Author: brittblaser

Dave Winer points today to a stimulating USA Today article sure to gladden Jeff Jarvis‘ heart, about Internet adoption and blogs in Iraq:

Iraqis enjoy new freedom of expression on Web journals
By César G. Soriano, USA TODAY
BAGHDAD — A year ago, few Iraqis had ever had access to a computer, much less used it to communicate to the outside world.

Now, Internet cafes seemingly dot every block in Baghdad, and new ones open often. That has led to a new phenomenon here: bloggers.

“We suffered for years under Saddam Hussein, not being able to speak out,” says Omar Fadhil, 24, a dentist. “Now, you can make your voice heard around the world.”

Hence, the blog. Short for “web log,” a blog is a diary or journal posted on the Internet for all the world to read. E-mails can be sent to the blog, so it’s also interactive.

The article naturally describes the famous Salam Pax blog, now available in book form, (who’da thought?) and a photo album. It also cites two educated brothers, a dentist and a pediatrician, Omar and Ali Fadhil. They are pro-American and hugely grateful for the American intervention.

“We get threatening e-mails from Palestinians and Arab-Americans who write, ‘You are traitors. If I were in Iraq, I would shoot you,’ ” Ali says. Other e-mails accuse the brothers of being CIA agents who are writing from Washington, “as if the CIA didn’t have anything better to do than run a blog,” he says.

“My ideas are very shocking to people,” Ali says. “I tell people I am a friend of America, a friend of Israel. Some of my colleagues at the hospital think I am an infidel. It’s impossible to change a man’s mind, but you can only make him consider other alternatives.”

Digital Divide

The two brothers jointly maintain their blog. In America, they’d earn about $30,000, monthly between them but USA Today reports that the average Iraqi doctor earns $150 per month. The typical price for connectivity at Baghdad’s proliferating Internet cafés is $1 per hour. That means some people are spending the equivalent of $1,000 per hour to update their blog. Doesn’t the blogosphere have an award for that level of dedication?

Like many bloggers, the Fadhil brothers’ site solicits donations to help make ends meet. They’ve received more than $1,000, most of it from Americans. The money is wired to Kuwait, where friends pick it up. The Fadhils’ site gets about 3,300 visitors and a few dozen e-mails a day.

Maintaining the blog “is really a 24-hour job,” Omar says. “When I’m not blogging, I’m thinking about what to blog. I’m watching the news, discussing topics. It’s become part of our life.”

There are about 30 Iraqi bloggers in Baghdad, plus a few other blogs written by Iraqis abroad. Not all share the Fadhil brothers’ optimism. “You have your Fox TV. I am offering a counter response,” says Faisa Jarrar, whose blog is critical of the U.S. occupation. Her mixed Sunni-Shiite family began in December with a joint blog, afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com. Now, each of Jarrar’s three sons has his own blog. Raed, 26, Jarrar’s eldest, is studying in Jordan. Khalid, 21, and Majid, 17, are in Baghdad.

This is crazy. Broadband costs the US military nothing. They should be spreading GPRS or WiFi or WiMax everywhere, and handing out routers with the food rations. Hell, Linksys and Cisco could get a huge write-off by donating equipment for the Marines to distribute. Isn’t this called Yankee ingenuity? If the Iraqi wireless scene were data-friendly and cell modems cheap and plentiful, then the Iraqis might have a better use for the phones than for detonating IEDs.

Why kill people to pacify them when you can get them to sit down and engage each other constructively? Even if the Mayor of Salt Lake City is right, it’s worth it: he doesn’t support universal broadband because it causes people to get fat while they download music. At least they’re not shooting at us.

As Doc says, the three most important attributes of the Internet are infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure.

Sister Cities

At the International session at Bloggercon II on Saturday, I wondered why bloggers can’t take the initiative by acting globally and locally? Why not revive the sister city program, but conduct it at Internet speed, mediated by bloggers rather than chambers of commerce?

This would be a pure grassroots effort, with groups of bloggers in US cities and villages “adopting” similar-sized cities in Iraq and then donating equipment and connectivity so that Iraqis can get on the Internet and blog sell stuff on eBay and do some phone banking and all the rest. Since Iraqi is essentially a U.S. colony, why not issue them U.S. charge cards? The US should insure card issuers against losses–as good a use of some of those 87 billion dollars as cluster bombs.

Naturally, we’d have to get somebody to translate some blog software into Arabic, as Jeff Jarvis is Jonesing for. Joi? Loïc? Ethan? Ferris? Anyone? (Shameless plug for Open Republic: This is precisely the kind of well-defined, small project that the Open Republic project would whip out its checkbook for. There’s nothing like a paying client to grab a freelancer’s attention!)

Bloggers donated a lot of the $40,000,000 collected by Howard Dean’s campaign. We might be equally motivated to address problems directly rather than supporting someone else in the hope that they will find a solution.

Just a thought.

“I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.”
                                                — Dwight Eisenhower

10:20:19 PM    comment [commentCounter (282)]

Dave Winer points out that Arianna Huffington, the high-affect, Greek-born, conservative-turned-realist, LA-based, political author and force of nature, has a crush on blogs and the people who write them:

A Mash Note to the Blogosphere

I’ve got a confession to make. I’ve got a big-time crush. I’m talking weak-in-the-knees infatuation. But it’s not Brad or Orlando or Colin or any of the cinematic hunks du jour who have set my heart aflutter. No, it’s Atrios and Kos and Josh Micah Marshall and Kausfiles and Kevin Drum and Wonkette. Bloggers all. Yes, when it comes to the blogosphere, I’m a regular cyberslut. And I don’t care who knows it. Bring on the fines, Michael Powell!

