Author: brittblaser

The trolley must be off the track when Dennis Kucinich and Charles V. Pena agree that we should get out of Iraq, like, this weekend.

Kucinich sincerely understands a deep truth not accessible to most of us: our destiny is to overcome the collective illusion of war as the answer, but his methods sound too far out for the electorate. He probably doesn’t know that he’s echoing what Dwight Eisenhower said about peace 40 years ago:

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.

Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and co-operation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.

(Jim Moore doesn’t seem like an Eisenhower disciple, but this sure sounds like Jim’s Second Superpower meme.)

Charles V. Pena is the Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute: the most aggressively libertarian think tank in Washington. Presumably, his goal is the same as Cato’s: dismantle the government, starting with overseas adventures:

The United States must leave Iraq posthaste before the Iraqi mission becomes a sinkhole that swallows billions more of taxpayer dollars and all too many American lives. The best way to guarantee the safety of American troops is to bring them home.*

[Securing Iraq is] doable if they’re willing to make hard choices. But politically the administration has said there are enough troops. And they’re trying to avoid all comparisons to Vietnam,” says Pena. “But if you ramp up to almost a quarter of a million troops, suddenly Vietnam comparisons become impossible to avoid.”*

With the edges of the bell curve lobbying for a quick exit, we may get one. Let’s game this out a little. We can watch the political forces drive up the costs and casualties relentlessly over the next 3-10 years, a Viet Nam replay, or we could find a rational way to clear out fast. This will require some fancy footwork.

Recovering an out-of-control Plot Line

Our government’s like a novelist who has lost control of his characters and plot development, with the dialogue somehow taking his creation where he hadn’t imagined. That being the case, this novelist must go with this disastrous flow or come up with a deus ex machina real quick now. If there might be such a mechanism, what might it look like? We need a quick and plausible way for the Iraqi stakeholders to build consensus, capitalize development, get people working on a common vision, and we need to do it without our people present. Aha! The perfect answer: a magical web app!

“Any sufficiently advanced technology…

…is indistinguishable from magic.”
                       –Arthur C. Clarke

http://www.money.iraq.gov

I’ve got economic and political advice that Dr. Dean hasn’t asked for, and neither have his policy people (though at least I’ve met them). As the potential substitute novelist trying to wrestle this story line from disaster, Dr. Dean should have an alternate plot outline available. The best outline would be one that seems most plausible coming from the Dean camp and compelling enough to gather hope and credibility.

The Dean campaign is filled with savvy Netizens who have convinced us that they know more about this stuff than the rest of us. They could develop a web-based enterprise whereby Iraqis and their allies can complete forms, make commitments, securitize their commitments and receive electronic transfers to fund their vision, infrastructure, institutions and civility.

The funds would come as private loans, guaranteed by the $87 billion we’re about to commit but won’t need if we get out of Iraq quick. Transfers would be based on real outcomes, one of which would be documented commitments to build, for example, bridges and schools and hospitals.

Money.iraq.gov would provide so many ways for Iraqis to make money that they’d be more interested in how to use the new WiFI & ATM infrastructure than their AK-47:

• Credibly commit to build a $25 million Halliburton bridge for $1 million = $50,000
• Deliver engineering drawings for the bridge = $50,000
• Start, continue, finish bridge construction, etc., etc., etc.= $100,000, $100,000, $100,000
• Send a child to a non-religious school for a month = $10 (?)
• Teach in a non-religious school for a month = $500 (?)
• Guard a pipeline within view of one of the 100,000 new webcams = $25/night

Would it work? Who the hell knows? But it’s at least as plausible as the thinking we’ve seen so far. And unlike the current plot, there’s no prequel proving that the plan can’t work. The current plan was so flawed from the outset that even a Vermont physician knew it would fail.

I bet Bezos would put the whole program together for a dollar a year. Now that Amazon’s book scanning project is finished, he’s probably got enough untapped processing power to host it. (Sorry, Jeff, no patent rights)

http://www.money.iraq.gov com

In fact, does the government even need to host these services? Why not model it on the fed-insured Student Loan model, where a government guarantee has spawned an entire industry offering terrific web applications to put serious money to work for you.

Of all the answers to the Iraq mess, http://www.money.iraq.com is the only idea that might not fail.

