Democracy's To Do List
Jerry Michalski and Andrew
Rasiej (pr. ru-shay) have organized a terrific conference on May
24 at The New School here in New York: Personal
Democracy Forum (or "PDF". Heh).
The Personal Democracy Forum will bring together political
figures, grassroots leaders, journalists and technology professionals to discuss
the questions that lie at the intersection of technology and politics
-- to take a realistic look at where we are now and where we are headed.
The notables include a few people I met through the Dean campaign: Joe Trippi,
Sanford Dickert, Nicco Mele, Mat Gross, David Weinberger. I've added more info
below.
What is Still Missing?
The final question in the Forum's Aspirations is
"What is still missing?" (Aha! The most noble question in human endeavor).
Also, Jerry Michalski asked me what I thought the perfect session would be,
so I'm answering him here. Naturally, I think that what's missing are all the
pet projects I've dreamed up. They are:
Strawberry Roots Activism
Friend to Friend model
Strawberry Roots
and the Voterfile
Social Networks
P2P Policy Engagement
RSS-based Assertion Processor
RSS-based Freedom of Information
Open Resource Governance
Bureaucrat Retirement Initiative
Open Republic
The characteristic of the first three ideas is that they are mostly technical,
decentralized and that they provide information among people that is actionable.
Most importantly, they are permission-free. The importance of permission-free
grows when we think of the crucial role of viral marketing to the success of
any product, whether it's an iPod or an iPresident. The last four require continuing,
centralized effort, which is a more iffy proposition.
Worthy? Buzz Worthy? Buzzed?
It's time for politics to leverage the self-forming capacity of the web. I
believe this is the core disconnect between traditional political activists
and the new toolmakers.
Micah Sifry and I represent those
two ends of the spectrum. He's a professional who's fascinated with the promise
of these tools and I'm taken with what he needs from the tools. Political pros
are still wired for centralized intelligence, and most of the political tools
reflect that bias. Until we move past that mind set, campaigns will exhaust
themselves trying to create buzz rather than riding a wave of buzz inspired
by the campaign but not built by it.
No matter how hard you flog your product, if you don't generate buzz, your
sales will be ordinary. But if your product generates spontaneous buzz, you'll
prosper no matter how little you promote it. Wendy's current ad campaign shows
amateur "Wendy's champions" encouraging others to eat at Wendy's,
a fiction about the champions they'd like but don't have. Managers and experts
take all the credit for success and leave little for the viral processes that
they don't really understand: the specific mechanisms by which some ideas fire
customers' imaginations and others don't.
But it is possible to get our heads around the new rules of viral markets.
Malcolm Gladwell and Seth
Godin and, of course, the Clue Trainers,
have done seminal work in this area. In Tipping
Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Gladwell deconstructed
why epidemics take off and how a few East Village kids in NYC caused Hush Puppy
shoes to become the IN thing. When your target market is a swarm, even if the
swarm doesn't know it is one, you have the potential for your product to take
off despite your planning. Joe Trippi has been candid that something like that
happened with the Dean campaign.
Here's what I think needs doing, starting with the most viral idea I can come
up with:
Grass Roots Strawberry
Roots Activism
Your front lawn is dependent on you for seed, feed, water and weeding, each
seed pushing out just a few blades for us to admire. Rhyzomes, like strawberries
and crabgrass, are more creative. Once started, they shoot out opportunistic
runners which put down roots in hospitable circumstances. If the new plant prospers,
it puts out multiple runners, and so on. Strawberry roots activism may be the
future of politics.
The Dean campaign hit a wall at about 150,000 active supporters, though four
times as many were registered in its database. (Surprisingly, there were thousands
of active supporters who chose not to register with the campaign’s web
site.) How might the campaign have scaled its conversational throughput to a
high enough level that it would get the votes it needed?
When I was embedded at Dean Headquarters, I learned that supporters were energized
primarily by their ability to "touch" the campaign and by the sense
that their personal views were actually interesting to the campaign. Any campaign
that wants to attract rabid support must give each potential supporter the power
to connect substantively with the campaign and to accept all supporters' opinions
on substantive issues.