Although I’ve only recently stuck my toe in the fast-moving blogstream, I’ve been a fan — and an advocate — ever since bloggers took the Trent Lott/Strom Thurmond story, ran with it, and helped turn the smug Senate majority leader into the penitent former Senate majority leader, a bit of bloody political chum floating in a tank of hungry sharks. Simply put, blogs are the greatest breakthrough in popular journalism since Tom Paine broke onto the scene. (emphasis added)

What Arianna loves about blogs is what societies loved about the press back when it spoke with a human voice. I’ve previously opined that our republic was the product of small printing presses, post roads, coffee shops and leisure time: bandwidth-powered conversations. The post roads, built between America’s major cities in the early 1700’s, were a disruptive bandwidth upgrade. It suddenly made more sense to converse with other colonists than to receive orders from Londoners, just as it now makes more sense to converse with each other in “print” than to passively absorb the media’s titillation du jour:

And then, in the New World, came a bandwidth revolution. Each of the colonies had started as settlements, divided from each other by an impassable barrier of wilderness. Their communications architecture was hub and spoke, a hierarchical command economy driven by old world masters who were the only source of the manufactured goods they needed to hack out a living from the forest. With time came expansion and roads and inter-colony trade and local foundries and mills and a slow realization that a very nice living could be had without reference to the masters now so far away. Physical distance was a metaphor for the attenuation of hierarchical control, and a clue that this newly flat society was giving more than it was getting.

The metaphors with our age are stunning and inspire us to pick up that old thread the Founders started and Emerson continued and Thoreau and Whitman and Clemens and Steinbeck and Kerouac and all the rest. We’ve been so busy lately that we’ve quit talking about ways while focused on means. But that hasn’t dimmed our collective sense of how we’re meant to live. To paraphrase what the rustic said about art, we may not know freedom, but we know what we like.

Somehow the Dean campaign dropped a little of this latent genetic sensibility into the nutrient pool called the Internet. Contrasted to the bushies’ assault on freedom as we like it and a radical foray into preemptive war, we seem to sense an unprecedented disturbance in our collective force, as if a sister blue-green planet had been obliterated far, far away.

(The other day I suggested to Ethan Zuckerman that it’s perfect that he looks like Ben Franklin. We agreed that the American revolution was the work of techies like Franklin and Tom Jefferson who invented ways to do things better, and that the small scale printing press was the blogware of the Age of Enlightenment.)

And this is precisely why Arianna has stars in her eyes – the blogosphere’s ability to consider an issue substantively and persistently:

The vast majority of mainstream journalists head in the direction the assignment desk points them. This often means just following a candidate around, or sitting in the White House press room, and then rehashing the day’s schedule for their readers or viewers. Bloggers are armed with a far more effective piece of access than a White House press credential: passion.

When bloggers decide that something matters, they chomp down hard and refuse to let go. They’re the true pit bulls of reporting. The only way to get them off a story is to cut off their heads (and even then you’ll need to pry their jaws open). They almost all work alone, but, ironically, it’s their collective effort that makes them so effective. They share their work freely, feed off one another’s work, argue with each other, and add to the story dialectically.

And because blogs are ongoing and daily, indeed sometimes hourly, bloggers will often start with a small story, or a piece of one — a contradictory quote, an unearthed document, a detail that doesn’t add up — that the big outlets would deem too minor. But it’s only minor until, well, it’s not. Big media can’t see the forest for the trees. Until it’s assembled for them by the bloggers.

Our blogalogue resonates with the founding brothers’ dialogue through our shared emphasis:

Hold the great ideas in your head; ignore fads.

These guys had all mastered the great books (well, through volume 36, Adam Smith). Their classical education was based on the notion of the classics, that some ideas are more important than others – that educated people have been conducting a great conversation for three millennia and we’re obligated to attend to them and hold fast that which is good. That you’re not educated until you learn the core body of thought and discourse that has stood the test of time.

Arianna was steeped in this body of work at Cambridge University. She bemoans the fact that the media doesn’t cover the important stories in a way that treats them as important:

Reporters for the big media outlets are obsessed with novelty
, always moving all-too-quickly on to the next big score or the next hot get.

That’s when it dawned on me: The problem isn’t that the stories I care about aren’t being covered; it’s that they aren’t being covered in the obsessive way that breaks through the din of our 500-channel universe. Because those 500 channels don’t mean we get 500 times the examination and investigation of worthy news stories. It means we get the same narrow conventional-wisdom wrap-ups repeated 500 times. As in “Dean is angry.”

It’s enough to make a girl swoon when legions of passionate writers come on line, almost overnight, to do the heavy lifting that the lightweight press refuses to:

All of which has made the blogosphere such a vital news source in our country — and has made me besotted with blogs. It’s a crush that I’m betting will quickly progress to going steady.

I only have one question: Does the blogosphere have an ID bracelet? I sure hope so.

Good News

Well, Arianna, a sizable fraction of the blogosphere thinks you’re a hottie and we’re ready to take this relationship to the next level. Your ID bracelet is being engraved as I write this. If you come to BloggerCon a week from Saturday, I’ll ask Dave Winer to present it to you. After all, he’s the father of the form you adore.

1:06:24 PM    

Open Republic helps activists grow their community, their support, their contributions and their political power. This is the entry point for the tech-averse political novice and a backroom operations guide for the tech-savvy political pro: Dean done right.

I believe some sage (Regis McKenna?) said:

Draft the press release before you design the product

The reason is familiar to any salesperson. They get deep into a presentation and they’re stopped cold by the dreaded objection #3a – the one that slows down most sales and kills half of them. If the engineers had only designed objection 3a out of the product, life would be good.

By drafting the press release, even 12 to 24 months before product launch, you’ll be forced to think about the product’s benefits rather than its features, and you’ll design a better product. You’ll think about benefits because you’re trying to engage editors and end users who don’t care about anything but what’s in it for them. You’ll answer why your darling is worth the brain damage of owning it.

End users never care about features – the engineers’ beloved blinkenlights – they care about the core utility of the thing. Most of our VCRs are blinking 12:00 because we bought it to play rentals, not to schedule recordings, and we have other clocks that keep working when the power goes out. Most people still don’t watch DVDs because every time they try to buy a player, the sales guy starts talking about 3:2 pulldown and their eyes glaze over. He thinks he’s selling DVD players, but he’s really delivering brochures.

A web page is essentially what salespeople refer to as a “cold call,” an interruption in the customer’s search for an answer in a haystack of solutions. My friend Jerry Vass says that most people really don’t care to change what they are doing now, because it’s too much trouble.