1:21:35 PM    comment [commentCounter (226)]

(Far more than you want to read about e-voting and maybe not quite enough about burning airplanes)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the buzz developing around auditless electronic voting machines. Then this morning, in Gets my vote, Doc points to Phil Windley‘s essay, Transparency, eVoting and Copyright. He quotes:

I do not believe that we should be willing to buy or use voting systems where the source code and design is not open for public review. I think there are companies that would be willing to work in this model, particularly if the contract provided some long term commitments. This is not Britney Spears we’re talking about here — the integrity of our voting system is a fundamental component of our government.

Phil Windley is the former CIO for the state of Utah and a Republican, so his advocacy for open source (peer reviewed, really) election systems carries a lot of weight. Read it, and there are some great links.

“Copyright” in his title refers to the fact that Diebold, a leading seller of these machines, is suing people who have downloaded and published Diebold’s internal memos and specs they got off an open FTP server that Diebold operated for code updates (!). If you care to join me in a DMCA violation, you can get the 28 MB zip file or view the docs and memos.

Phil’s essay suggests the important core of the matter. If advocates believe, as he does, that the procurement standards must be questioned, they need to understand that there’s no mass conspiracy by election officials buying the machines at the state and county levels. Rather, they’re deep into a challenging procurement process requiring skills they seldom possess, surrounded by experts with a vested interest in the outcome. He suggests the kind of long-term, deliberate effort that homeowners’ associations are famous for mounting against life-shattering issues like rights to unobstructed views and height restrictions. Do you suppose we citizens will be as determined to protect our right to a fair and open vote?

I hope we can since this seems a more basic issue than the bulk of our political and procedural discussions. We’re talking about an issue that’s so close to the core of the life of our body politic that, like breath itself, we can’t afford to debate it as if it matters no more than, say redistricting. The power to count the votes is the key to the kingdom.

“It’s not the people who vote that count. It’s the people who count the votes.”
                                –attributed to Josef Stalin

“Everything that can be counted doesn’t necessarily count;
  everything that counts can’t necessarily be counted.”
                                 –attributed to Albert Einstein

Obviously some things are more important than others, and accurate voting is surely the high order bit of our society.

Mayday!

Ton Sun Nhut Airport, Saigon, Vietnam was the world’s busiest airport in 1967-68. Operating out of there was like being part of a flying circus, a landing pattern clogged with choppers, 60 mph Cessnas, 250 mph F4 Phantom fighters, civilian airliners and of course, we C-130 crews happy to be arriving in a places serving good food for a change. Trash haulers, as we called ourselves, are always looking for a decent meal to punctuate the tedium of flying into tiny strips guarded by enemy anti-aircraft fire. (not “ack-ack”, a WWII term. This blog seeks to be syntactically precise.)

One day as we were maneuvering to land, the emergency Guard frequency came awake. “Mayday! Mayday, this is Stalwart 34 declaring an emergency. I’m an F4C with one engine out, low oil pressure on no. 2 and bingo fuel. Request immediate landing!”

“Roger Stalwart 34,” came the tower’s surprisingly relaxed reply, “You’re number 3 in the Emergency Traffic Pattern.”

If you fly airplanes for a while, you learn that some issues are more vital than others. For instance, if you can’t get the landing gear down at the same time you need to make a radio report to headquarters, you deal with the gear. I know, I’ve been there.

When you have low hydraulic pressure at the same time you have an engine fire light, you pay attention to the fire and leave the hydraulic pressure for later. I know, I’ve been there.

When you can’t control the airplane at the same time you have a fire light, you first control the airplane, then deal with the fire. I know, I’ve been there.

On 25 June 1968, about 3 miles from Cambodia, our C-130 was struck by .50 cal. machine gun fire that blossomed into a real headache, forcing us to deal with a fire that took out engine no. 1, ignited the left outboard fuel tank, distorted the front wing spar so that the left wing was bending down and forward outside of the no. 1 engine, knocked out the hydraulic system we needed to put the gear down, disabled the left aileron and generally scared the living shit out of five 25-year-old aviators.

The flight lasted only eight minutes and 20 miles but it occupies a larger partition in my brain than many of the several years of my life. The things we need to attend to sometime add up faster than we’d like, with consequences more dire than we’d like.

Hierarchy of Needs

I’m reminded of aviation priorities as I read of strange things happening in the country that I fought for and for which 58,000 of my comrades-in-arms died for. I mistrust alarmism, since most alarms are premature and self-serving. False urgency is such a staple of advertising that we’re inured to it, so that all emergencies seem equally optional. In airplanes and democracies, they aren’t. I think I’m there now.