But what is "the campaign"? There’s no clear dividing line
between "the campaign" and "the supporters." Every campaign
has volunteers working at headquarters and in the field. Are those people inside
or outside the campaign? Does it matter? When anyone associated with the campaign
is responsive to a less-connected supporter, it can be as powerful an involvement
as if the supporter had engaged directly with an "official" campaign
staffer. Here’s the structure needed to build winning associations that
cascade through a population, sweeping up support:
This is the "Instant Newbie SWAT" idea discussed
last July and the "polymer" structure that I proposed
to the campaign last October and continue to believe was the key missing
element of the Dean campaign. (Indeed, it's missing from all campaigns: the
only reason it was conspicuous by its absence from the Dean campaign was the
campaign's intent to leverage every Internet possibility.)
The Friend to Friend
Model
Leveraging Supporters' Existing Social Networks
The defining breakthrough of the 2003 primary season may have
been the accidental innovation of registering "members" of a campaign.
People accustomed to registering at other web sites were happy to register
at deanforamerica.com as they do elsewhere. From registration, it's a series
of baby steps to Meeting Up, contributing, house partying, and all the rest
of the Dean magic. Unfortunately, registering on any web site is a broadly
acknowledged impediment to becoming involved. Who knows? For each supporter
who signed up, perhaps there were 10 others who never took the trouble.
But why not leverage the personal information that the self-declared
supporters have already entered into their personal email address books? Clearly
the only impediment is technical, so I established mydeanpeople.com last winter
to give supporters a way to cooperate with potential new members of the campaign.
This required the combined efforts of Alden Hynes, Zack Rosen, Shannon Clark
and Neil Drumm and Ian Bogost.
- Using a few mouse clicks, any user of Outlook or another
address book can save any number of their contacts as a text file.
- At mydeanpeople.com, a campaign supporter can upload
such a contact list and then review the contacts as a list, or individually,
to edit each contact's information.
- With a single click, the supporter can send a personal email to one of
their contacts, containing a link that invites the contact to review their
personal information at mydeanpeople.com. Preferably this is done with their
friend, their campaign mentor, present or on the phone.
- With a single click, the prospective new supporter can "push"
their contact data to the campaign, taking advantage of a process the campaign
had built for internal use.
In moments, automagically, the new supporter has easily registered, voluntarily,
with the campaign web site without the inconvenience of having to visit the
campaign's web site. In this way, it's possible for each supporter to engage
any number of their acquaintances in the reasons to support the campaign and
to easily join up. The next steps can seek a contribution, their personal policy
preferences and, most interestingly, register their own contacts with the campaign.
Thus 1 begets 10 begets 100, etc. Equally importantly, the hierarchical relationships
among these thousands or millions of supporters is known and forms a kind of
telephone tree for mobilizing support quickly and effectively. If the campaign
flows information through the tree structure, it can be as effective as parents
announcing a snow day. And the communication is from people in your existing
social network, a far more compelling contact than yet another mass mailing
from a campaign you may support but can feel like spam.
This Address Book-based approach is an extension of the Friend to Friend System
developed by Pat Dunleavy in Williamstown,
Massachussetts to override a property tax limitation:
Instead of laying siege to a population and wearing it down with uncomfortable
and unwanted approaches from strangers ringing doorbells or calling during
the dinner hour, you grow the campaign fromthe inside, through the web of
relationships inside the community.
(From the PDF description)
The Williamstown activists had friends contact friends by selecting them from
a centralized list that the campaign had compiled. It's probable that the mydeanpeople
system is faster, easier and more complete. It's simply the logical next step
in having friends approach friends.
The question that we designers and builders of tools must ask is whether the
mere presence of such tools catalyze the inherent urge of like-minded individuals
and interest groups to organize themselves. However, as Alan Kay taught us,
"It's easier to invent the future than to predict it." Can
I have an Amen?
In the mydeanpeople expression of this capability, thanks to Ian
Bogost, each supporter's social network is depicted as a little solar system
(Flash version):
Person-to-Person
Multi-Level Networks
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Brad
deGraf, Micah
Sifry and Jim
Moore commented recently in response to the NY Times Magazine article
describing the Republicans' centralized, pyramidal "Amway"
campaign. I suggest that self-forming "telephone tree" structures
may exhibit the same compounding growth of network marketing structures,
without the centralized command & control.
It's useful to remember that "Organization" is
important,and hierarchists excel at the art. But "Organization"
describes any activity that has become organized, whether from
above or spontaneously, by its members.
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Strawberry Roots and
the Voterfile
The "voterfile" is the heart of any campaign's work.
