The Money got Their Attention
The Dean campaign captured the world's imagination because it raised so much
money so quickly from so many people. We pay attention to money because it indicates
that people are willing to back up their sentiments with more than words. It's
a crude measure of social worth, but it's the metric that seems to matter the
most to most of us.
When millions of dollars are anted up by a self-organizing, grassroots movement,
it even gets the attention of the big money guys, since their organizations
work so hard for the money, and suddenly an unknown is making it look easy.
As Jim Moore stressed so long ago, the few hundred million dollars driving a
Presidential campaign is chump
change compared to the trillions of dollars of budgetary power it so cynically
buys. And the beat goes on over at johnkerry.com,
where the fundraising pace is making believers of the old boys, at about $50K
per hour.
A Social SourceFourge with Money
Ethan Zuckerman and I spoke
today about the Open Republic (OR) concept, noting how similar it is to his
concept called Social SourceForge. Coincidentally, I've often described OR as
a political SourceForge, with money to spend on good ideas. I'm beginning to
see this space as tools for governance and how to use them, and here too, money
can be the secret sauce. This is precisely Ethan's vision and we want to be
pushing this inevitability together, so it happens in 2004 rather than 2 or
4 years later.
The best expression of the [working-titled] Open Republic would be a charitable
foundation with a broad purpose:
Upgrade American governance by stimulating the creation and adoption
of excellent campaign and governance software and Internet resources.
Despite that grand vision, the operation of OR should be a based on a down-to-earth,
practical charter:
- Identify and praise the currently available resources
- Specify improvements and extensions to those resources:
- Software
- Documentation and users’ guides
- A web site that guides users in deploying the resources
- Make cash grants for improvements to those resources
The Electoral Cycle: the Krebs Cycle of Democracy
If we're so idealistic, why the focus on political tools rather than governance,
which is what we really need to emphasize? About a month ago, it
occurred to me that the individual campaign is where the action is:
Where we go seems to be to develop a set of tools even better than the
Dean team put together and release these tools into the public domain for
the benefit of every campaign from PTA President to US President. Although
my vision is for tools that improve the character of governance, campaigns
are the place to start, and only partly because that's where the money is.
The electoral cycle is to governance as the Krebs Cycle is to biology: it's
the fuel that makes democracy work. Political campaigns engage zealots who
try to motivate partial zealots to vote a certain way. (Relative to the general
disregard for politics and voting, one must be a partial zealot to vote and
a real zealot to be a campaign activist.)
The required zealotry is a clue to the poor user experience of American
politics. The people who know how to "do" politics today don't see
what's wrong with the current system, in the same way that Unix geeks don't
see why more people can't learn to live with a command line interface.
My many months of work with the Dean campaign convince me that our cynical
and closed political system depends on its miserable user experience for its
sway over our lives. There are probably other ways to improve politics, like
better civics classes, public television, parents' interest groups, responsible
party leadership. But I and the people I know are limited to improving the
user experience for people who might be better citizens, if they were just
given the tools.
Mini-Summit 2.0
Last July, I hosted a little mini-summit
here on East 43rd Street, where Zephyr Teachout and Zack Rosen met and we exercised
our collective image-a-nation. Ethan suggested I do it again, but this time
apply it to our shared vision of how the openRepublic concept might work. (I
had no idea what prompted his suggestion. Only after we spoke did I come across
Doc's Vision aerie post
about his visits to our pad where we mostly laugh at the passing scene but occasionally
do serious work, like figuring out how to extend our WiFi service from the window
of my study to Tudor
City Park.)
If we're going to have a vision, there's no sense wasting time on a small one.
I'll get into the mid and long term visions later, but politics is the most
demanding fast-cycle environment you can imagine, and this is the
year for enabling upstart politicians. So let's imagine our near-term ideal
client and what her needs might be.
Misty Smith Goes to Washington
the problem Imagine you're Misty Smith's brother-in-law.
Misty's a popular and effective mayor of a mid-size midwestern city who's being
encouraged to run for congress against an entrenched incumbent. the problem
is that Misty's party has atrophied over the incumbent's eight terms in office.