If your freedom is threatened at the same time your job is threatened, defend your freedom.

If your comfort is threatened at the same time your neighbors’ rights are threatened, forget about your comfort and defend others’ rights as energetically as your own, since they’re identical.

If you can’t be sure your vote will count, at the same time your personal freedom is threatened, make sure your vote is guaranteed to be counted.

There is a statistical trend in politics that only a Polyanna would ignore. Elections that everyone knew were in the bag have improbably gone to the underdog, even though the pre-polling, exit polling and historic voting patterns contradict the reported vote.

Southern Hemisfear

I don’t know why I trust New Zealanders. They just seem to be upstanding, steady folk, outnumbered by sheep, and more co
nservative than we. They don’t seem likely to embrace change for its own sake. So I’m inclined to take seriously a report from a couple of weeks ago, regarding odd results from the Georgia mid-term elections a year ago tonight. These excerpts capture the raw numbers from a long 3-page New Zealand Herald article:

Something very odd happened in the mid-term elections in the US state of Georgia last November.
On the eve of the vote, opinion polls showed Roy Barnes, the incumbent Democratic governor, leading by between 9 and 11 points.

In a somewhat closer, keenly watched Senate race, polls indicated that Max Cleland, the popular Democrat up for re-election, was ahead by two to five points against his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss.

Those figures were more or less what political experts would have expected in Georgia, a state with a long tradition of electing Democrats to statewide office.

But then the results came in, and all of Georgia appeared to have been turned upside down.

Barnes lost the governorship to the Republican, Sonny Perdue, 46 per cent to 51 per cent, a swing of as much as 16 percentage points from the last opinion polls.

Cleland lost to Chambliss 46 per cent to 53, a last-minute swing of 9 to 12 points.
Red-faced opinion pollsters suddenly had a lot of explaining to do and launched internal investigations.

…There were also big, puzzling swings in partisan loyalties in different parts of the state.
In 58 counties, the vote was broadly in line with the primary election.

…In 27 counties in Republican-dominated north Georgia, however, Max Cleland unaccountably scored 14 percentage points higher than he had in the primaries.

And in 74 counties in the Democrat-leaning south, Saxby Chambliss garnered a whopping 22 points more for the Republicans than the party as a whole had won less than three months earlier.

Now, weird things like this do occasionally occur in elections, and the figures, on their own, are not proof of anything except statistical anomalies worthy of further study.

But in Georgia there was an extra reason to be suspicious.

Last November, the state became the first in the country to conduct an election entirely with touchscreen voting machines, after lavishing US$54 million on a new system that promised to deliver the securest, most up-to-date, most voter-friendly election in the history of the republic.

The machines, however, turned out to be anything but reliable.

With academic studies showing the Georgia touchscreens to be poorly programmed, full of security holes and prone to tampering, and with thousands of similar machines from different companies being introduced at high speed across the country, computer voting may, in fact, be US democracy’s own 21st century nightmare.

In many Georgia counties last November, the machines froze up, causing long delays as technicians tried to reboot them. In heavily Democratic Fulton County, in downtown Atlanta, 67 memory cards from the voting machines went missing, delaying certification of the results there for 10 days.

In neighbouring DeKalb County, 10 memory cards were unaccounted for; they were later recovered from terminals that had supposedly broken down and been taken out of service. It is still unclear exactly how results from these missing cards were tabulated, or if they were counted at all.

And we will probably never know, for a highly disturbing reason.

The vote count was not conducted by state elections officials, but by the private company that sold Georgia the voting machines in the first place, under a strict trade-secrecy contract that made it not only difficult but actually illegal — on pain of stiff criminal penalties — for the state to touch the equipment or examine the proprietary software to ensure the machines worked properly.

There was not even a paper trail to follow up. The machines were fitted with thermal printing devices that could theoretically provide a written record of voters’ choices,
but these were not activated. Consequently, recounts were impossible.

Georgia was not the only state last November to see big last-minute swings in voting patterns. There were others in Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois and New Hampshire — all in races that had been flagged as key partisan battlegrounds, and all eventually won by the Republican Party.

What, then, is one to make of the fact that the owners of the three major computer voting machines are all prominent Republican Party donors?

Or of a recent political fund-raising letter written to Ohio Republicans by Walden O’Dell, Diebold’s chief executive, in which he said he was “committed to helping Ohio to deliver its electoral votes to the president next year” – even as his company was bidding for the contract on the state’s new voting machinery?