This is the data base, maintained by each Secretary of State, of registered
voters and their stated affilitation, and it's notoriously flawed but it's
the only staring point activists have had. When activists canvass neighborhoods,
this is the data they carry with them. Anyone can pay a nominal fee to get
voterfile data. I learned that there's quite a little service industry that
takes voterfile data and cleans it up and organizes it for campaigns. The
political parties do this also, and earn serious money by charging their candidates
for the service. The hacktivists that Dean left behind are taking this on
as a worthwhile challenge, including the Advokit
project that Pat Dunleavy and Dan Robinson have formed, based on Dunleavy's
experience with the Williamstown project.
But, as Chandler Bing might say, "Could it be
any more centralized?" In an open source world, there must be a better
way to accumulate this data, since there's far more contact data, and more
detailed, sitting on individuals' hard drives, if there were only a way to
get at it. Perhaps the mentor-newbie address book-based approach is a way
to build a superset of the voterfile from scratch, while adding in even more
interesting kinds of voters – those who haven't voted before but will
this time.
P2P Policy Engagement
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) is an organizing force powerful enough to connect people
on several continents to develop software – one of the most complex of
all projects. Other factors equal, any campaign that harnesses P2P power will
defeat a campaign that does not. When supporters become members – campaign
insiders – you need to give them what they want, and what they want is
a voice in policy.
This was probably the Dean campaign’s greatest failing. Although there
were discussion forums and cross-comments on the blog, there was no systematic
seeking of policy input from the campaign’s members and no way to organize
policy preferences to summarize the sense of the campaign's supporters. It was
a goal but not a priority, even though there was a lot of discussion about how
to so engage the campaign’s members. Nicco Mele, the campaign webmaster,
had reserved the domain opensourcepolicy.org with the expectation that it might
be the right vehicle. Nicco and Mat Gross and Alison Stanton and I discussed
the structure at some length after I drafted a prototype.
Unfortunately, there were other priorities.
There were several policy professionals working for the Dean campaign. They
taught me that policy professionals hate the idea of the voters expressing
their explicit policy preferences in a way that politicians must acknowledge
and, perhaps, respond to. Here's a condensation of one idea for a policy preferences
panel. Members of any web site could use the preferences panel to build their
aggregated sense of what they want politicians to do:
This expression leaves great opportunities for improvement, but it includes
the vital elements:
- A quantitative and qualitative expression of policy preferences
- Raw material for a blog for each respondent, using the policy comments
- A chance to join a Special Interest Group (SIG) for each policy area.
Imagine with me that such a detailed polling tool encouraged each of us to
express our values so explicitly. We could then understand the values profile
for each person, family, census tract, zip code, city, county, state and nation.
Of course, each piece of legislation also expresses a set of values, as does
every speech, amendment, rider, piece of pork, military adventure and, over
time, each politician. Though experts may not welcome explicit policy expressions
from the voters, policy professionals would be useful in describing the values
profile of legislation and politicians, using the same matrix as the supporters,
so that apples are compared to apples. I'd like to have such experts working
for me, so I could print out my personal voting guide on election day, telling
me how I would have voted if I'd had the time to compare all these actions personally.
RSS-based Assertion Processor
Google links are implicit, but a timeline is explicit. Here's an example of
a timeline asserting that the Reagan administration traded arms for
hostages whenever it was politically expedient:
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IRAN
CONTRA SCANDAL
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| "October
Surprise" allegation |
10/80
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Reagan-Bush campaign makes secret pact with Iran to delay
release of the Embassy hostages until after the November election, in
return for future covert arms sales. |
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| Reagan takes oath of office. |
1/20/81
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Hostages held in the American Embassy in Iran released. |
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| An Israeli official suggests a deal with Iran to then-national
security adviser Robert McFarlane. . . |
7/85
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...saying the transfer of arms could lead to release of Americans being
held hostage in Lebanon. McFarlane brings the message to President Reagan. |
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8/30/85
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The first planeload of U.S.-made weapons is sent from Israel to Tehran. |
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9/14/85
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The first American Hostage is released. |
| Reagan secretly signs a presidential 'finding,' or authorization... |
12/5/85
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...describing the operation with Iran as an arms-for-hostages deal. |
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etc.,
etc., etc.
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John Robb believes that,
given a semantic aggregator, any set of blogs could form the basis of a knowledge
log (K-Logs).