Companies’ inability to deliver answers delays the purchases we’d otherwise leap at. Vass estimates that featureSpeak costs companies billions of dollars in delayed purchases. Customers seem to care most about dollars but we really care about the aggradollars we squander on the aggravation of owning anything we’ve not owned before. Aggradollars are the dark underbelly of the Information Economy that sounded so appealing when Paul Hawken described it in 1983.

Answers, not Solutions

The software industry believes its mission is to deliver solutions, but customers want answers. The great thing about an answer is that it includes a promise. Customers have learned that “solution” means “black hole”. We who’ve spent too much time packaging information for a computer screen have learned that we have to throttle our ambitions way back to be useful to our customers.

That’s why Open Republic must first be a trusted publication, not a software development operation. OR’s first obligation is to deliver the single answer an activist wants, not the data architecture solution she needs. The OR answer for the activist is direct:

Open Republic helps activists grow their community, their support, their contributions and their political power. This is the entry point for the tech-averse political novice and a backroom operations guide for the tech-savvy political pro: Dean done right.

Scores of smart, committed technologists are setting up consulting shops and development operations. They will all be competing for the attention and confidence of Misty Smith’s brother-in-law. Open Republic means to be the comprehensive and comprehensible companion and portal for the activist with questions that need answers.

Learning by Teaching

It’s axiomatic that the best way to learn something is to teach it. By building the indispensable guide to what’s available in the activist software market, Open Republic will understand far better what’s missing and what most needs improving. Armed with those insights, it will better spend its grant money inspiring activist developers to do what they want to do anyway, but with a better UI.

The Open Republic portal to the new tech of activism will have no shortage of donors. People and foundations experienced enough to have money to give know that the world needs more benefits and fewer features – answers, not solutions.

---

From recent comments:

Your description of OR seems like it avoids the pitfalls of so many recent posts I’ve seen around the ideas of how technology can support campaigns. By focusing on a mix of expert political advice with active critique/support of toolmakers, OR might just avoid the trend of scholastic laziness and technological navel gazing I see in most of the emergent democracy posts.

One important piece of this mix is the communication between experts, campaign managers and toolmakers. OR seems like it would be in a unique position to allow these people to tell each other of their needs and goals, and to bring together multitalented teams like the one you joined on the Dean campaign. While many of the social software software systems have questionable value as services for the general public, OR can benefit from the lessons they are teaching us about encouraging communication among relatively small communities like the one OR will support.

Trevor F. Smith • 3/24/04; 7:38:22 AM

Towards Trevor’s point – a couple of further quick thoughts.

• OR should ideally draw on technical resources regardless of ideaology, so should look to include Republicans as well as Democrats (and independants)
• I think OR should incorporate knowledge and skills being learned outside of the US in the realm of applying the Internet and connectivity to campaigns. While there are differences (legal and cultural), some of the most innovative uses of technology in the political process are not here in the US.

From the simple Fax your MP program in the UK, to using SMS messages to assemble protests (and/or get out the vote), to voting booths in Africa that do not require literacy (using photographs), innovations are now very much global.

Further, OR should probably address and look at how tools and technology can a means of reaching out beyond just the English speaking portion of the US population. Non-native English speakers are a key and growing block (well blocks) of voters, any technology being built likely should consider this going forward.

Shannon Clark • 3/24/04; 8:5
8:48 AM

 

8:36:17 AM    

follow the money

Governance is about who gets to decide where the public’s money goes. A republic is a government where the peer-to-peer bandwidth is too limited to support a true democracy. A democracy is a government where any citizen who chooses to speak up has an equal voice with the other, equally vocal citizens. We are at an exquisite balance point between the presumption of insufficient bandwidth and wide open, wild west democracy.

Small-r republicans, whatever their party, get this instinctively. The easiest way for those in power to stay in power is to ensure that peer-to-peer bandwidth remains limited.

But middle class American households own most of the society’s money, the votes and now, the broadband connections. It’s a democratic bonfire waiting for the right match.

Phase II of the Open Republic concept won’t grow out of some foundation’s grand scheme for how politics morphs into governance, but rather because of an inevitable outbreak of citizen-provided governance, starting at the local level and bubbling up to the federal and global scales. It starts as we start providing the data governments lack and the political power [polis, L., the people] to speak to our governments directly, requiring governments to be responsive to us.

Politicians fret about such openness while government employees often welcome it. Doc’s recent reminder about this reflects my personal experience:

People get the best government they provide

Politics as Unusual is my latest SuitWatch from Linux Journal. It includes some mind-opening thoughts from my local friend Patrick Gregston, who knows local politics far better than I do. A sample:

Government isn’t the problem. People need to bring solutions to government. Government is dying for answers. Bring some and you’ll get somewhere.

I don’t have experience with the government stonewalling me at all. I experience interest and cooperation at every level, as long as I bring solutions and not only problems.

A lot of helpless people want government to solve their problems or to carry their spear on one issue or another. That reflects an ignorance of how the whole ecosystem actually works. If you’re constructive, you can participate in that ecosystem.

This seemed consistent with what I’ve learned from Phil Windley, too.

Last Friday, Doc quoted Gregston again:

Patrick Gregston’s maxim about the differences between business and government: Business is interested in outcome, and government is interested in output.

Phil Windley and I discussed local government responsiveness on Tuesday and agreed there’s a lot of service provided by people happy to be of service. It’s all about building and fixing the streets.

Creating Infrastructure

Like Patrick Gregston, I don’t have experience with the government stonewalling me at all, and I’ve spent a lot of time working with governments. Before I became a tech junkie, I was a Denver-area real estate developer. I’ve formed three metropolitan districts, closed two municipal tax-exempt fundings, annexed 1600 acres to a 90 acre town and made a lot of money changing zoning, installing utilities and building streets. I even patented a solar home because we couldn’t get natural gas service for a subdivision. You can get a lot done by filling out government forms, but it’s a lot like writing code.

One of my projects involved 120 acres on the Denver-Boulder turnpike, but without access. All it took to increase the value of our land 20-fold was to get four layers of bureaucracy, including the Federal Highway commission, to authorize us to build the interchange by adding an assessment to our land and other interested parcels. Add 15 years of brain damage and bam! Overnight success:

The difference between building a fence in your back yard and building an interchange is only a matter of scale: the interchange involves more permits, more layers of government, more zeroes and more financing.

