This is the Spring of Our Discontent
("Hurry!!!. . . Hurry,
hurry, hurry.")
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Open Source Society design
(6.5 min Flash video)
Every
aspect of governance has been designed by the people strong enough to
design that aspect for their own vested interest.
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It's the spring of an election
year and we're beginning to plan ahead again. But FrostFan isn't happy.
Like so many other fans of netroots organizing, he's wondering why no
political sites provide Dean-type tools three years after the Dean web
service blossomed on our radar screens. Responding to the last
post, FrostFan commented:
Hurry!!!
I'm not technical enough nor politically active enough to comment on
HOW to implement peer-to-peer software, but I'd like to lend my
encouragement and a sense of urgency to the effort. What you guys
created on the Dean site inspired my first venture into politics (to
comment, contribute to campaigns, write letters to newspapers, stand on
the street corner and wave signs, etc.).
I'm
still as deeply motivated
to participate in grassroots politics but have not since found any web
site where I can feel as involved in a campaign as the Dean site made
me feel. Judging by some of your quotes, perhaps the sense of
involvement was illusory and the Dean campaign really only wanted my
money but not my ideas. But I'd really like to think that somehow the
Internet can be used to rejuvenate our sadly corrupted political
system. Just want to say thanks for the efforts you and your colleagues
are putting into it & to urge you to hurry, hurry, hurry. The
2006 midterm elections are upon us and 2008 is close behind.
Thanks, FrostFan. It is
amazing that a Dean-type campaign-in-a-box is not available. We often
used that term in describing where DeanSpace - now CivicSpace - was
headed. But, as Desktop Linux proves, it's not straightforward
to get together a cat herd of Open Source developers and produce
software that regular folks will embrace. That's because open source
people focus on what matters to them and regular folks focus on what's
missing. As I quoted David
Weinberger last time, in software that's meant to help you do
little
things well, the nits are determinative. If a tool or platform is not
adopted, it affects nothing. So the question is, what are the customers
of Netroots tools looking for?
Instant Gratification in Ruby Slippers
Campaign managers and consultants are looking for a
comprehensive web platform that requires no conversation to adopt. Yep,
like the notorious zipless
fuck ("the purest thing there is, rarer than the unicorn, and
I have never had one"), everyone in a campaign wants to choose the
perfect
platform without the choosing part. That means the platform must
be absolutely obvious from the moment they lay eyes on it. Open
source advocates need to understand that their "customers" are trying
to save two kinds of dollars, USDollars
and AggraDollars.
Aggra = Aggravation, and AggraDollars are the most precious currency of
all. Campaigns don't want to rely on volunteers and they don't want to
learn about installations and taxonomies and all the arcana that
accompanies most open source solutions. Like spoiled Mac users, they
want everything to just work. Developers think they're lazy but they're
really just human.
There were other comments this weekend. One is an email from a
personage in the open source world whom I feel free to quote but not
identify:
In the last few weeks there has
been interest in the possibility of either defecting from Drupal or
joining for the first time a CMS
platform community based on Ruby. The
reason that people like Drupal from a technical point of view is the
modularity of it and if that can be part of the nature of what you
have then even better.
Anyway, I
would like to help in any way I can.
Fortunately, modularity is straightforward with Ruby. In fact,
Open Resource Group will support an upgrade server to ensure that
clients' installations have all the latest modules.
And the ORGware code
will be open source - the only possible choice since Doc Searls is the
most active of our fine Board of Advisors, and Jan Searls is our
Executive Officer. It's not clear that our upgrade server
should support installations we don't install, since the
upgrades might cause conflicts. Our business model is SugarCRM,
but for MRM, Member Relationship Management. Here's the Board
of Advisors to Open Resource Group, LLC:
Rodger Desai
Henry Ansbacher
Arthur Einstein, Jr.
Diane Francis
Mary Hodder
Salim Ismail
David Isenberg
Jeff Jarvis
Doc Searls
Micah Sifry
Robert Tolmach
Jerry Vass
David Weinberger
Phil Windley
Nothing is More Important
In 2004, George Soros declared
that he would bankrupt himself to get George Bush out of office. He did
his best, but it's a good thing he didn't go the whole nine yards
discovering there are some things money can't buy automatically. One of
them is good interface design and another is software development in a
Presidential campaign.
For lack of those two nails, a war was lost. We are at an epic
crossroads. US Democracy has never been more threatened, our influence
abroad never lower and our military's future never
more in question. Meanwhile, our country's
management has never been less skilled or less candid and never less
willing to do the work the people expect, either at the executive level
or its operating board, the Congress. No wonder Mitch Kapor has called for a
complete re-design of politics.
Just as
you can’t build a skyscraper out of bamboo, you
can’t have a
participatory democracy if power is centralized, processes are opaque,
and accountability is limited. Politics needs a new
architecture, not
just a new coat of paint. We need to renovate the house (and
Senate).
The architecture team needs to reflect the future, not the
present—who
is sitting at the table, and the experiences and perspectives they
represent matter enormously.
The
internet, if kept open and accessible to all, is a tool we can
use to reform our politics and create new democratic processes and
institutions. By using the internet and building upon its open
decentralized architecture, we can help give every person a voice and
offer them a forum to participate in creating a healthy politics. The
internet provides the tools to build bottom-up systems that are both
globally interconnected and locally controlled. As the printing press
was the technology that helped birth modern self-government, so the
internet can be the tool to build a new democratically controlled
participatory politics.
