All Politics is Yokels
My meme last
time was that, like companies' collective race to the
bottom (of pricing, quality, customer service), local politics embraces
the tyranny of the mediocre, trumping the urges of the idealists. Don Hodges was
kind enough to amplify that perception in my seldom-visited comments
department, in a comment that has mysteriously disappeared (please, no
conspiracy theories. They presume competence):
"Britt, if you are really taking a poll,
I am a local Republican precinct committeeman on our county exec
committee. I have attended enough meetings to avoid being dropped from
the roll (four a year of 12 possible) and I have reached almost the
identical conclusions you have - we MUST activate the 20 percent or so
that can make a difference, but who are too busy or wise to slog around
in the political cesspool. In my county, an insider can buy someone a
seat on the county commission for about $75,000, and an endless line of
willing "candidates" will take the ride. Three votes on the 5-member
commission gets any zoning, contract, board appointment, etc. the
insider desires. I have no reason to believe the system won't scale
right up to the White House, and I KNOW it works up through the FL
legislature and Governor.
"I think you said early in the Dean
campaign (he wasn't my cup of tea, but the Dems did even worse in the
end) that we "! concerned citizens" need to buy our own pols - I agree
and I hope your "little company" is headed there. Let's hear some more."
– and
later –
"Britt, What is your new little company?
I commented at more length last night but it went down the memory hole
I guess... BTW, you are right about politics as meetings, I am a
Republican committeeman TOTALLY fed up with the Bushies - would like to
hear more about your "enterprise"."
Well, Don, it's called Open Resource Group, LLC (ORG), and we're
about to
publish something called ORGware. It's a web-based framework for
organizations that want to attract members and which are brave enough
to cede control to the edges of the groups that form, spontaneously,
around their
organization. Your comments confirm most people's awareness that local
political power is
slow-moving, cynically intransigent and is running things for no better
reason than that they like running things. My life is dedicated to
routing around this particular fault.
Let's make American
politicians as irrelevant as the British monarchy.
Last time, I suggested we
need an alternate channel for regular folks to
aggregate and express their political power, and that it couldn't be
based on getting them involved in local party politics, which
celebrates the fact that only zealots will participate in the
mini-drama called local party politics. Hell, you've gotta be a bit of
a zealot just to vote.
[Of
course, I've overstated the rule of the mediocre in local
politics. Many people perform a real service for their lazy fellow
citizens there. Just as, in every enterprise, there are invisible
heroes
doing the real work that the grandstanders take credit for.]
What do local party activists do, and
why do candidates need them?
Local party activism is the outbound sales
force for candidates who kiss the right asses.
There's no other proven force to get people to get out and vote.
Clearly that's because Americans need to be harangued into voting,
since we don't like it much–either the thinking part or the
showing up part. Activists consider not voting a gross
dereliction of civic duty. Americans call it having a life. Most
Americans don't see much reason to vote because they can't discern the
differences among the linked
sausages emerging from Congress and their legislatures.
So political candidates, who are often successful, high-functioning
individuals out in the world, find themselves hostage to the
Lilliputian despots who
control
local politics. That's gotta be a shock for the newbie candidate. What
if, instead, there were a systematic web service for discovering and
aggregating
citizens' sentiments and then publishing their collective will? What if
the system, merely by publishing people's intentions, could then help
the participants in the conversation to show up at the polls in
conformance to their online commitments? Would that encourage the
centrist candidates and policies that We the People cry out for but
which the zealots at the power levers will never bless?
We can build that system. I describe it to attract the skeptics like
bees to honey. We live to make the skeptics look silly and
unimaginative. That
will happen when we craft a credible Vote Delivery System (VDS).
Open Source Politics: The Last Mile Problem
VDS is a
supply chain. Currently there are two competing
supply chains for votes, each owned by the local political parties:
hence
their tyranny over people running for office. Sure, the politicians
spend a gazillion dollars trying to route around the local parties,
hyping themselves with expensive ads. Broadcast politics is like the
direct-to-consumer ads that transformed Big Pharma in the 1990s. But
like
Big Pharma's sales force schmoozing the physicians, politicians can't
ignore the local parties' power to prescribe for its user base.