No one at any level of government wants to prevent citizens from creating infrastructure. But you must be willing to help them work within the regulations. That means a lot of paperwork, patience and empathy. As Patrick Gregston says, they’re interested in output, which is a kind of throughput: Citizens fill out paperwork declaring what they want, and government processes it. Too bad businesses aren’t as responsive.

Self Full-Funding Prophecies

If you and your neighbors want to pave your country lane and it’s not in the county budget, you can get together, fill out some forms, and agree to higher property taxes in order to get your paving. I’m sure some cities now do that on the web and within a few Internet years government sites will support self-forming social networks to support infrastructure.

A few cycles later, the web of obligations and funding will be palpably depicted and managed on line by the citizens. We will make mutual commitments and government entitlements by the same logic: are dust abatement and fewer front end alignments worth the tax increase? That’s an economic decision, not an ideological one.

When that happens, government becomes a service we purchase like everything else. As clients of our governments, we the customers people will demand that our government web application become responsive and user-friendly. The way we’ve always wanted government to be.

Politics IS Governance

This is the interesting part. Historically, political campaigns have melted away on election night. What will be the relationship of the new political tools to the governing style of the victors? Political campaigns have learned to operate web sites to seek our active membership, our policy preferences, our voluntary contributions, our activism and MeetingUp.

Contrarily, governments would rather be left alone. But what happens to a campaign’s web presence when the campaign succeeds? Does it disappear? Or should we expect the online community to be active after the candidate takes office?

Doh! I’d never thought about this before. The web sites of dead campaigns live on! The DeanforAmerica DemocracyforAmerica web site and blog is now committed to electing Kerry and lives on; not surprising. But the Clark and Edwards blogs are still active, because
their community won’t let them die.

There’s no way a successful campaign will be able to shut down its community of winners.

And that’s the obvious destiny of an Open Republic initiative. It starts by paying attention to politics and helping political campaigns to use the new emerging activism tools. But these tools have an unintended consequence: They instantiate a campaign, giving it a life of its own.

Voters who have built a candidate with open source tools will be interested in open source tools that build a government.

6:30:54 PM    

…is nothing like under surveillance.

Joi Ito indicates his support for the new noun, urging us to attend a conference on a major disruptor heading our way:

International Workshop on Inverse Surveillance – April 12

This should be a cool event. I’ll be participating remotely in some way, but if you can make it, you should. I’m on the program committee.

Subject: Int’l Workshop on Inverse Surveillance: Camphones, ‘glogs, and eyetaps

Call for Participation:
International Workshop on Inverse Surveillance:
Cameraphones, Cyborglogs, and Computational seeing aids;
exploring and defining a research agenda

Date: 2004 April 12th.
Time: 12:00noon to 4pm, EST (a working lunch will be served)
Location: Colony Hotel (1-866-824-9330), 89 Chestnut Street, Toronto

Sousveillance is hipspeak for inverse surveillance, which is still too hip to comprehend easily. The workshop’s site explains:

Surveillance		Sousveillance
Sur-veiller is French for “to watch from above”.		Sous-veiller is French for “to watch from below”.
God’s eye view from above. (Authority watching from on-high.)		Human’s eye view. (“Down-to-earth.”)
Cameras usually mounted on high poles, up on ceiling, etc.		Cameras down-to-earth (at ground level), e.g. at human eye-level.
Architecture-centered (e.g. cameras usually mounted on or in structures).		Human-centered (e.g. cameras carried or worn by, or on, people).
Recordings of an activity made by authorities, remote security staff, etc.		Recordings of an activity made by a participant in the activity.

Inverse surveillance is the imminent device-driven tsunami whereby we commoners take back our commons. We will be using our always-on videophones to capture the passing scene. The result will be that our blanket, overlapping and corroborating public record captured by our high-res private devices will overwhelm the spotty, lo-res record of incidents captured by so-called public surveillance devices.

Toward the Obvious Republic

The rise of private video capture first captured my attention almost a decade ago. I call the device a PFR, for Personal Flight Recorder. Oddly enough, it ties in to where the Open Republic concept is sure to lead us, once open source tools open the Republic. The PFR is such an important development that it was the basis of an arrogant little series Doc convinced me to put together 13 months ago. What I was seeing everywhere was transparency unfolding where opaqueness has always been the rule.

Prophecy 1
Personal Flight Recorder (PFR)
Prophecy 2
Open Source Hegemony
Prophecy 3
Personal GeoPositioning & Notification
Prophecy 4
The Obvious Society

Prophecy 1 · Personal Flight Recorder (PFR)

This one’s especially dramatic because no one’s talking about it, but it gets the transparency Oscar since the PFR is inevitable, imminent, obvious, and requires no one’s permission. I’m amazed that we’re not addressing this change directly because, when you know the world’s about to change, it’s a good time to re-assess your deck chair arrangement project. 

If you can spell S-O-N-Y, you know what’s around the corner:

• Picture Phones will become Video Phones.
• Video Phones will be connected into the wireless mesh.
• Audio/Video capture will not be obvious to others, being separated from the phone as the microphone is today. We’ll be stealthy without being sneaky.
• Copyright holders won’t like it, but we will have the right to capture anything we witness.
• We will replay and share any part of our personal history we choose to.
• Within n years, more people will have PFRs than not.

That inevitable sequence means that ours is fated to be a pervasively shared culture. Every action by the police will be captured (by their and others’ PFRs) and subject to public review. Any transgression, real or imagined, will be shared and, probably, published. The most noteworthy exceptions to “conventional” mores will receive the most attention. This will have a chilling effect on a wide range of undesirable activities:

• Crime
• Media absurdity
• Assholes
• Politicians
• The non-productive Many.

Prophecy 3 • Personal GeoPositioning & Notification

We’ll be capturing the video stream we witness while knowing where we are, where going, how to get there and when. The third leg of this empowerment stool is the logistical equivalent of blogging. Where we are and what we’re seeing will be selectively available, in real time, to anyone we care to share it with. Thereby, our social involvements will escape physical restraints, and moblogging rises to a third dimension.

