Oh Kaye!Doug Kaye has posted his interviews with Marc Danziger, COO of Spirit of America, and force of nature; and Kerry Dupont, SoA’s Director of Procurement/Logistics. They give a good insight into how SoA evolved and, importantly, how the project is embraced by all sides of the political spectrum. (Kerry gives a great example: her husband is very conservative and his mother’s a committed liberal. “At dinners, I think we’ll end up throwing wine.” But both of them embrace the SoA vision–and specifics–enthusiastically. Kerry tells more here.) Spirited CounterpointerDave Winer, bless his heart, is a reliable curmudgeon. When no one can find something wrong with Spirit of America, Dave is the loyal opposition, cautioning the rest of us clueless enthusiasts from joining hands in our shared ignorance:
I agree that we Americans have to get over ourselves, but that’s mostly because we’re a subset of that egotistical species, homo sapiens, that needs, collectively, to get over itself. Fat chance! About as likely as the absurd hope that we’ll stop guzzling gas and start electing leaders with brains, morals and courage. As the military says, a hope is not a plan, and hoping for the impossible is a waste of time and bandwidth. Alan Kay famously said that “The easiest way to predict the future is to invent it.” It’s a clever way to suggest that the only way to prove something is worth doing is to make it worthy.
But I’m missing the dark, ugly American aspects of SoA. Even Dan Gillmor is more optimistic than Dave, and Dan is our most trusted and insightful doubter of All-American cure-alls. The only problem he sees is that gear might not reach its intended recipients:
How Do I Question Thee? Let Me Count the WaysIs it a problem that Americans choose to share their abundance with Iraqis? Is that a bad example? Should we not take advantage of the communications power of the Internet and the logistical miracles of space-available air freight? Which of SoA’s self-absorbed, questionable initiatives shall we stifle?
I understand the threat of irresponsible giving that Dave is cautioning us against. Oh, it started harmlessly enough when Dianna Smith humored her husband, Special Forces Sgt. First Class Jay Smith. Jay had asked Dianna to send baseball equipment so he and his buddies could organize a Little League program for Afghani kids in the town of Orgun-e, 20 miles from Pakistan. See, this is how these imperial initiatives start: innocent-appearing, but with a Pax Americana motivation. The hapless volunteers should have recognized the xenophobic threat in the next slide down the slippery slope when they helped load 2 tons – 4,000 pounds! – of Frisbees for delivery to Iraq. There is surely a diabolical back story behind the nine Arab TV stations that the Marines are about to equip, thanks to about $1,500,000 donated in a week when the idea was raised at SoA. The Marines had found the buildings and, I guess, antennas for the nine stations, but the equipment had been destroyed. Now the equipment is in Iraq, ready to be delivered and lighted up. The stations will be turned over to Iraqi ownership and management, but the Marines have stipulated that the stations must accept the Marines’ paid commercials, urging Iraqis to not kill . . . wait for it . . . Marines! You do see the propaganda machine they’re setting up, don’t you? Soon the Marines will be broadcasting where the kids can pick up their frisbees. I have a soft spot in my heart for American GI’s. I hauled a ton of ’em around Vietnam in ’67 and ’68. Couldn’t find a bad one in the bunch. As an airlift pilot (trash hauler), I’m aware of the good deeds that airlift crews have done. Did you know that, during the Berlin Airlift, the crews would airdrop candy with little parachutes they’d stay up half the night preparing? You DO know that candy causes cavities don’t you? There you have it: another plot against the world’s disadvantaged. OK. I’ve gone over the top with this Fox News commentator persona. But we moderates don’t often have the luxury of teasing those who question straightforward humanitarianism. But there’s a deeper opportunity here, and if it’s not progressive, what is? Strike Force Echo: Fulfillment Specialists
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Author: brittblaser
Spirited America
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Dan Gillmor wrote yesterday about Spirit of America (SoA), which is providing peer-to-peer support to Afghanis and Iraqi’s coordinated by American GI’s. Dan is struck by the fact that Marc Danziger and I are both over-the-top gung-ho about SoA, although we represent ends of the spectrum of opinion for and against the war in Iraq.