Work groups and companies are trying to do this already, but why not create
knowledge logs that let We the People look at blocks of text that describe the
activities of political figures?
The "News" (as print media quaintly call their output) already is
built around the classic Perry White imperatives to expose the who, what,
where, when, how, why of every article, column or exposé. The writers
and their editors and reviewers don't flag those data elements, but they sure
as hell could. Why not make those general classifications explicit and then
extend them with additional, explicit tags to let the expositors sell us more
efficiently on the point of their assertions, whether they are selling outrage
or smug complicity. What is there about an otherwise lifeless lump of ASCII
text that causes it to be worth the author's effort? Without some animating
force, it's not worth our time either. Those elements of outrage, assurance
or innuendo should include the kinds of data that excites people at a cocktail
party or sells books: sex and money and intrigue:
| <actor> |
<payee> |
| <actorQuote> |
<scapegoat> |
| <associate> |
<wretchedExcess> |
| <associateQuote> |
<cynicalGreed> |
| <provableLie> |
<whiningVictim> |
| <authority> |
<statuteViolated> |
| <date> |
<wrongedSpouse> |
| <moneyPaid> |
<fiduciaryViolation> |
| <payor> |
<conflictOfInterest> |
We are drawn to the media based on its power to push our buttons. There is
a characteristic to outrage as there is to beauty and grace. Just because the
elements of outrage are hard to describe is no excuse to abandon the quest.
The elements of outrage are what journalists strive to express even as they
attempt to push their master
narrative of omniscience and objectivity–the dominant myths of the
press, as Jay
Rosen is so masterfully teaching us. Today, Dave
Winer suggests the need for exposing non-journalism in journalistic drag:
A possibly
interesting twist on the...
A possibly interesting twist on the Is It Journalism? perma-debate. Okay,
let's not worry for a minute if blogging is journalism or not. How about keeping
a list of pubs that claim to be journalism that run stories that are clearly
not journalism, and clearly not marked as such. Factual errors that are never
corrected. Conflicts of interest that are not disclosed. We've learned that
the pros simply won't investigate themselves, which itself is a breach of
journalistic ethics, as far as I'm concerned. So what's to stop us from doing
it for them?
Heh. Nothing. Anyone can assign RSS tags to anything they quote, which is just
another form of assertion. Perhaps, if we all think of our own and others' writing
as assertions subject to debugging, we'll lose the arrogance that "experts"
put on like a suit of clothes– a form of wishful thinking, IMHO.
As Alan Kay suggested when he told us that it's easier to invent the future
than to predict it, it takes longer to argue over why to design an RSS-based
Assertion Processor than it takes to develop the means to expose what there
is about any body of text that is asserted to be outrageous or reassuring.
Dave, do you have the time or interest to take a stab at this form of RSS?
Does the 2.0 spec allow such an extension?
RSS-based Freedom of Information
I'm with Steve
Gillmor: "Nothing sways me from the notion that RSS is a transcendent
technology."
(Heh. It doesn't
mean Steve's with me:
Whether I agree with Britt's last comment
about Big Media (I don't), I understand his perspective. It adds
to the dialogue, the conversation. The advent of the blogosphere and RSS has
provided both a filter for information and a low-barrier mechanism for empowering
the direct participants in a conversation.)
RSS could be an acronym for the Rosetta Stone for Sharing. We the People are
winding up a four-year crash course in why we should mistrust a secretive government.
Our chance now is to establish Freedom of Information on steroids. The Freedom
of Information Act (FOIA) was a reaction and antidote to the last time a Republican
administration knew more about what was good for us than we did. Clearly, the
reaction will be to re-invigorate FOIA, and I hope we embrace and extend openness
by legislation that federal documents must be online, in HTML, and offer RSS
feeds like the rest of the world's documents will, by the time FOIA II is passed.
Open Resource Governance
One of these days, a candidate will win by offering an alternative so obvious,
compelling and profound that s/he will be hailed as a savior of the country.
That alternative is Government BY the People. Literally.
We will be the source of surveillance video, thanks
to our ubiquitous PFR videophones (like soldiers taping prison truths). We
will triangulate the useful insights into what's really going on through our
blogging of the facts as we interpret them. We will
learn that we hold all the capital and that we can express our preferences for
action with our wallets in the same way that online political contributions
have revolutionized politics.