That is the promise of the PFR equipped with personal geopositioning.

Prophecy 4 • The Obvious Society

All the technical clues point to a transparent society that collectively knows as much about its participants as did the citizens of a 19th century village. The personal means for that transparency is the PFR with geopositioning. The supporting infrastructure will be the wireless mesh of repeating stations that we the people will build without realizing that we were supposed to wait until the telecoms got their act together.

The icing on the transparency cake will be the broad adoption of Radio Frequency ID (RFID) tags. These microscopic, essentially free passive transponders will be based on unique IPv6 identifiers numerous enough to tag every item on earth. The tech is being developed for retailers but its significant effect will be that eve
rything in the world will be detectable by your cell phone-turned-PFR.

In an Obvious Society, each of us will have one or more devices capturing the video stream moving past it and aware of the description and history of the material objects it is near. This is a world in which it is absurd to consider stealing a bike or snatching a purse. As noted previously, all this mutual observation and knowledge makes current security monitoring a small and irrelevant part of the collective knowledge of society. Peer Brother makes Big Brother irrelevant and kind of pitiful.

But those technologies describe a transparent society. What’s an Obvious Society?

It’s one where it’s obvious to we the participants how to indicate our needs and receive rewards for our energy, though there are billions of learning cycles between now and then. We’ve all observed how most web sites suck but that a precious few totally nail it. When I stumble on that rare web site that “gets it”, I’m amazed and relieved that there are any at all. Slowly, the way to make choices obvious will prevail. The relentless march toward Open Source software will hasten obviousness in all our choices, because the open source process nibbles away at poor code until what’s left is what we have agreed is correct.

It’s stunning that the PFR is inevitable, imminent and destined to become ubiquitous. Extended by geo-positioning, the wireless mesh and RFID awareness, the PFR will expose what it sees happening around it and what physical items it senses nearby, perhaps including people. It forces us to become what we would have others believe us to be.

The Obviousness Revelation

Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.
                           — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We live in the Age of Spin, where companies and governments publish what we want to hear and then do whatever they intend to anyway. Implicitly, they recognize right action, they just can’t live with it. When we can directly see what happens within view and earshot of each of us, actions merge with how the actors want to appear to others, and each of us gain some of the insight Emerson enjoyed. As our motives become obvious, so do we. But there’s another, equally important form of obviousness—an individual’s proper course of action.

People yearn for obviousness. It’s why we sacrifice our freedoms and personal choice to the yoke of self-serving patriarchs and religious fundamentalism. It frees us from having to think for ourselves enough to make nuanced choices.

• Why master the subtleties of Evolution of the Species when we can rely on the Book our parents relied on (or thought they should)?
• Why make our own choices when we can succumb to the seductive appeal of an all-powerful Father like the one so few of us had?
• Why attempt to decipher the competing trajectories of constitutional guarantees, politicians, generals and demagogues when we can mouth platitudes wrapped in flag and fatherland?

When obviousness is finally embedded into the socioeconomic interface, we can each become masters of nuance rather than slaves of mystery. Isn’t the aim of User Interface Design to allow us to master options more broad and subtle than previously manageable?

The enabling technologies of the Obvious Society, while intriguing, are irrelevant. What’s critical is that it promises to free us from the smoke we blow up each others’ asses and, with a little bit of luck, make “isms” obsolete.

The Open, Obvious Republic

We don’t have to work on the Obvious Republic, Sony and Nokia and all the rest will take care of that. We just have to work on the Open Republic, but we can’t talk about where it’s going without understanding how it will be looking at itself.

All the time.

7:37:50 PM    

I’ll delay the vision thing RE Open Republic, Phase II to reflect on Ellen Dana Nagler’s excellent post, Letting the Terrorists Win. She says that we let the terrorists win every time we factor their threat into our planning, and she catalogues the moments in her life when she altered her behavior because of terrorist activity: London in the early 70s, Paris in the summer of ’86, winter, 1991 and January, 2002.

And Tuesday.

Ellen’s is a candid, revealing and courageous essay. She describes her mother’s way of looking at the world:

In her heart, where she receives the world as a fearsome thing and shrinks from encounters with it, she is letting the terrorists win.

And the pressures she felt in London during the IRA bombings in the early 70s:

I avoid Grosvenor Square and the American Embassy, which for some reason seems to be on the list, or at least on the list in my head.

The List in My Head

Ellen is teaching us by example, admitting the habits of perception she’s not proud of but which might inform our own behaviors and perhaps free us from hatred and terror in our hearts, which is truly terrible, while confronting terror objectively, which is terrific. What we’re really reacting to, she’s saying, is the list in our heads.

This is a recurrent theme for me, having placed myself in so many precarious circumstances, first as a clueless, grandstanding young man and later as a habit useful in combat. Here’s a repeat of something I published last August:

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About that Face Slap

What if our 9/11 tragedy wasn’t? I hate to sound harsh about our losses, but has it occurred to anyone else that running airplanes into buildings might not have been the logistical masterstroke of the century?

I’m suggesting that there was an operational hole in our hijacking prevention system and that some passionate Arabs got lucky and managed to kill some of us. I’ve got about 2500 hours in a Boeing 707, and I’m sure that a couple hundred hours in Microsoft Simulator would be enough for the average person to switch off a 767 autopilot, turn left and crash into the Twin Towers. The fact that they did some actual flight training in a Cessna seems irrelevant.

There’s almost 300 million of us. On 9/11/01, those Arabs killed a little over .001% of us, fewer than die from smoking every week. Instead of panicking, we could have started locking cockpit doors, continued to keep guns off airplanes, and we’d have plugged that loophole.

Perhaps 9/11 was more spectacle than significant. Of course, there’s a war on terror, but we’re the foot soldiers in that war, and we should acknowledge that some of us are going to get hurt. It’s a war, fer chrissake! I’ve been traveling a lot lately, and as most of us know, the airport precautions are more charade than anything else. We all understand that we’re not significantly safer than we were before. Feeling safer is not the same as being safer.