As Dan said when we spoke last week, there’s no part of the SoA project that any of us can find fault with. If you’re a bleeding heart liberal, you want to demonstrate that people who hate the war can reach out to the people hurt by our government’s illegitimate war. Rabid war supporters see a chance to demonstrate that the war can be won because the greatest American force is the innate goodness of the American GI, and that it’s worth going to war to connect our terrific GI’s with Arab kids. I can walk both sides of that street. Marc Danziger got started by coordinating volunteers to fulfill the requests, and now he’s involved full time, directing all aspects of SoA as Chief Operating Officer. Jeff Jarvis hooked me up with Marc last week, in the hope that I can help them copy the parts of the Dean campaign that worked right – specifically the mechanics of a grassroots campaign using the strawberry roots hierarchical model I discussed recently. Like all of us, Jeff feels strongly about this, moving mountains behind the scenes. He is a buzz machine. Read Jeff’s take here. America Actually Coming Together
SoA is wielding the positive kind of energy that seems non-existent in the political arena. Are we surprised to discover that the positive energy is rising spontaneously from a grass roots, self-organizing movement? SoA started with Dianna Smith, who sent baseball equipment to her husband Jay, a sergeant with the Special Forces in Orgun-e, Afghanistan. Her shipment started a movement. Perhaps the catalytic moment was when an Afghani kid named Nazim said, “I like to be a player, not a fighter.“
It works both ways. GI’s surely see their younger selves when they watch a 9-year-old belt one out of the infield; any 9-year-old, growing up in any family, regardless of the religious image on the wall over his bed, and regardless of the hatred his uncles were taught.
Could a web-based movement be far behind? And a visionary leader who grabs the bull by the horns? The leader is Jim Hake, Silican Valley entrepreneur and visionary. The sound you hear around Hake is that of the ball rolling, Big Time. As I understand the rough sequence, more shipments followed rapidly, especially after FedEx agreed to haul stuff for free. This week FedEx is flying a free charter loaded with 10-20 pallets of hand and power tools for Iraqi tradesmen. So it goes when you get mixed up with the grass roots. Tipping PointI love grass roots movements (You know, like the American Revolution). Movements that resonate so deeply with the right thing to do that support comes out of the woodwork, from people all over the ideological spectrum. From people so tired of resenting their neighbors’ opinions that they find a way to join with those neighbors and do something positive for a change. There’s no shortage of authentic needs at the people level in Iraq and Afghanistan. And there’s no shortage of grass roots energy here in this land of abundance. Money, of course, is just a form of energy. Other needs arose and were immediately met. Baseball games-in-a-box – a pallet loaded with everything it takes to equip two teams to learn the game from GI’s – GI’s who surely see their younger selves when they watch a 9-year-old belt one out of the infield; any 9-year-old, growing up in any family, regardless of the religious image on the wall over his bed, and regardless of the hatred his uncles were taught. Baseball-in-a-box and school kits sound straightforward, especially with free shipping. But the logistics aren’t trivial. If you want to send hundreds of school kits, the Marines discovered, you need to buy the parts in bulk and customize the kits. A tote bag loaded with a pencil box, notebook, lunch box, crayons, etc., sounds simple, but it needs a gang of volunteers to unpack the shipments of tote bags, pencil boxes, etc., and re-assemble them as individual kits. The assembly lines formed at Camp Pendleton in southern California. That takes a lot of volunteers and that’s where Marc Danziger comes in. Marc is a tech consultant and soccer dad in the L.A area, who took to this project like he was born for it. He stepped up and became active coordinatng volunteers. He was so active that he and Jim Hake had a little heart-to-heart and now Marc Danziger is coordinating SoA’s day-to-day operations. Kerry Dupont (the Maine b I hope I can help Jim and Marc and Kerry line up a million people and several million bucks in pledges for continuing support. As you know, I have some views on how that might be done. So, as Jeff Jarvis writes, here’s your opportunity. Get involved. If you have a war-peace preference, express it by helping our troops show their true colors. Doing so, you can demonstrate that the real power of our country is our people. Spirit of America LinksSoA Background 4:46:09 PM |
WiseChat
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From an IM session yesterday with Doc, in response to my Terror as PR post in response to his post declaring that Nick Berg’s beheading was PR:
Sheesh. The guy can’t help himself… Doc even gives bonuses in his IMs:
10:53:17 AM |
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 “polymer” structure that I proposed to the Dean 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?
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.
Person-to-Person Multi-Level Networks
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.
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 so
ftware – 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:
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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. | ||
| Reagan takes oath of office. |
1/20/81
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Hostages held in the American Embassy in Iran released. | ||
| 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. 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 ou
r 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:
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!