Mitch is passionate about this stuff, as I learned when we
spoke two years ago about developing the Open
Republic meme, conceptual godfather to Open Resource. He
speaks of "internet tools to build bottom-up systems that are
both
globally interconnected and locally controlled". However the current
tools are usable only by those of us who are most skilled and zealous,
and even then, our energy flags because in practice, since
we're all stupid when we use the web:
smart = busy = distracted
= stupid
Today we completed an important milestone bringing us within
striking distance of a beta release. So I'm feeling good about the
design elements described in the short video interview
(6.5 min. Flash video) that JD Lasica shot at the conference on Digital
Transitions held at the UCSB Center
for Information Technology and Society two weeks ago. Here's
the transcript:
JD:
Lasica:
Hi. Here we are at the Forum on Digital Transitions in Santa Barbara.
Can you introduce yourself.
Britt
Blaser: Britt
Blaser, Open Resource Group.
JD: So,
tell me about what Open Resource Group does.
BB: It's
really memberware. Or you can call it MCC-ware: Memberware -
communityware - campaignware. Anybody who wants to attract members. and
we mean that in general but also in the specific sense. The Cluetrain
Manifesto inspired movement away from consumerism, toward customers. We
believe in another step, to members. So. we're really building member
relationship management software which in fact inverts the
organization.
JD: And,
what is the first example of that, that's rolled out already?
BB: We
built something called PodSlam.org and that was a series of 15 poetry
slams, video slams, online, which then people could rate and as a
result we discovered who was the best poet. That was not a particularly
significant expression of what we are doing, it really. I call it Dean
Done Right. My experience with the Dean campaign was they had a lot of
tools for which they were trying to write software in the campaign,
which is of course the wrong place to do it. Zack Exley said you have
two days to do something that should take six months, and it just
didn't work. And there was a lot of low hanging fruit, technically. The
example this morning was, the Meetup people were not willing to also
provide the mechanism for the organizers who came for the big meetup to
get together the next morning for coffee. Because, unlike the
people at this conference, most people are not willing to use multiple
modalities to do things. If they come to a campaign site, they will use
the tools that are in that campaign site. But they won't go out and use
Dabble or use this other tool or that tool.
JD: So,
how do you see the people who are attending this conference being able
to use your software?
BB: The
key is that you can create instant groups and hierarchies without any
permission from anybody. Not a lot of people have that. But at that
point, we're mimicking the best practices. You know, Web 2.0 means this
cloud of things and even those of us who are passionate about these
things can't keep track of all the stuff that's happening. Well,
certainly the grandparents aren't (I'm a grandparent, so I can say
that). And so, each site has to have all the tools we see out here in
Web 2.0 that are useful. Now that sounds pretty complicated, but
otherwise we're not going to actually have an effect on the
electorate.
You know, we're designing an open source society. And that's
the second expression of the open source movement. The engineers for
the open source software, the first expression, they have marvelous
collaboration tools for their needs they've built themselves. But the
engineers for the open source society are grandparents. They are not
going to build collaboration tools and they are certainly not going to
use five different web services, fifteen different applications, and IM
here, text there. They don't do that stuff. We don't do that stuff. So
that's why you have to put it in a package and make it as simple to
operate as an airport kiosk.
JD: So
if the goal is an open source society, what does that mean? What does
that entail?
BB: Well,
in my parlance it means open source governance. Redesigning governance
because governance has been designed, every aspect of governance has
been designed by the people strong enough to design that aspect for
their own vested interest. Now we have a community raising up saying,
OK, let's redesign this.
JD: And
how important is it for the members themselves to show who they are?
The community of those who are talking to each other? Is it important
to have a spot where they can show who they are?
BB: Well,
they get that. First of all, you just need a handle. So you can have
this avatarness. But as we know, as people get more and more engaged,
they get over that. Like bloggers. So what happens here, an entry point
for most of these is, you go to a site and you see an interesting
conversation and you click on it and you make a comment. You have to
register. OK, so if you do that step, you get an e-mail in our case
it's, thank you from the place you commented on and also thanks. And
also, by the way, it's been put on your as well, did you know that?
What? My blog? I have a blog? So, you go and read your blog and sure
enough, an automatic comment or primary post has been put up here which
is a trackback back to here. So that begins an interesting opening. And
they didn't even know that they had a blog. They didn't have to know
they had a blog. It's all AJAX, so when they go to their
blog, they see their post and any other comments they've done and then
at the top, it says, create new post. Click, AJAX, everything slides
down the page. Insert your text entry. You know, the smart things we've
seen elsewhere. All we're really doing is copying these things and
saying, OK, we're going to need that, and we're going to need that.
JD: So,
are blogs and comments the profile of the person?
BB: No,
they have a separate profile they maintain. And the key to that is the
values profile. In the Dean campaign, there were fifteen issues that
were listed. These are the things we care about. Like war, and so on.
And I went to the mat with the policy people up there. I said, OK,
let's create a web site so that all of our 600,000 members can fill out
a values profile about where they are in these values issues, and it
was really plain dead simple. Here is issue one. Here is ten radio
buttons. Click one. Conservative liberal scale. Little tool tips, you
know? Nobody wanted to do it. The policy people said, we cannot have
the candidates be responsible to the base for the views. Well, that's
code. The code is, we can't have the candidate responsible to anybody
else other than us, OK. I think everybody acknowledged that Republican
party has been hijacked by the neo-cons. The Democratic party has been
hijacked by the political consultants. And that's the core problem.
Until we can route around those damage points, we go nowhere. So, when
somebody wants a campaign tool, they don't want to go mess with the
civic space, and find experts, and have that conversation. Because they
want something Tuesday. So, we say, we install this, and it
has all
those tools in it. And then when somebody is for whatever reason
attracted to that particular campaign, they find all these rich
invitation tools, contribution tools, all the stuff we see out there in
Web 2.0, brought together, simple as an airport kiosk. We hope.
JD: Good
luck with the Open Resource Group.
10:31:14 PM 
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