What we might have done in the middle of September 2001, if tough-mindedness were part of our national makeup, would be to say,

“OK, you motherfuckers, you got lucky once. We’re not changing how we live our lives, but we’re changing how you live your lives, starting with Saudi Arabia, which is the obvious catalyst for this foolishness. We’re going to do the thing you can’t stand us to do: Freeze your assets, dictate what we’re willing to pay for oil, and spend those saved billions on energy independence and telecommuting technologies. Any company that resists that initiative will be exposed for its un-American activities. Now you guys fix that Taliban problem or we’ll get really nasty and put an embargo on bizjets.”

That kind of thinking arises from my sense that we spend most of our lives flying into large mountains avoiding small bullets. I learned that lesson when I saw a guy do that very thing in Viet Nam, so clanked was he about the idea of someone shooting at him that he ignored the reality that airplanes and mountains are a bad combo.

Yeah, yeah, I know, we can’t dictate market forces. But if OPEC can, we can. Of course we’d only do that if we had confidence in the resilience of the American people and if national security were more important to us than oil company profits. Our homeland security problem is that the American Oil Industry benefits from high prices as much as the Sheiks of Araby, as ex-CIA Mideast specialist Bob Baer points out in Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, cited by Salon,“the real war we should be fighting is not in Baghdad.”

Small Minds, not Small Government

Maybe we got it wrong. We thought the Bushies were about small government, but perhaps it was only about their small mandate. Maybe they were fixated on what everyone seems to ignore: without extraordinary measures, they’re unlikely to get more votes than last time. The opportunity the Bin Laden family handed the Bush family was to paralyze our culture so ordinary electoral logic would not apply.

“Lucky me. I hit the trifecta,” Bush told [Mitch] Daniels shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the budget director.
                         – Miami Herald , Nov. 29, 2001*

These cynical points have been made by smarter people than I. I’m just riffing on the role of our cultural aesthetic and high tolerance of cynicism. The political cynicism we’re seeing is related to the cynicism of public companies and TV evangelists and the media. Our cultural taste no longer reflects the high personal values most of us hold, regardless of our politics. Instead, we’re gripped by the opportunistic economic aesthetics of large groups, where anything goes as long as it increases stock values or electoral votes or collection plate revenues.

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Buzzing the Machine

This recurrent theme reminds me of an enjoyable lunch conversation I had on this topic with Jeff Jarvis at Etech in early February. The bright San Diego sun was smiling on our grateful faces and I lobbied for this notion that we somehow need to separate one’s personal fate from one’s actions, that the battle plan must be consistent and smart, not hostage to a few casualties. I believe our nation’s battle plan is to live according to the Bill of Rights, even if it costs some of us our lives once in a while.

Today Jeff writes,

…we have to remember that these are pathologically insane and evil beasts and it’s impossible to guess how low they will stoop.
If we were lucky enough to have intelligence inside their devil’s cult, then, yes, we might have foiled their plot. But that’s obviously hard to do.
If we were lucky enough to have stopped one of them for speeding and locked them up, then we might have f
oiled their plot. But that’s like counting on a lottery ticket.
What matters now is learning the lessons we can learn — and to that extent, the hearings are valuable — to protect us as best we can.
But I find the blame game going on now unseemly and divisive and unproductive and distracting and just a little bit tasteless.
I saw people die that day not because of anything we didn’t do but because of what a bunch of soulless murderers did do. Let’s never forget that.
It’s us against them, not us against us.

This is where Jeff and I diverge in how to wage war well. Rage hampers your ability to function in combat, and we are in combat. One prevails by respecting the enemy, not in seeing him as inhuman. Further, I’m convinced that no one is soulless, though many on both sides are deluded by fundamentalist leaders and happy to kill in their personal quest for meaning. Just as our vets have been to Viet Nam and met and hugged and wept with their former enemy, someday Iraqis and Yanks will sit down in Baghdad over sweet tea and grieve for the lost days of their youth, seeking to maim each other.

Though we’re not at war with with ourselves, we must be antagonistic to our own errors. NFL teams review the game video and fighter pilots the gunsight film and grade each others’ landings because they’ve got past the idea that discovery is blame and that criticism is personal. The military has a lot at stake so it’s pretty comfortable with the idea that perfection is the absence of mistakes: their only hope is to get the mistakes out in the open and learn from them. If George Bush were a warrior, he’d get this, and he’d never have allowed Rumsfeld to fire General Shinseki for his foreknowledge that it would take more troops and money to occupy Iraq than the White House wanted to consider.

Kicking the Dog

The Iraqi war was a catharsis, not a strategy, the equivalent of kicking the dog after a bad day at the office. Does my analogy belittle the agony of all those families? Think about it rationally: our problem was in witnessing all that agony all at once, so dramatically, and dwelling on it for months. It built a dangerous list in our heads. Every life is precious but most end badly, with tubes and machines and grieving relatives around us. Multiply the affect surrounding those individual deaths times 3,000 and it’s probably the same as 9/11.

Living fully and free is more important than a specious guarantee of domestic tranquility. The list of blessings in an open heart trumps the list of threats in a timid head. Our spirit is destined to celebrate the universal dignity of life and keep the hope that tomorrow, everywhere, can be a renaissance of understanding.

12:14:58 PM    

Thanks to Doc for helping Ethan Zuckerman and me advertise for Internet vets to vet the accumulating activism tools for our nascent Open Republic effort. Since all but my 15 readers have missed this groundswell, the back story is that a small bunch of us are looking for volunteers to serve on one of three blue ribbon advisory panels (your reward will be a blue ribbon and a certificate suitable for framing).

1. The Review Board will survey the available tools so the Open Republic Foundation can host its flagship effort–sort of an activist consumers’ union–granting a Good Nationkeeping Seal of Approval for the tools providing the best user experience:

   A comprehensive and comprehensible guide to the online organizing of campaigns

2. The Innovations Board will describe tools in the guides that need improvement and new tools to fill in the gaps among those tools:

   Stimulate the creation of excellent campaign and governance software and Internet resources.

3. The Acceptance Board will exercise quality control over the work performed for the Innovations Board:

   Review work commissioned for the Open Republic Foundation and accept or reject it as fast as humanly possible.

The Pitch

If you’re interested in so serving, please comment below or send me an email specifying which board you wish to serve on. Naturally, each board will hire experts to do the grunt work, so your work is to be a grizzled veteran whom the foundation will honor and publicize for your wisdom and insight.