You're a well-connected attorney and Misty's asked you to look into a congressional
race for her and make a recommendation. It's an assignment you wish would go
away, but Misty's as persuasive as you are loyal. Where do you start?
some hope With a little research, you discover that there's
a non-partisan, apolitical openRepublic Foundation that hosts a comprehensive
and comprehensible guide to the online organizing of campaigns. Further, you
learn that this foundation has an expert advisory board that keeps its recommendations
fresh and actually pays people to maintain a rich online guide to the various
offerings. You're surprised to learn that most of the tools are free to use
at will. It seems too good to be true.
revolution 2.0 You're a lawyer, so you're convinced that anything
that's too good to be true, is. But you dig into the details and discover that
some people actually believe that free and effective activist software is the
key to the next phase of the great American experiment in democracy. They believe
that, even as printing presses and post roads enabled the first American revolution,
so might Internet communications leverage the power of people to combine their
ideals so that their millions of voices and small contributions aggregate into
a force that drowns out the obsolescing grip of broadcast politics on the voting
public.
campaign in a box What's interesting about the effort is that
most of the online tools, whether developed by volunteers or contracted for,
are free for you to download and use. They configure themselves into a suite
of resources that some of the contributing programmers call CIAB–Campaign
In A Box. This suite of tools sets up a web log so Misty and her close supporters
can reach out to find new supporters for Misty, attract their contributions
(& account for them), discover their most strongly felt opinions and send
her to Washington using her unique unfair competitive advantage over her aloof
opponent–Listening. You also discover that some of the recommended resources
cost money, but they're also described in the openRepublic Foundation's catalogue.
You appreciate this because you know that commercial software is often worth
paying for, since it's the product of a focused effort designed to satisfy paying
clients.
money for nothing You have no understanding of open source
software, since this is your first exposure to this strange concept, but you
discover that these projects attract thousands of contributors around the world,
seeing every bug and every chance for improvement.
You're floored to discover that most web sites, and even the Tivo in your
den, are based on software developed for free by people who care more about
their contributions to the common wealth than about their day jobs. You know
that traditional capitalism says that this is impossible but it gives you a
slim hope that the Pilgrims might have been right and that maybe the commons
is not doomed to be a tragedy. This insight is reinforced by your discovery
that Yahoo! and Google have leveraged free software into prodigious market capitalizations.
In the case of the openRepublic Foundation, you learn that their blue ribbon
advisory panel is backed up by two other panels of working volunteers coordinated
by a small staff.
free upgrades The first of these is the Innovations Board.
They take a hard look at the current resources and describe projects that seem
obvious: tools that need improvement and new tools to fill in the gaps that
become obvious when you look at any set of separate tools that serve an end-to-end
function, just as a word processor depends on a separate dictionary and printer
driver. The openRepublic Foundation requests proposals for extending the suite
of tools and even accepts grant applications from developers proposing solutions
that the implementation board hasn't thought of.
quality control The other advisory panel is the Acceptance
Group. They look at the tools built for the foundation and accept or reject
them as fast as humanly possible. This is the core of the foundation's growth
initiative, because it includes the hard work of improving the user experience
of neophytes like yourself.
renaissance of hope After this cascade of revelations, you
feel feel like a 16-year-old with a new driver's license. Is it possible that
someone as clearly unqualified as Misty – 8 years of experience revitalizing
her city, beloved by her constituents, articulate, educated and wise –
could actually have a chance against her clearly superior opponent who has mastered
pork barrel programs, influence and wealth for a decade and a half? You hardly
dare to hope but you see there is a way.
The User Experience
You're a lawyer, not a geek, so you've never heard of "the user experience"
but you've suffered more of them than you wanted. You learn that the openRepublic
Foundation is designed around you and Misty because every campaign, whether
for an issue or a candidate, is driven by people with an incomplete set of skills
and experience. The openRepublic Foundation is wrapping their innovations in
a package that lets you understand what to do and when, with the least possible
confusion and angst.
You also learn that the foundation is focused on another user experience, which
is the one where Misty's client–a voter–visits the campaign web
site and discovers a chance to be heard, to learn, to meet like-minded others
and to grow the hope that there may be a way to deliver at least one congressional
district from the desiccate cynicism of politics as usual.
You're up 'til 3:30 discovering what's almost automatic that had never before
been imagined. You go to bed energized by what's possible rather than depressed
by what's inevitable. You even remember why you went to law school, so many
disillusionments ago.
You can't wait to accept Misty's invitation to run her campaign.
8:12:55 AM 
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