone from the Secret Service nervous. Sharing is the threat. It became pervasively available. Any attempts to control have collapsed.
We’re asked to believe that hyperconnectivity will be embraced by campaigns and those in power. That politics will be different. Bullshit.
This is not a crisis, not a lack of leadership. Obama created a very traditional network which is being activated for primaries and elections. What happens after the election? Doesn’t matter what he thinks, because the mob is in control. Fasten your seatbelts and get ready to descend into a war against all (Hobbes). Connectivity begets mimesis begets empowerment.
Conflicts will emerge. Governments will try to stop. Then the guns will be trained on them. The future looks nothing like democracy. It sought to empower the individual, but the individual has now been empowered by a new social system. Now the world will move for all of us – not just Margaret Mead’s small groups.
National Tech Policy: Which Way Forward?
What would do for executive order #1 as president?
Cerf: abolish the FCC
Schonfeld: digital bill of rights
Ross: Appointment of chief technology officer (tech administration was gutted by Bush)
Silver: Use the bully pit to educate Americans on how the media is so reliant on the internet – make it relevant
Prado: Give cabinet a week to understand digital DNA.
Cerf: A CTO is top-down, that’s not the internet style. Too central, doesn’t enable folks.
Ross: CTO is not a panacea. Obama has a challenge of how to continue bringing in people outside the process. How can you live the values from which you benefited? Citizen-centred candidacy to citizen-centred government. A lot of these ideas come from outside politics – entrepreneurs citizen, journalists, people outside the US. The only candidate who speaks about digital divide is Obama. Minorities lag in education – this is a lever to help bridge that gap. Use universal service subsidies for internet, not just phone.
P: We’re blurring the frontier between civil society and government. We have activists inside government, even anarchists. Something bottom-up is happening. End of central authority, to periphery. We have 19th and 21st century realities.
R: Internet for Everyone coalition is a group of stakeholders outside government. Innovation comes from the periphery – this will mainstream the concerns of net neutrality.
Andrew: Pesce spoke up how people are skimming from pre-industrial to digital era. 95% of behaviour in life maintaining your position. Baby Boomers are complacent and like their position – how much of the US being held back is people not getting it?
C: Internet-enabled mobile will come to developing world before internet computers. Becomes an information portal you carry around on your hip. People use these for very local questions – the geographic web is really interesting. It will be information free of gatekeepers.
P: Govt needs to understand the new possibilities. Government should think of democratizing access, forget about piracy.
S: People don’t realize the fact their iphone only works with AT&T is a conscious policy decision. 95% of Americans can only buy broadband from a cable duopoly. These companies are misbehaving children who are paranoid about what the future could bring – Vint Cerf & Google, or lefties who want to regulate everything. Once we make it understood that the public’s needs to come first – with dovetails to other industries – we’ll realize the opportunity we have. Kick out the bums and create a better media system.
C: Those companies are just responding to their incentives. We need to change to those incentives. It might mean a regulatory change, or it could mean something else…so they do the right thing.
A: How can we have this conversation in a duopoly?
C: Those people need to be at the table.
S: We need competition, open it up. My friend in France is paying way less, due to more competition.
Schonfeld: Right now the spectrum is auctioned off. Companies can afford to buy spectrum and park it.
C: Opening up to multiple use would lead to more efficient use. We need a government that wants to explore the possibilities.
Schonfeld: The president could appoint someone to the FCC without a technical background, at least one could be a non-lawyer.
C: We build roads, but we let people decide what to use on the roads. We don’t build redundant networks. Building multiple single-use networks is super redundant. Maybe the underlying transport should not be competitive, but provided by the government? If competition doesn’t work, then we need another answer.
A: In NYC, we built a water system by government and helped make it a world class city. If water-carrying firms could have blocked that, everything would suck,
Schonfeld: We need more competition, not socializing the internet.
C: It could work, government can do it better.
Q: Teaching kids to upload?
P: People in Brazil never see technology as something of theirs. They’ve never heard of copyright. If you try to explain it after they know copyleft, it’s totally foreign.
<dispute over term ‘peeracy’>
C: Regulations are rooted in the technologies that founded them.
Q: Why is there such apathy on tech issues in the US?
C: Other countries have bigger populations, and they’re getting better-educated. We can never win on the numbers – we need to win based on thinking.
Schonfeld: There’s a talent problem.
S: Digital divide stats. Gap between broadband and no net is the same as the old gap between dialup and none. Racial minorities are particularly poorly connected.
Q: Internet for everything, not just everyone. In 2016, there will be tens of billions of devices online. What applications will there be?