…In Dallas, during early voting before last November’s election, people found that no matter how often they tried to press a Democrat button, the Republican candidate’s name would light up.

After a court hearing, Diebold agreed to take down 18 machines with apparent misalignment problems.
“And those were the ones where you could visually spot a problem,” Dr Mercuri said. “What about what you don’t see? Just because your vote shows up on the screen for the Democrats, how do you know it is registering inside the machine for the Democrats?”

Other problems have shown up periodically: machines that register zero votes, or machines that indicate voters coming to the polling station but not voting, even when a single race with just two candidates was on the ballot.

It is not just touchscreens that are at risk from error or malicious intrusion. Any computer system used to tabulate votes is vulnerable.

An optical scan of ballots in Scurry County, Texas last November erroneously declared a landslide victory for the Republican candidate for county commissioner; a subsequent hand recount showed that the Democrat had in fact won.

In Comal County, Texas, a computerised optical scan found that three different candidates had won their races with exactly 18,181 votes. There was no recount or investigation, even though the coincidence, with those recurring 1s and 8s, looked highly suspicious.

In heavily Democrat Broward County, Florida — which had switched to touchscreens in the wake of the hanging chad furore — more than 100,000 votes were found to have gone “missing” on election day.

The votes were reinstated, but the glitch was never adequately explained. One local official blamed it on a “minor software thing”.

Most suspect of all was the governor’s race in Alabama, where the incumbent Democrat, Don Siegelman, was initially declared the winner.

Sometime after midnight, when polling station observers and most staff had gone home, the probate judge responsible for elections in rural Baldwin County suddenly “discovered” that Mr Siegelman had been awarded 7000 votes too many. In a tight election, the change was enough to hand victory to his Republican challenger, Bob Riley.

County officials talked vaguely of computer tabulation error, or a lightning strike messing up the machines, but the real reason was never ascertained because the state’s attorney general (a Republican) refused to authorise a recount or any independent ballot inspection.

Is this just an alarmist reaction? Should we take more than a passing interest in the known but unpublicized catalyst of the year 2000 turmoil? A well-documented tally revision caused the TV networks to reverse their original call
that Gore had won Florida and to give it to Bush instead, prompting Gore’s premature concession call to Bush, later retracted.

The “glitch” was the revision of the Volusia County vote when someone used card ID 3 to overwrite the “master” card ID 0 with a new Gore tally of minus 16,200 votes and plus 4,000 to the Bush total. When discovered, card 0 was re-inserted in the master machine and the tally revised. (The pun’s too tempting: Master card ID 0, $.48; Premature concession, Priceless.).

There’s a lot of buzz surrounding e-voting story. Perhaps we’ll soon be sated with its novelty and with the complexities we must master to glimpse the whole picture. Certainly the press will tire of it and probably already has. Perhaps only the bloggers will have the persistence to keep this story above the fold.

To me though, it feels like molten aluminum dripping off the left wing. There is no larger story.

The ANZAC Treatise

Voting machine irregularities reported by the Kiwis and a solution from the Aussies? It’s enough to make a southern hemisphere junkie weep with joy. Just yesterday, Wired published Aussies Do it Right: E-Voting. It describes eVACS, a program developed by Software Improvements, a down-under open-source solution that might satisfy Mr. Windley:

“While critics in the United States grow more concerned each day about the insecurity of electronic voting machines, Australians designed a system two years ago that addressed and eased most of those concerns: They chose to make the software running their system completely open to public scrutiny.

Although a private Australian company designed the system, it was based on specifications set by independent election officials, who posted the code on the Internet for all to see and evaluate. What’s more, it was accomplished from concept to product in six months. It went through a trial run in a state election in 2001.

Phillip Green, electoral commissioner for the Australian Capital Territory, said that going the open-source route was an obvious choice.

“We’d been watching what had happened in America (in 2000), and we were wary of using proprietary software that no one was allowed to see,” he said. “We were very keen for the whole process to be transparent so that everyone — particularly the political parties and the candidates, but also the world at large — could be satisfied that the software was actually doing what it was meant to be doing.”

It raises an interesting question. If the Australian Capital Territory knew about our voting machine problems 3 years ago, why don’t we?

