Open Republic, Phase II - follow the money
Governance is about who gets to decide where the public's money goes. A republic
is a government where the peer-to-peer bandwidth is too limited to support a
true democracy. A democracy is a government where any citizen who chooses to
speak up has an equal voice with the other, equally vocal citizens. We are at
an exquisite balance point between the presumption of insufficient bandwidth
and wide open, wild west democracy.
Small-r republicans, whatever their party, get this
instinctively. The easiest way for those in power to stay in power is to ensure
that peer-to-peer bandwidth remains limited.
But middle class American households own most of the society's money, the votes
and now, the broadband connections. It's a democratic bonfire waiting for the
right match.
Phase II of the Open Republic concept won't grow out of some foundation's grand
scheme for how politics morphs into governance, but rather because of an inevitable
outbreak of citizen-provided governance, starting at the local level and bubbling
up to the federal and global scales. It starts as we start providing the data
governments lack and the political power [polis, L., the people] to
speak to our governments directly, requiring governments to be responsive to
us.
Politicians fret about such openness while government employees often welcome
it. Doc's recent reminder about this reflects my personal experience:
People get the best government they provide
Politics
as Unusual is my latest SuitWatch
from Linux Journal. It includes some
mind-opening thoughts from my local friend Patrick
Gregston, who knows local politics far better than I do. A sample:
Government isn't the problem. People need to bring solutions to government.
Government is dying for answers. Bring some and you'll get somewhere.
I don't have experience with the government stonewalling me at all. I experience
interest and cooperation at every level, as long as I bring solutions and
not only problems.
A lot of helpless people want government to solve their problems or to
carry their spear on one issue or another. That reflects an ignorance of
how the whole ecosystem actually works. If you're constructive, you can
participate in that ecosystem.
This seemed consistent with what I've learned from Phil Windley, too.
Last Friday, Doc quoted Gregston again:
Patrick
Gregston's maxim about the differences between business and government:
Business is interested in outcome, and government is interested
in output.
Phil Windley and I discussed local government
responsiveness on Tuesday and agreed there's a lot of service provided by people
happy to be of service. It's all about building and fixing the streets.
Creating Infrastructure
Like Patrick Gregston, I don't have experience with the government stonewalling
me at all, and I've spent a lot of time working with governments. Before I became
a tech junkie, I was a Denver-area real estate developer. I've formed three
metropolitan districts, closed two municipal tax-exempt fundings, annexed 1600
acres to a 90 acre town and made a lot of money changing zoning, installing
utilities and building streets. I even patented
a solar home because we couldn't get natural gas service for a subdivision.
You can get a lot done by filling out government forms, but it's a lot like
writing code.
One of my projects involved
120 acres on the Denver-Boulder turnpike, but without access. All it took to
increase the value of our land 20-fold was to get four layers of bureaucracy,
including the Federal Highway commission, to authorize us to build the interchange
by adding an assessment to our land and other interested parcels. Add 15 years
of brain damage and bam! Overnight success:
The difference between building a fence in your back yard and building
an interchange is only a matter of scale: the interchange involves more
permits, more layers of government, more zeroes and more financing.
No one at any level of government wants to prevent citizens from creating infrastructure.
But you must be willing to help them work within the regulations. That means
a lot of paperwork, patience and empathy. As Patrick Gregston says, they're
interested in output, which is a kind of throughput: Citizens fill out paperwork
declaring what they want, and government processes it. Too bad businesses aren't
as responsive.
Self Full-Funding Prophecies
If you and your neighbors want to pave your country lane and it's not in the
county budget, you can get together, fill out some forms, and agree to higher
property taxes in order to get your paving. I'm sure some cities now do that
on the web and within a few Internet years government sites will support self-forming
social networks to support infrastructure.
A few cycles later, the web of obligations and funding will be palpably depicted
and managed on line by the citizens. We will make mutual commitments and government
entitlements by the same logic: are dust abatement and fewer front end alignments
worth the tax increase? That's an economic decision, not an ideological one.
When that happens, government becomes a service we purchase like everything
else. As clients of our governments, we the customers people will demand
that our government web application become responsive and user-friendly. The
way we've always wanted government to be.
Politics IS Governance
This is the interesting part. Historically, political campaigns have melted
away on election night. What will be the relationship of the new political tools
to the governing style of the victors? Political campaigns have learned to operate
web sites to seek our active membership, our policy preferences, our voluntary
contributions, our activism and MeetingUp.
Contrarily, governments would rather be left alone. But what happens to a campaign's
web presence when the campaign succeeds? Does it disappear? Or should we expect
the online community to be active after the candidate takes office?
Doh! I'd never thought about this before. The web sites of dead campaigns live
on! The DeanforAmerica DemocracyforAmerica
web site and blog is now committed
to electing Kerry and lives on; not surprising. But the Clark
and Edwards blogs
are still active, because their community won't let them die.
There's no way a successful campaign will be able to shut down its community
of winners.
And that's the obvious destiny of an Open Republic initiative. It starts by
paying attention to politics and helping political campaigns to use the new
emerging activism tools. But these tools have an unintended consequence: They
instantiate a campaign, giving it a life of its own.
Voters who have built a candidate with open source tools will be interested
in open source tools that build a government.
6:30:54 PM 
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