Personal Democracy Forum
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’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 
Terrorism PR
I’ve been working hard on a summary of political tech tools, but I’d like to pull some terrorism-as-PR threads together.
Doc can smell PR a half a world away:
“First, take it from an old PR guy: the Berg beheading was not an act of war; it was an act of publicity.
Second, stop and think of what that publicity was meant to do, and what it has the power to do regardless of its intentions. Hal Crowther puts it best: The best way to give a lie the force of truth is to soak it in innocent blood.
Jeff Jarvis points to Doc’s post and harvests comments:
Comments:
It was precisely an act of publicity, as all terrorism is.
And the deliberate suppression of those images, and any substantive discussion of them, by our ‘journalists’ in the mainstream media is a calculated act of opinion-steering.
Posted by Insufficiently Sensitive at May 17, 2004 11:45 AMDoc is right that is was a PR move. That’s what terrorism is: An attempt to frighten people into capitulation when you’d otherwise lack the ability to defeat them. The act fails if the intended target does not frighten.
Hafta disagree, though, that choosing not to publish image of the Berg beheading is a “calculated act of opinion-steering.” It seems to me an act intended not to sicken people. I don’t need or want to see tape of a beheading to be repulsed and angered by it, thank you very much. Imagination suffices. Making decisions about what to present to readers and what to leave out is essential to journalism. Readers do it, too. And so does Jeff and every other blogger when they decide what they want to write about.
Posted by billg at May 17, 2004 11:56 AM“…act of publicity” – so are embedded journalists, the staged “toppling” of Sadam’s statue, the Jessica Lynch “rescue”….
Posted by mm at May 17, 2004 12:33 PMActually, I thought it was a lesson in beheading for all good would be muslim terrorists. Maybe the media is right not to be posting jihadi techniques of the dumb and the demented.
Posted by Kat at May 17, 2004 01:04 PMOn the same note, see Mark Borkowski’s posting — The vile PR stunt that escalates the hatred
Posted by Constantin Basturea at May 17, 2004 02:06 PMWell, it seems the viewers from the ME were so huge in numbers that some sites could hardly handle the increase in traffic. Any site which posted the URL for the video got bombarded —and the majority were from the ME. Go figure. On line jihad for dummies with a demo on the art of beheading innocents.
Posted by Kat at May 17, 2004 05:09 PM
Decoding Terrorism
Dan Brown, the author of the Galaxy-class bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, wrote a prequel, Angels & Demons, which describes a lecture on terrorism:
“Terrorism,” the professor had lectured, “has a singular goal. What is it?”
“Killing innocent people?” a student ventured.
“Incorrect. Death is only a byproduct of terrorism.”
“A show of strength?”
“No. A weaker persuasion does not exist.”
“To cause terror?”
“Concisely put. Quite simply, the goal of terrorism is to create terror and fear. Fear undermines faith in the establishment. It weakens the enemy from within . . . causing unrest in the masses. Write this down. Terrorism is not an expression of rage. Terrorism is a political weapon. Remove a government’s façade of infallibility, and you remove its people’s faith.”
In a nutshell, Brown is saying that terrorists’ success depends totally on our response to the act. This is like a so-called social computer virus that scares people into bizarre responses to an email describing a computer virus that doesn’t exist. I’m not suggesting that terrorism doesn’t exist, but that we need to keep each attack in perspective in order to defeat the attackers. If one terrorist success causes us to re-engineer our society, why not just give them the keys to the kingdom?
I’ve previously suggested that our response to the terror was totally inappropriate to the act of killing 3-10,000 people on television. (10,000 is how many would have died if the planes had impacted an hour later. The body count is a distinction without a difference.) I’ve discussed with Jeff privately and publicly that we need to be warriors: take our losses, bury our dead, isolate our exposures, repair specific flaws in our systems and stick to our mission plan.
But what is our mission plan? The mission plan of the United States is not the Bush plan and never has been. In America’s third century, our mission plan has not changed for 228 years: Our God-given purpose is to demonstrate that a varied populace from disparate origins can live peacefully under an open government that governs minimally but humanely.