Master of my Domains

My small contribution to the effort is to snag a couple of domains, seemyvote.com and digivotereally.com. I imagine them as a way to allow our voting to be so transparent that we collectively overwhelm centralized record-keeping. A couple of other ideas:

1. Work with manufacturers to place disposable digital camera booths near polling places so millions can capture their voting screen before it disappears.
2. Establish WiFi web cams viewing the activity around the most suspect polling places.
   (Mitch Ratcliffe and Howard Greenstein have organized correspondences.org as a bona fide press organization with feeds appearing in Google news searches. They might arrange for Press credentials for webcam operators. Is that so, guys?)

The seemyvote.com vision:

Politicians who need our votes are acting like they don’t. They’re behaving like the RIAA, pretending they can treat their customers like thieves. Why do we spend so much time worrying about the RIAA and so little time directly managing our elected toadies?

SeeMyVote would be based on our right to enforce full, fair and equal representation, establishing a protocol for translating individual hot issues into votes with teeth.

SeeMyVote would be a database of real people who have abdicated their secret ballot to advertise their real-time responses to current issues and current outrages. The database would match issues and outrage with politicians and their current actions. Voters would link their next vote with their current values and beliefs so that, for instance, a politician’s cynical work against choice would publicly guarantee my wife’s vote against him. Combined with other uppity women, some politicians would see that this particular form of political cynicism is foolish, at least in his district. (Cynical because few politicians give a rat’s ass about right-to-life. They do care about the votes of people who care about abortion).

This is the kind of data which allows politicians to explain to each other why they can’t support each others’ favorite pork barrel. They all know they’re in government in order to stay in government.

Sample SeeMyVote Report:

“The Fleemer amendment to HR 419 has caused a plurality of Mr. Fleemer’s voting constituents to commit to vote him out of office in November. Based on commitment data from 73% of registered voters, It appears that Rep. Fleemer will lose his seat by a 9% margin unless his amendment is withdrawn.

Those voter commitments have been communicated to Mr. Fleemer’s staff, other Republican and Democratic National Committees and major media outlets. The data are presented in detail at http://www.electoralcollage.com/fleemer."

11:23:30 PM    

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart: the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity…

…And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
                              –The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats, 1921

To a patriarchist*, the Dean campaign could mean the end of the world as it should be. While wishful thinking will prompt denial and grief anger, a more disciplined assessment would cause any elitist to quake at the possibility, slight, thank Gawd, but still too frightening to consider, that the proletariat might now have the means to sink the patriarchal world into anarchy.

*I’m trying out “patriarchist” where one might normally use the term “conservative.” And I fancy “explorer” where “progressive” has been the norm. This is consistent with the teaching of my mentor Howard Bloom, who says that every population consists of conformity enforcers and diversity generators.

Sir, There may be a vulnerability…”

W. B. Yeats and Joseph Campbell and George Lucas and now Joe Trippi teach that Breakdown Leads to Breakthrough. The Internet has the scaling potential to mediate the voices of us all, like a central nervous system, so that each of us (We the Cells) have a voice weighted in reasonable proportion to our contribution to the Rest of Us. Anyone with a passion for the Internet and a reasonably well developed sense of adventure should be irrevocably committed to this possibility.

There are terrorists among us. For patriarchist leaders, democracy is a form of anarchy, as Lance Knobel points out today. Patriachist Americans also feel that society might be endangered by a President untethered from the hierarchy of large organizations so beloved by the politicians. Some feel terror at the thought of a non-Bush president, even though Dubya is the only President who’s ever had a major terrorist attack happen on his watch.

It makes you wonder if we might be safer with a President who knows first-hand how a self-organizing smart mob works.

Disruptive Terrorists

Clue 1 Valdis Krebs depicts hidden data in novel ways. Here’s part of a visualization from Uncloaking Terrorist Networks to make sense of the terrorist network surrounding the 9/11 flights:

Krebs used public knowledge to uncloak obscure relationships:

“The best solution for network disruption may be to discover possible suspects and then, via snowball sampling, map their individual personal networks – see whom else they lead to, and where they overlap. To find these suspects it appears that the best method is for diverse intelligence agencies to aggregate their individual information into a larger emergent map. By sharing information and knowledge, a more complete picture of possible danger can be drawn. In my data search I came across many news accounts where one agency, or country, had data that another would have found very useful. To win this fight against terrorism it appears that the good guys have to build a better information and knowledge sharing network than the bad guys (Ronfeldt and Arquilla, 2001).

Clue 2 Gary Wolf is writing a story for Wired about Howard Dean’s Internet campaign, trying to figure out how the smart mob that is the campaign functions, and whether or not it actually can be managed. Wolf finds this to be such a challenge that he’s asked his own smart mob–his readers–to help him write the story.