Heh. Then you will be slowly sucked into the actual work and schmoozing that attracted us to you in the first place. At least that’s how it’s worked on every board I’ve served on.

Don’t be shy! Step right up if you feel qualified and energized. For those who know that Ethan or I will be contacting you, well, this would be the time to make a great show of grace and noblesse oblige and step right up. You have been warned…

6:05:35 PM    

The Dean campaign captured the world’s imagination because it raised so much money so quickly from so many people. We pay attention to money because it indicates that people are willing to back up their sentiments with more than words. It’s a crude measure of social worth, but it’s the metric that seems to matter the most to most of us.

When millions of dollars are anted up by a self-organizing, grassroots movement, it even gets the attention of the big money guys, since their organizations work so hard for the money, and suddenly an unknown is making it look easy. As Jim Moore stressed so long ago, the few hundred million dollars driving a Presidential campaign is chump change compared to the trillions of dollars of budgetary power it so cynically buys. And the beat goes on over at johnkerry.com, where the fundraising pace is making believers of the old boys, at about $50K per hour.

A Social SourceFourge with Money

Ethan Zuckerman and I spoke today about the Open Republic (OR) concept, noting how similar it is to his concept called Social SourceForge. Coincidentally, I’ve often described OR as a political SourceForge, with money to spend on good ideas. I’m beginning to see this space as tools for governance and how to use them, and here too, money can be the secret sauce. This is precisely Ethan’s vision and we want to be pushing this inevitability together, so it happens in 2004 rather than 2 or 4 years later.

The best expression of the [working-titled] Open Republic would be a charitable foundation with a broad purpose:

Upgrade American governance by stimulating the creation and adoption of excellent campaign and governance software and Internet resources.

Despite that grand vision, the operation of OR should be a based on a down-to-earth, practical charter:

1. Identify and praise the currently available resources
2. Specify improvements and extensions to those resources:
   1. Software
   2. Documentation and users’ guides
   3. A web site that guides users in deploying the resources
3. Make cash grants for improvements to those resources

The Electoral Cycle: the Krebs Cycle of Democracy

If we’re so idealistic, why the focus on political tools rather than governance, which is what we really need to emphasize? About a month ago, it occurred to me that the individual campaign is where the action is:

Where we go seems to be to develop a set of tools even better than the Dean team put together and release these tools into the public domain for the benefit of every campaign from PTA President to US President. Although my vision is for tools that improve the character of governance, campaigns are the place to start, and only partly because that’s where the money is. The electoral cycle is to governance as the Krebs Cycle is to biology: it’s the fuel that makes democracy work. Political campaigns engage zealots who try to motivate partial zealots to vote a certain way. (Relative to the general disregard for politics and voting, one must be a partial zealot to vote and a real zealot to be a campaign activist.)

The required zealotry is a clue to the poor user experience of American politics. The people who know how to “do” politics today don’t see what’s wrong with the current system, in the same way that Unix geeks don’t see why more people can’t learn to live with a command line interface.

My many months of work with the Dean campaign convince me that our cynical and closed political system depends on its miserable user experience for its sway over our lives. There are probably other ways to improve politics, like better civics classes, public television, parents’ interest groups, responsible party leadership. But I and the people I know are limited to improving the user experience for people who might be better citizens, if they were just given the tools.

Mini-Summit 2.0

Last July, I hosted a little mini-summit here on East 43rd Street, where Zephyr Teachout and Zack Rosen met and we exercised our collective image-a-nation. Ethan suggested I do it again, but this time apply it to our shared vision of how the openRepublic concept might work. (I had no idea what prompted his suggestion. Only after we spoke did I come across Doc’s Vision aerie post about his visits to our pad where we mostly laugh at the passing scene but occasionally do serious work, like figuring out how to extend our WiFi service from the window of my study to Tudor City Park.)

If we’re going to have a vision, there’s no sense wasting time on a small one. I’ll get into the mid and long term visions later, but politics is the most demanding fast-cycle environment you can imagine, and this is the year for enabling upstart politicians. So let’s imagine our near-term ideal client and what her needs might be.

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Misty Smith Goes to Washington

the problem Imagine you’re Misty Smith’s brother-in-law. Misty’s a popular and effective mayor of a mid-size midwestern city who’s being encouraged to run for congress against an entrenched incumbent. the problem is that Misty’s party has atrophied over the incumbent’s eight terms in office. You’re a well-connected attorney and Misty’s asked you to look into a congressional race for her and make a recommendation. It’s an assignment you wish would go away, but Misty’s as persuasive as you are loyal. Where do you start?

some hope With a little research, you discover that there’s a non-partisan, apolitical openRepublic Foundation that hosts a comprehensive and comprehensible guide to the online organizing of campaigns. Further, you learn that this foundation has an expert advisory board that keeps its recommendations fresh and actually pays people to maintain a rich online guide to the various offerings. You’re surprised to learn that most of the tools are free to use at will. It seems too good to be true.

revolution 2.0 You’re a lawyer, so you’re convinced that anything that’s too good to be true, is. But you dig into the details and discover that some people actually believe that free and effective activist software is the key to the next phase of the great American experiment in democracy. They believe that, even as printing presses and post roads enabled the first American revolution, so might Internet communications leverage the power of people to combine their ideals so that their millions of voices and small contributions aggregate into a force that drowns out the obsolescing grip of broadcast politics on the voting public.

campaign in a box What’s interesting about the effort is that most of the online tools, whether developed by volunteers or contracted for, are free for you to download and use. They configure themselves into a suite of resources that some of the contributing programmers call CIAB–Cam
paign In A Box. This suite of tools sets up a web log so Misty and her close supporters can reach out to find new supporters for Misty, attract their contributions (& account for them), discover their most strongly felt opinions and send her to Washington using her unique unfair competitive advantage over her aloof opponent–Listening. You also discover that some of the recommended resources cost money, but they’re also described in the openRepublic Foundation’s catalogue. You appreciate this because you know that commercial software is often worth paying for, since it’s the product of a focused effort designed to satisfy paying clients.

money for nothing You have no understanding of open source software, since this is your first exposure to this strange concept, but you discover that these projects attract thousands of contributors around the world, seeing every bug and every chance for improvement.