However, our current government’s response was not restrained and it was not enlightened. The Twin Towers attack was used for PR for a weak administration’s narrow purposes. Our current bureaucrats seem unaware that the our country was an expression of the age of enlightenment. Rather, our government responded in a way you’d expect from people who’d never been shot at: we overreacted and thus we engaged in our own acts of terrorism, as Dan Brown describes it: “Undermine faith in the [enemy’s] establishment.”
I’ll say it again. All Americans are combatants who were drafted into combat when a couple dozen guys got lucky 2-1/2 years ago, leveling some expensive real estate and taking out .001% of our population. The 9-11 attack was like several other attempts, except that it was the first one that was effective, on our soil. The next time that happens, and it will, what shall be our reaction? Should we steel ourselves as might a nation of warriors, or shall we succumb to the appealing rhetoric of self-victimization and emotion? Shall we model ourselves on the actions of heroes or shall we behave, as we have been, like participants on the Jerry Springer Show?
Of course we’re not likely to act consistently. However, our leaders and our press could conceivably act with courage in mind rather than market share.
11:36:18 AM comment [commentCounter (289)]
A Hand Tied Behind Our Back
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As the most belligerent country in the world, we routinely withhold our most belligerent options–we’re simply not going to nuke Iraq, for example (though a friend says that Cheney supports the “Nuke it, Pave it, Pump it” doctrine). Imagine the United States choosing to be the strongest nation rather than just the most belligerent. Among nations as among people, strength is measured more by character than by mere force. This is not news, though each generation seems to have to learn it anew.
A strong America would be confident enough to open itself to its citizens and the world, by purposely forgoing the methods and superstitions typical of less confident nations. A stronger America would export prosperity and information, not just movies and threats. Although I’ve never been a big fan of “branding,” imagine the benefits if a few experts burnished the tarnished image of USA™. The obvious starting place is to ratify good old American values, by treating the Constitution seriously. Then we might review the films and books that have most formed the American consciousness, and apply those re-discovered values to our government’s actions. We could start with leading value-shapers like John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart. What would the Duke do with the pencil-pushing noncombatants who have hijacked the GOP and the government? Can’t you see Duke cleaning house at Abu Ghraib? Then he’d climb in his HumVee, go over and grab Bremer by the lapels and lay down the law: “We’re not gonna listen to that snot-nosed Yalie any more. Ya got that, Pilgrim?” If Jimmy Stewart went to Washington again, he might hire David Weinberger as his speech writer. David has posted a rousing speech that he’d like to hear from a leader, if only we could find him one. He concludes with:
It’s Transparent, See?Transparency: a manager’s nightmare. With transparency comes accountability and its twin scourge, responsibility. No manager wants to be subject to the kind of scrutiny that s/he imposes on the people at the next level down. Leaders, however, welcome visibility because a leader’s genius is exposing the group’s core values and expressing its beliefs. Thus it is that our CEO President and his lame Board of Directors, managers all, want to clamp down on scrutiny of the operations of a country owned by We The People who have already decided to fire these guys in six months (mark my words, we’re facing a landslide here*). Nick Johantgen (blog pending) called yesterday to suggest that soldiers’ cameras are the most powerful weapon threatening the American military. Adam Curry quoted a Chinese Proverb over the weekend: “The palest ink is better than the best memory.” This is the effect that digital photography is having on our military. For ten years I’ve been imagining the impending revolution of the Personal Flight Recorder, archiving reality as it streams past us and saving it for personal use as we wish. With our PFRs, we’ll triangulate our collective environment so pervasively that fixed security videocams will be like pinhole cameras by comparison. Someday soon, every cellular plan will include unlimited video capture through the wireless pickup in your ball cap or eyeglass frame. Police departments and public employees will use the devices to record their side of the story. Employees may call it intrusive until they find that they want to carry their own PFR. Sure, it will first be based on fear of getting mugged or some other unlikely event, but it will finally be about recording the interesting moments and transactions in your day. The military’s obsession with Command & Control will ensure that all military activities will be similarly archived. Technology will achieve what Command & Control has never been able to: conform actions to public policy and ultimately, to our shared public sentiment about how Americans are supposed to behave. This single evolution in form factor will cause mankind to re-engage the community that was lost when we invented privacy as an artifact of the Industrial Age. Every creature on earth lives in public except modern man, and the PFR will take us home again. When transparency is re-established in our society, common sense will once again be common. * Anecdotal evidence can be as misleading as political polling, but the steel seems to have left the backbone of the NeoCon movement.