Why shouldn't we also do for government many other services, not necessarily
for pay but for reduced taxes and better security? Think SETI on steroids. MoveOn
can raise a million bucks overnight for a cause. Why can't the EPA raise awareness
and even money using the same tools? The outlandish seer in my head says that
if enough people want a Star Wars missile defense, then they can ante up the
cost, requiring the government to make a stronger case than it has so far.
I don't know if government-by-bakesale should be our budgetary model, but our
current model is broken. What if voluntary support turned out to be the system
that improves on the representational democracy we like to think is perfect
when it so clearly is not?
Government-by-bakesale has an important virtue going for it: The politicians
and lobbyists will hate it.
Bureaucrat Retirement Initiative
Government bureaucrats aren't cheap, especially with the great benefits, infrastructure
and expensive processes that surround them. But their actions are what really
cost us. Like any private sector bureaucrats, they must use every budget dollar
before the end of the year, or risk losing that dollar in next year's budget.
But the most expensive part of our Bureaucracy Support System is the proliferation
of projects, procurements and studies that the bureaucracy orders up to justify
its existence.
In the face of this incredible churning, most of us feel that many bureaucrats
could be replaced by a properly designed web application. Every major company
is learning to reduce head count by having its customers do their own order
entry and move their requests over the web. The federal government can't work
that way since the point of the bureaucrats is to keep their jobs and increase
their budget. Without the civil servant's enthusiastic help, how could you reduce
the head count?
Simple. Get their help. Some day a reform-minded leader will establish a swat
team of IT experts who implement a standing offer in the federal government:
If you believe your job is expendable, let us know, and we'll work with you
to eliminate it. Then you can go home and continue to get paid, receive your
agreed-upon GS raises, and retire on schedule. What's the benefit to the taxpayer?
It's worth paying you to stay home so you can't dream up more novel ways to
spend our money.
Open Republic
Naturally, I believe that the Open Republic initiative deserves to be developed.
The purpose of Open Republic is to act as the indispensable guide to the use
of technology in politics; providing an entry point for the tech-averse political
novice and an operations guide for the tech-savvy political pro. Working with
Ethan Zuckerman and Allen Gunn and Katrin Verclas, the idea has developed and
we've started to spec out the web site's layout:
You may recall that Open Republic is intended as a monthly online publication
reviewing the currently available political technologies with a thorough guide
to their use. Open Republic will also commission improvements in activist tools
and perhaps the creation of new resources.
This list is just one man's opinion, so it's only the start of a consensus.
Open Republic would provide a formal review and documentation process for discovering
and describing everything that Andy Rasiej and Jerry Michalski want to explore
on May 24, as well as doing something about it.
Imagine That!
Speakers and panelists include:
- Senator Bob Kerrey, President of the New School University;
- Ralph Reed, President, Century Strategies
- Joe Trippi, Former Campaign Manager of Dean for America;
- Sanford Dickert, CTO, John Kerry for President;
- Danny Goldberg, Author of Dispatches from the Culture Wars:
How the Left Lost Teen Spirit;
- Mark Halperin, Political Director, ABC News
- Scott Heiferman, CEO, MeetUp.com;
- Nicco Mele, Former Webmaster, Dean for America;
- Jerry Michalski, Former Managing Editor of Release 1.0;
- Eli Pariser, National Campaigns Director of MoveOn.org;
- David Pollak, Executive Director, Democratic Leadership
for the 21st Century;
- Simon Rosenberg, President and Founder, New Democrat Network;
- Andrew Shapiro, Host of What's Next on Thirteen/WNET;
- David Weinberger, Author of The Cluetrain Manifesto;
- Congressman Anthony Weiner, 9th District of New York;
I like the sensible framing of the
Forum's aspirations:
Avoiding both breathless hyperbole and uninformed rushes to judgment,
we will tackle questions like:
- What is the role of online activism in today[base ']s political landscape?
Are watchdogs more powerful than ever?
- How do weblogs and other alternative media sources change how information
moves? What is their perceived objectivity? What is the role of citizen journalists?
- How does the online medium help and hinder public discourse? What are
we learning from deliberative democracy, deep democracy and other projects?
- How can we guarantee security and control for online voting?
- What are the deeper opportunities for community building and consciousness-raising
online? How can politics get more personal?
- What unconventional methods of campaigning and fundraising are emerging?
- What has really worked? What is still missing?
10:49:31 AM 
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