Let's transform
retail politics as Amazon transformed retail. Like Amazon, the
trick is perfecting the VDS fulfillment
system, as package delivery has
been innovated into an obvious and hassle-free appendage to the
eCommerce experience. Our new company, Open Resource Group, has devised
an architecture to deliver voters to their polling places as
systematically as UPS puts an Amazon book in your hands (not as
reliably, but as systematically). Like Amazon,
we don't care what book you buy, based on what value system. We do care
that the online experience brings out your preferences and causes you
to invest in delivering your vote to the right polling place on
Election Day.
Next time, I'll list the specific steps to delivering an energized vote on
time, on budget, without requiring a trip to your local bookstore Vote Store.
We build stepping stones, really. If you're on a flat, accommodating
rock in the middle of a roaring river, you might feel pretty secure. If
there's a similarly hospitable stone a short step away, flat and dry
and not too smooth or mossy, you might just step on it if it's in the
direction you want to go anyway. ORGware means to erect those stones
all over the member sites we build.
Did Jeff Bezos know that his online bookstore would become a thin
shopping cart wrapped around a rich customer reviews blog? Probably
not. But that fact tells us that peer-to-peer dialogue is the most
reliable and easiest way to tease out voters' real sentiments, and
energize we lazy voters enough to haul our cynical ass to the polling
place. It
begins by understanding each user's hot buttons and connecting her to a
dialogue with like-minded others to discuss them on and off line and
develop a
habit of taking action in the real world. The hope is that the ultimate
action–voting–is a natural consequence of the offline
actions that precede it.
Here's a primitive prototype for discovering a voter's hot issues
and helping him join the dialogue. The emphasis is on empowering the
voter to tell the "system" what to do. It is not about
registering with a campaign for the dubious privilege of being spammed
for contributions, before and
after contributing. Sheesh, who thinks up this shit? (Actually, I know,
but lets not go there – it's so depressing.)
2. Peer Publishing
Every ORGware registrant owns her opinions. She has a blog which she
may
post to in the conventional blogging way, but every comment made by the
user is posted to her blog as a free-standing post, linked to the
original, looking very much like "real" blog posts, since that's what
most blog posts are anyway. Maybe these training wheels will inspire
a newbie to create free-standing posts or to elaborate on their
comments. Whatever. The most
active, engaged users will sound off and attract readership, and the
others may at least read and take actions they otherwise would not.
3. Peer Reviews
Every atom of "content" published on an ORG site, whether by the
owner's
staff or on a member's blog, may be rated by any reader on a
fine-grained 1-99 scale. This is the enabling technology for mapping Robert's Rules of Order
to the web (see below). This mapping turns an ORG site into a venue for
citizen deliberation and, literally, a collective parliamentary
procedure. When we demonstrate that a few thousand people can reason
together on line, consequentially meeting off line, and then roll up
their collective view into a specific ballot initiative or candidate, and show up at
the polls to impose their newfound will on the rest of us, then we'll
begin to have a democracy worthy of the label.
4. Ad Hoc Action Centers – The Seed Crystal Incubator
Any member of an ORG site can declare a new, shared space for others
to
join and contribute to. This new space can be private or public and, if
public, open to others or by invitation. These spaces are like a
SourceForge repository for
political action. This is the law of the hollowed out, stupid network,
applied in the medium of politics, which considers all citizens stupid
and passive trip wires – trip them with a commercial and you wire
in
their vote.
But there's a more powerful force in society called conversation.
When conversation flares up spontaneously and aggressively at the edges
of the network, and if it has the fuel to spread, big things happen.
The Action Centers are the fire pits of an ORGware site.
Great conversations happen around great seed crystals. It's a rare
enterprise that has more than a few great seed crystals. But it's a
rare organization that lacks scores of great seed crystals among its
stakeholders. That's the power of the edge, and we mean to provide the
best possible edge environment for turning good seed crystals
into great conversations and will.
8:21:40 PM 
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