“I’m used to stories having an innate structure that allows you to start anywhere in the vicinity of the key actors and find your way in. You just follow the trails…But the Dean campaign is different. Yes, it is centered on a single man – the candidate. But its activities are widely dispersed, control is decentralized, and many of the “happenings,” for lack of a better word, seem to have equal weight…

So, I’ve naturally decided to do what the campaign itself has done – that is, I’m making the network work for me.

To catalyze his network, Wolf has posted a “retroactive manifesto.” He’s asking us to imagine that the Dean campaign as we now see it had sprung out of a manifesto. By laying down the design criteria which might produce the campaign, he hopes we all can better understand it. And then he’ll take our collective work and put it under his byline. Following Dan Gillmor‘s example, Gary Wolf implies that he can learn more from his readers than we learn from him:

“Here, I’ve offered a Retroactive Manifesto of the Dean Campaign. These are the rules that might have been posted on the wall of campaign manager Joe Trippi’s office, if there were such a list of rules. I am looking for examples and counter-examples – confirmation and correction. Are these really the principles that underlay the architecture of the campaign? Are there concrete examples you can suggest? Is something here plainly wrong? Hack away.

When you look at both stories–Krebs’ search for network connectors and Wolf’s use of one network to understand another–you get it that Al Qaeda and the Dean campaign are both self-organizing, disruptive networks. Further, both have been catalyzed by a strong leader but neither depends on the leader for specific direction. In fact, each network is more a response to the strict hierarchy it opposes than the result of a purpose-built hierarchical organization.

The Smartest Network Wins…

…is how David Weinberger puts it. We can now see that our nation’s hierarchical security model is as vulnerable to the network model as circuit-switching phone companies are to packet-switching guerilla protocols. In military terms, we look like the Red Coats marching down a road while the Green Mountain Boys pick them off from the woods.

What if the Dean campaign prevails over the many hierarchies that want him to fail? If so, it will be because there’s something intrinsically superior in the nature of his accidental organization vs. everyone else’s explicit organizing. Howard Bloom would suggest that the Dean campaign is a Darwinist experiment by the American superorganism to find a way to defend itself from a previously unknown threat. It’s safe to say that a Dean administration will seek novel ways to combine information and make connections that our current hierarchy chooses to ignore, provably to our peril. Who knows? Maybe even Glenn will learn to embrace the only Internet candidate.

To Catch a Thief…

The patriarchists among us fear the Dean terrorist network as much as Al Qaeda, perhaps more. They’ve forgotten that the 13 colonies were a self-organizing network that overthrew a loathsome hierarchy. They should take comfort knowing that it takes one to know one.

1:46:54 AM    

Every red-blooded American male lives and dies with his favorite team. As a rite of passage, he masters the lineups, statistics and intricate details of strategy, tactics, player strengths and weaknesses. Put two fans in a room, and they’ll launch into a debate as passionate and subtle as anything you’ll hear at the UN.

While other teams are attacked, each fan saves his greatest resentment for his own team’s foul-ups. As they break his heart, he’ll boo their errors, misses, whiffs, boners, blunders and failure to appreciate the infinite subtleties of the game–details fans master without prompting. Just as hitting a fastball is arguably the hardest act in sports (here come the arguments!), so is mastery of any sport’s arcana one of the great feats of human intelligence.

These are obvious truths that even George Bush understands and embraces. He probably understands why Red Sox management fired Manager Grady Little yesterday, just for the hope that things could get even better. Based on the Sox’ love affair with the stats, it was a responsible decision, loyalty notwithstanding. When you’re running an enterprise as important as a baseball club, there’s no room for fuzzy thinking.

Such clear-headedness is clearly unwelcome at the national level. Bush feels that, unlike Grady Little, his contract should be renewed even though every stat that the Republicans have ever embraced is in the toilet. And traditional principles? We can only remember with nostalgia the good old days when our team seemed to do all the right things every time they stepped on the field. Wouldn’t it be great to sit in the stands with Dad again, and look at our national team through his eyes?

The only reason the voters could conceivably retain the country’s current management would be some vague gut feeling like the one that caused Little to hang in there with Pedro Martinez in the seventh game of the AL championship.

And isn’t this game a bigger one than baseball, too important for sentimentality? When you put a gun or fighting vehicle in a person’s hands, it’s time to pay attention to the larger game. The game of life and death.