You’re floored to discover that most web sites, and even the Tivo in your den, are based on software developed for free by people who care more about their contributions to the common wealth than about their day jobs. You know that traditional capitalism says that this is impossible but it gives you a slim hope that the Pilgrims might have been right and that maybe the commons is not doomed to be a tragedy. This insight is reinforced by your discovery that Yahoo! and Google have leveraged free software into prodigious market capitalizations.

In the case of the openRepublic Foundation, you learn that their blue ribbon advisory panel is backed up by two other panels of working volunteers coordinated by a small staff.

free upgrades The first of these is the Innovations Board. They take a hard look at the current resources and describe projects that seem obvious: tools that need improvement and new tools to fill in the gaps that become obvious when you look at any set of separate tools that serve an end-to-end function, just as a word processor depends on a separate dictionary and printer driver. The openRepublic Foundation requests proposals for extending the suite of tools and even accepts grant applications from developers proposing solutions that the implementation board hasn’t thought of.

quality control The other advisory panel is the Acceptance Group. They look at the tools built for the foundation and accept or reject them as fast as humanly possible. This is the core of the foundation’s growth initiative, because it includes the hard work of improving the user experience of neophytes like yourself.

renaissance of hope After this cascade of revelations, you feel feel like a 16-year-old with a new driver’s license. Is it possible that someone as clearly unqualified as Misty – 8 years of experience revitalizing her city, beloved by her constituents, articulate, educated and wise – could actually have a chance against her clearly superior opponent who has mastered pork barrel programs, influence and wealth for a decade and a half? You hardly dare to hope but you see there is a way.

The User Experience

You’re a lawyer, not a geek, so you’ve never heard of “the user experience” but you’ve suffered more of them than you wanted. You learn that the openRepublic Foundation is designed around you and Misty because every campaign, whether for an issue or a candidate, is driven by people with an incomplete set of skills and experience. The openRepublic Foundation is wrapping their innovations in a package that lets you understand what to do and when, with the least possible confusion and angst.

You also learn that the foundation is focused on another user experience, which is the one where Misty’s client–a voter–visits the campaign web site and discovers a chance to be heard, to learn, to meet like-minded others and to grow the hope that there may be a way to deliver at least one congressional district from the desiccate cynicism of politics as usual.

You’re up ’til 3:30 discovering what’s almost automatic that had never before been imagined. You go to bed energized by what’s possible rather than depressed by what’s inevitable. You even remember why you went to law school, so many disillusionments ago.

You can’t wait to accept Misty’s invitation to run her campaign.

8:12:55 AM    

The Republic is dying of Perfection.

Martha Stewart is going to jail because she wanted her investments to go perfectly. Mel Gibson’s vision of the perfect passion comforts those who believe that their lives can trace a perfect mythic arc if they only believe it strongly enough.

Worst of all, the government is in the grips of ideologues behaving like a motorcycle gang because they imagine a perfect world of compliant citizen droids driving SUVs to 12-hour work days while their children subdue infidels all over the globe. A perpetual campaign against the messiness of diversity is central to that perfect world.

Most people are not perfectionists. Many spent 2003 hacking code because they thought it might transform politics, and they were more right than wrong. They are the open source entrepreneurs of the governance tools space. Like all entrepreneurs, they are artists who create because they’re incapable of not creating. They will spin out a hundred disappointments for every blockbuster they produce and, like Linux for the desktop, the user experience will be frustrating to most users and especially for the neophytes who run campaigns. Like many entrepreneurs, they have no clue how they’ll turn their zeal into money.

Accidentalism

Most greatness is unintentional. Adam Osbourne once wrote that the microcomputer revolution grew out of the closing of Nasa’s Apollo project. Those talented young engineers just knew there was some way they could keep doing what they liked to do, so they took the notion of an integrated circuit and ran with it. They had no grand scheme but they knew they could make a difference.

Did the Steves know they’d change computing forever? Did Henry Ford know he was inventing the assembly line? The list of accidental heroes is as long as the Great Books collection. Those we most admire from the comfort of perspective started with no clue about its ending. What they have that perfectionists lack is a hunch and no other way of behaving than creatively.

These hunter gatherers take what they find and fashion new futures out of raw materials others ignore. DARPA created the perfect indestructible network and accidentally connected bloggers in Iran to readers in Iowa. NeoCon excesses have shown us how fragile the American experiment really is and some of us have a hunch how to fix it but not a detailed plan.

We need to support the tinkerers who are cobbling together imperfect solutions to governance problems we didn’t know we had when Bush was just an improbable candidate. My suggestion from last time is what Ethan Zuckerman calls a Social SourceForge, providing a stamp of approval and great documentation for the least imperfect campaign software out there. I want to add money to the toolkit.

A Role for a Perfectionist Patron

Unfortunately, we’re all perfectionists when it comes to software usability. Campaign tools are built hastily, so they most need the enhancements that patient perfectionism adds to functioning code. If you made a project of cataloguing and describing the best of the imperfect campaign tools, you’d think of the most obvious ways to improve them.

If you were diligent, your descriptions would include the best possible illustrations of how to facilitate solutions which would otherwise frustrate those who most need them: things like interactive online guides and step-by-step implementation charts for novices, suitable for hanging on the wall at a storefront headquarters.

Your insights would inspire you to suggest improvements and your commitment and means would cause you to pay people to make the necessary improvements. You’d contribute those enhancements to the ecosystem and then go after the next most glaring omission. Much of what you’d sponsor would be to improve the user experience, since programmers are usually better at the drive train and wiring than the fit & finish.

You’d also think of a thousand ways to extend the state of the art, which you’d cajole volunteers to do if you could, and pay people to do if you had to. It would be the perfect synthesis of baling wire design and patient perfectionism.

Uncharacteristically for a perfectionist, you’d do this work fast, because it would all be worth it to add a single rational voice to government in 2004.

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I’ve been blissfully off the grid in Mexico, reminding myself why the industrial world wants to subdue the rest of the place so people of color can bring you exotic drinks with little umbrellas.

9:38:11 AM