12:06:10 PM |
Draft the Bloggers
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William Broyles writes in the New York Times that The U.S. should reinstate the draft:
Broyles, who writes from Wyoming, brings more than a theoretical opinion to the discussion:
So Broyles tried out the Cheney Defense, whereby a rational person arranges serial draft deferments until after draft age, but Broyles didn’t push it as hard as our chickenhawk-in-chief. Surely it’s a coincidence that Cheney is also from Wyoming. Yet another Wyomingite, John Perry Barlow, has written eloquently of the dangerous perceptions of bomber pilots who, dealing death from above, cannot appreciate its horror. What was simply a metaphor for telecomic opportunism in 1995 is specific now:
My story was simpler. On graduation from college in the spring of 1965, my interest in flying trumped my interest in grad school, so I just volunteered for Air Force pilot training. It was the only way I saw to avoid the more threatening option of enduring Law School and all that it meant. From a combat standpoint, perhaps I was starting my affection for binary data: pilots usually live or die. Seldom are they simply injured. Though I developed no love affair with the Air Force, I do treasure the experiences I was forced to undergo and master. Like Broyles, I was never injured significantly, suffered no post-traumatic stress nor even the survivor guilt he dealt with. I certainly never endured the stress of jungle life he did. Like him, I served with and put my life in the hands of enlisted men who were not college types, for whom I likewise developed a deep respect. It also gave me a bully pulpit from which to ridicule people who want to send other people’s children into harm’s way. Embracing the Unscheduled HardshipIn a restaurant on September 15, 2001, a quartet of twenty-somethings at the next table were discussing what everyone was. One of the young men seemed to take the terrorism personally: “It’s not fair! This is the part of my life when I’m supposed to enjoy life! What happens next?” That’s a strong contrast with Joseph Campbell’s observation that the first half of an ideal life should be spent humbly: mastering the received wisdom and disciplines of one’s seniors, while the second half should be spent questioning everything and improving on conventional wisdom. By that standard, “advanced” societies have it exactly reversed. When young we are allowed to do what we naturally do: question everything and resist discipline when we have no judgment to form biases, and when older, equally irresponsibly, we fall into habits of rigid thinking and uncritical conservatism, our dendrites hardening with the arteries. Broyles is suggesting what I wholeheartedly embrace: A national draft.
I like a broader engagement: All citizens should be required to do four years of service that requires them to master a useful discipline and teach it to others. The reasoning is not to provide cannon fodder for Pax Americana, but rather to leaven the military with a broad cross section of American stereotypes. Obviously, only a lucky few of us would be drafted into the military, but that must not excuse any young person from doing something useful and understanding why. I suggest that young people be required to maintain a public journal describing what good they think should be done in the world, and how they are working on that cause. Applying Dr. Weinberger’s rule, every such blogger would be required to become famous for 15 people, or be found derelict in their duty. We Few, We Lucky FewWilliam Broyle’s most telling memory of combat is of being driven so far past his limits that he learned that self-imposed limits are illusory:
Military aviators are taxed mentally and emotionally more than physically (though 12 hours of takeoffs and landings on steaming, postage stamp strips surrounded by triple-canopy jungle and anti-aircraft fire will soak your flight suit, hopefully with sweat). My personal boot camp had been Colorado Outward Bound School, so I also found that physical limits are merely mental, at least for a 20-year-old. There’s almost a genetic need among young men (the only gender for which I can generalize) to experience overwhelming physical struggle with death as a palpable option. If our society were wise enough to impose universal usefulness on our youth, the ones undergoing military service would get the most from the experience. As we used to say in 1968, it’s a shitty war, but it’s the only one we’ve got. With that as a young man’s spontaneous response to warfare, it makes a lot of sense to include the unwilling in this stupid enterprise. Many Eyes Squash All BugsThe problem with an all-volunteer military is that you attract only those who want to go to war and those for whom the military is the best job opportunity. The point of a military draft is not to staff the military with unwilling citizens, the point is to staff the country’s leadership with people who have served in the military. While it’s true that war is too important to be left to the Generals, it’s even more true that war is too important to be left to those who, like the current war gamers, admire it as a means to subdue inferior regimes and to refresh the military stockpiles. Let’s draft the future leaders of the land into the military so their cynicism of the blunt instrument of war can leaven the enthusiasms of the ones who haven’t yet been disillusioned. Then their experienced eyes can debug policy to weed out the coding error called warfare.