Rational society is in a life and death battle with religious fundamentalism. Rationality–Enlightenment, literally–is the great thought behind our nation’s founding, inspired by a movement that grew out of their great technical communications breakthrough, local newspaper publishing and the technical mastery of its user interface (literacy). We have fuzzy-headed thinkers all around the world, basing their livelihoods on the eyeballs and anger of people who prefer a simple wrong answer to a a more nuanced correct one. This demagoguery is the root of “evil” in the mid east and here in the US.

It’s the Entertainment, Stupid!

To feed our partisan passion, most of us have lined up behind one of the two dominant political sports teams. We attack each others’ party and position with a passion and incivility that divides families and makes us dumb ourselves down to meaningless chat at Thanksgiving.

We do it for the same reasons that we argue about teams–entertainment. We’d rather argue politics with someone close enough to attack than to reason together in support of the larger team called America. The cost to our society and progress is immeasurable. It’s not because the issues, statistics and concepts are too difficult to master, they’re nothing compared to sports stats. The problem is the superstition that you’re a bad fan of your country if you criticize its management.

10:42:56 AM    

I’ve been at Dean Headquarters this week. This is the second time I’ve come up here intending to blog several color stories on what it’s like. Again, I’ve been so busy doing real work that the blogging suffers. And we had the first snow flurries of the year this morning.

Ed Cone was here on Tuesday and Wednesday.

West Wind for the West Wing

The news is out. Zephyr Teachout and Ryan Davis are taking an eight week trip across the country in a 27 foot reconditioned Airstream. Since zephyr derives from Greek for west wind, the Airstream seems a suitable conveyance.

Ryan’s Express

Not to be out-publicized, Ryan just told me that Ryan is Gaelic for Little Prince. Here he is early this morning contacting California Deaniacs to set up visits–one of his contacts called him back at 2:45 am.

Theirs is no odyssey for the faint-hearted. 64 cities in 8 weeks. 64 meetups. 64 chances to nourish the grass roots:

The first week’s itinerary includes:

• October 27: Los Angeles Kickoff
• October 28: Santa Barbara
• October 29: Salinas, San Jose, and Oakland
• October 30: Sacramento
• October 31: Davis and San Francisco

Later tour stops will include Reno, Las Vegas, Flagstaff, Phoenix, Tucson, Las Cruces, Albuquerque, Roswell, Austin, Houston, Dallas, Crawford, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Little Rock, Jackson (Miss.), Atlanta, Orlando, Raleigh, Richmond, Washington, D.C., Baltimore and dozens of other cities and towns. The tour will conclude in Philadelphia, the nation’s cradle of liberty, in mid-December.

Of the, By the, and For the…

The message to the grass roots? The campaign has been so successful that it has driven Joe Trippi’s doctrine of letting go to its logical outcome. The grass roots is now in charge of energizing itself. Literally, the “official” campaign cannot even pretend to directly manage the great conversation that is the campaign. So the next step is to empower the most active Dean supporters (“Deaniacs”) to engage and support the next most active Deaners, and so on.

Just as the best schools are those whose parents cultivate each other’s interests, exhorting them to greater involvement and support, so too will the Dean campaign now be in the hands of the people whom the campaign was organized to cultivate.
3:55:21 PM    

I’m headed back up to Dean Headquarters in Burlington on Monday to push a couple of initiatives along. Typical of an Internet start-up, these projects grew out of an impression, through a vision and into an imperative. The broadest vision is the one about a Billion Dollar War Chest, because it forces the special interests out of the Presidential Influence game. It’s my Steal this Campaign . . . er, campaign.

Billion-with-a-B

A while ago, Jim Moore speculated that there must be a million people in the country willing to give $1,000 to the Dean campaign. As he says, that’s only half the members of MoveOn. So my first priority next week is to push that meme along with my giving club idea: Club 42, Club 83 and Club 166. Those are the monthly contributions one gives to total $500, $1,000 or $2,000 annually. Fortunately, the club levels equate to latté units: you can make those goals by forgoing half or one or two lattés per day. Seems a simple enough metric.