R: Asymmetry based on race, even when controlled by income. This is due to content gap as well as access gap – internet is English, high vocabulary. One of the successes of TV is PBS, radio is NPR. There isn’t a public-private partnership on the internet, with public purpose media. Educational in nature. Why people don’t go online: fear of the media and perception that there’s nothing online for me. Seems ridiculous, but need to recognize the data.
C: Non-English internet is growing. More Chinese online than Americans.
A: No presidential campaign had a Spanish-language website.
Tim Wu: This tension between centralized and decentralized decisions. CTO vs decentralized outcomes. In the Australian election, broadband was a significant plank of the platform. Will broadband issues always be a low-tier issue in the US?
C: In Virginia, people are concerned about transportation infrastructure, so this is possible.
: People don’t think of the internet as a government responsibility.
C: In Australia and New Zealand, regulation has opened up the internet.
P: The internet is an international issues, not just national issues.
S: My mom never understood my job. But she recently forwarded me an email from a Moveon campaign – she wants me to save the internet. Need to put in simple terms: firefighters died in the WTC, but cops didn’t, because their radios worked better – so we need a better radio network. Frame things in simple terms.
The Cross-Partisan Movement for Political Transparency and Watchdogging Government from Below
-why is this movement flourishing now?
-do the left & right really agree on these principles?
-what are best principles for watchdogs?
Ellen Miller
Sunlight Foundation
1984: The first Mac made it easy for all of us to think about how to store and manage information. 46% of all adults are using internet/text messaging for political information. The technology is why the movement has taken off. Information is cheap. Social web connects information to issues. Easier to contact elected representatives. The Sunlight Foundation couldn’t have been founded any earlier. Rise in technology + loss of trust in Congress.
“Government transformation by data visualization”
David Stephenson
Stephenson Strategies
Shows slide from final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. You knew that box was never going to be seen again. Same happens with government data. In the sequel, Indy recovers the Ark – and this is a good omen, we are getting more public scrutiny than ever before (thanks to Sunlight). Shows a Google Map of pothole reports. This is not from government, but a private citizen, because DC releases 216 databases on a real-time basis. You can look up the pothole on your street and get current data.
Sousveillance – the opposite of surveillance. Holding government to account. IllegalSigns.ca is a from a guy in Toronto. Another mashup shows crime in Chicago. Neighbourhood Knowledge in LA: tracks 7 indicators of urban decline, colour-coded. Gapminder is the next wave in data visualization.
Two steps in these programs. First, release the data. You can scrape from public records, but this limits access to technologically sophisticated. Now that so many agencies are creating internal XML data feeds, so it’s easy to open up. The best government in the world on this is the District of Columbia. It’s all realtime – this is critical.
Second step is visualize the data. Swivel, Many Eyes are services which allow this.
Internally, DC has a site where their data is shown in good ways. Externally, they just dump it.
Once the data is out there, people are going to create mashups whether government likes it or not. The genie’s out of the bag.
Matt Stoller
OpenLeft
Google is on trial in Florida for obscenity. Their defense: ‘orgy’ is a very common search term, so doesn’t violated community standards. Case is pending. It’s clear that people don’t want to admit this. Gap between explicit and implicit values.
The gap between implicit and explicit values is the problem in DC. Both parties in DC have stuff they don’t want to admit, so it’s trans-partisan. National security legislation: bipartisan movement for reform – Ron Paul libertarians and Democrat civil libertarians. Last week, the FISA bill passed, very few members could read it. Not one Democrat criticized the Dem leadership who pushed this through. Mashups make the implicit understandings explicit, and make government accountable.
Things we’ve tried: electing more Democrats. We have, it sort of helped – delayed bad bills. We’ve lost – stems backlashes, somewhat useful. Internet transparency merges will and elections – HRC was doomed because of supporting the war. On FISA bill, $300K has flowed in donations. Old media are useless for engaging in debate, since they only tell the story when it’s over. Blogs keep a story active.
Mark Tapscott
Washington Examiner
(formerly Heritage Foundation)
USAspending.gov is one of the most revolutionary websites around. A few clicks away from knowing where tax dollars going. The movement is flourishing because of the alignment of interests – me, a government-hater, and Ellen, a government-lover.
Not cross-partisan, but trans-partisan. What does the internet do to the fundamental nature of internet? You don’t see the answer. We’ve created a leviathan in the last 50 years, bureaucracy, etc. The internet eliminates the need for centralized government.
Q: Should the first obligation be to put out the data, or put out a finished website?
There’s a lack of overall trust in the government. Even with all the uproar lately, you can still donate money…it’s now cheap to monitor a lot. Google aggregates weekly questionnaires of employee tasks.