11:18:08 AM |
“I don’t begrudge them…”
“…We’d do the same thing if some foreign dudes rolled into San Diego and set up shop.
— A Marine officer in Fallujah“I also started thinking that the insurgents sure didn’t look like terrorists from my vantage point on the truck. They didn’t seem like radicals or hard-core fighters. They were people shooting from their bedrooms, their prayer rooms, their rice paddies and their mosques. They were people defending their land.”
— NY Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman“If an Iraqi division was rolling up I-85 through Greensboro on its way to overthrow some hypothetical despot in Washington, I’d like to think I’d have the wherewithal to pick a couple of the bastards off along the way.”
— Ed Cone, a peace-loving journalist“Jerry, just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s worth doing!”
— Lt. Britt Blaser to Lt. Jerry Iverson, 1967
When I was a 24-year-old Lieutenant hauling guns and butter around Vietnam in C-130s in October, 1967, my fiancée was demonstrating for peace in Washington, DC. Between the two of us, I felt we were getting it about right. We saw our higher purpose not as assembling a bundle of illusory reinforcements for a narrow point of view, but rather to do what needed doing, competently, while understanding our context, competently.
Or, as Tom Wolfe related in The Right Stuff: “Shut up and die like an aviator.” He was quoting an experienced Naval aviator advising a young pilot to stop yelling about the MIG on his Six and to start doing what he’d been trained to do.
The common thread in these anecdotes is that, if there is such a thing as right action, it places a demand on your resources whether or not your intellect or your gut buys into it. That is the essence of trusting your instruments rather than your inner ear. It also suggests that, when you must do things that seem threatening to your survival, it’s OK to keep your perspective.
In fact, it will improve your odds of survival.
[I penned this last night without the benefit of Ed Cone’s similar post. Honest.]
1:50:15 PM
Hooray! Hooray!
Open Editing
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Micah Sifry has a great insight over at Iraq War Reader: Bloggers are editors, not journalists. We bloggers are not reporting what we see, we’re editing what others tell us.
Micah drives to the hole and dunks it! This is precisely the insight that’s been missing from the media vs. bloggers dialogue. Micah goes on to imply that our new collective cultural editing is the global equivalent of the blind committee examining the elephant.
Blogging, then, is the equivalent of a police sketch artist. Even if each of us is handicapped and specialized, the sketch artist makes our collective effort holistic and insightful. (Extending the metaphor to demonstrate the Sifry brothers’ plot to dominate blogspace, Technorati is the artist’s indispensable index.)
The Metaphor, PleaseOpen source mavens and groupies will quickly see the tight parallel between bloggers’ collective discernment with the open source development process, where “many eyes make all bugs shallow”:
We bloggers are more than zeitgeist gazers. I believe we’re engaged in a collective design process by which human values are beginning to supersede corporate valuelessness, correcting an unintended outcome whereby ink-by-the-barrel was affordable only to the big pubs. The values–and outrage–that inform our posts are those of ethical individuals, reacting to the tapestry of inert sensibilities woven by Big Media. Carbon-based persons hold strong beliefs, which they feel are self-evident. This is not true of charter-based persons–corporations–which, in their ceaselessly failing Turing Test, cannot bring themselves to speak in a human voice expressing human values. What are we designing? I think it’s a society with a memory. Big media’s not much interested in the historical arc describing how we got here. Part of it may be the low level of cultural awareness of most reporters and certainly of the talking heads. Amateur writers though, working literally for the love of editing out the errors so obvious to them, instantiate thoughts and point to evidence that, once documented, is harder to ignore than yesterday’s newsprint recycled as today’s fish wrap. Consideration of prior art was once a requirement for serious commentary, where each work presuming to be consequential felt considered the thread that preceded it. Arbitrary, ungrounded declarations were dismissed as a form of daydreaming, not as serious work. This requirement lives on in science and, happily, in computer programming and the welcome tyranny of standards-based engineering. Prior art has been abandoned by marketers huckstering old wine in new bottles and describing the trivial as startling. When news became marketing, those tricks were adopted. When marketing took over politics, appearances trumped statecraft. Can We Go Home Again?If we’re lucky, attribution-based blogging will lead our cultural dialogue back to the reflective candor that was natural when everyone in the clan or village witnessed the same truths and were constrained by their shared history. 3:04:40 PM |
Escapable Logic 