So I’ll work with Bobby Clark to instantiate those club levels on the monthly sustainers page instead of the slightly different $50, $75 or $150 monthly levels. Those donors earn the same bragging rights as some self-important guy who whips out his Mont Blanc and writes a big check to the campaign. Actually, they’re worth more since they don’t demand the kind of coddling that self-important guys demand. Maybe there ought to be a special certificate for people who give so much and demand so little. (I’d suggest it to the campaign staff, but they’d just encourage me to customize a Word template….;-)

Easy Monthly Payments

In a normal campaign, this adjustment would require a round of meetings, jaw-stroking and deliberations. Not in the Dean HQ permission-free zone. Bobby and I worked this out in about 20 minutes last month, but he was in a big server upgrade and it was the final push of the September to Remember. It never occurred to anyone to circulate a memo, though he did ask me to do a little HTML mockup, like the one above.

The point is that the Dean campaign is open to having a regular guy show up with a laptop and WiFi card and having him be an equal peer. The best place to work in America today is on a folding chair at a folding table in the volunteer bullpen at Dean HQ in Burlington, Vermont.

Small Pieces Loosely Joined*

There’s a kind of Rich Dad, Poor Dad bias against presidential investing. Some people protect their interests with political contributions but it just doesn’t occur to most of us. The virtue of Presidential Investing is another Moore-ism, from when Jim suggested that the amounts that elect a president are chump change compared to the benefit: the Republicans propose to spend $170 million this year to retain control of a federal budget of $1.7 trillion per year! The wealthy got much more than $2,000 in tax refunds and zillions in corporate welfare, so it’s easy enough for 85,000 rich guys to each reinvest the maximum $2,000 contribution to help re-elect their sock-puppet. Actually, it’s probably more like 40,000 families giving as individuals.

That’s an interesting metric. In 411 BCE, Alcibiades briefly imposed the rule of the 400 on 370,000 Greeks. If the 280 million of us are being managed by 40,000 wealthy families, our aristocracy is narrower than theirs by a ratio of 70:1. The 400 held sway only briefly because the Athenian fleet rebelled at this violation of their democratic sensibilities. Perhaps its our turn.

I’m imagining a civil reformation. A few things have changed since 1776. Suppose one of them is that just voting is no longer enough. Suppose each of us gets it that to make a difference we need to vote with our wallet as we do with every other preference we hold in this insanely materialistic society. If we can get just that message across, then we’ll take our country back.

It doesn’t matter if you support Al Sharpton or Genghis Khan, there are two steps each of us can take to carve the special interests out of the political process: give an amount that’s personally significant and advertise our preference on the personal peer-to-peer newsletter we send every day–email messages. I imagine a tipping point where, just as it’s somehow uncivil to not offer an email inbox, it’s unimaginable to not advertise the fact that you support a candidate, any candidate. Anything else should be unthinkable.

Now that’s Campaign Reform!

Takin’ it to the Streets

Rank-and-file Democrats are especially unaccustomed to spending money on their candidates, which is why the DNC is accustomed to raising money in big chunks, but that’s no longer allowed because of McCain-Feingold campaign reform. So the campaign has an education challenge. My proposal is to promote contribution reminders in everyone’s email signature. These signature lines must be constructed as carefully as any movement’s viral email, with a link to the Dean contribution page, and a link to instructions on how to set up your email signature, like this:

Did you ever want to be part of something meaningful, exciting, once-in-a-lifetime, potentially world-changing? If so, the Dean campaign needs tech volunteers to help Burn the Bush. This is from the Dean Blog today:

Are you willing to volunteer your time and skills to help get Dean elected?

We need tech-volunteers!

We need bug-squashers, knowledgeable administrators, graphics designers, and
software developers, testers, and technical writers to help on state sites, development and support. We have the opportunity to change politics forever, to redefine what it means to campaign. You have the ability to create the tools that will help define the future of our democracy.

If you want to participate please email me back with the following information:

• A brief description of your technical / graphical skills
• Your estimate of hours per week you can contribute
• Any comments / questions / concerns
• If you are a professional developer, it’s very important we do this within FEC requirements. You may not work on any company computers, support, or work on company time. If you are a contract developer, your help is in-kind contribution — you can contribute up to $2,000 worth of work, minus any amount you have separately contributed (the limit for any individual contribution).
• You must be a US National

A Tag-Team Match

Unless you’re a hobbyist, you can contribute fewer than 100 hours or so, even assuming that $20 per hour is a reasonable market rate. So the trick to this from a management perspective is to find a lot of people with good communications skills to coordinate their work as they move into an active role and then back out out of it.

You will never find a better man than Zack Rosen to work with. He is probably a programming genius and even though he’s just 20, his vision encompasses technology, community and democracy. I was planning another trip to Burlington this weekend, but postponed it when I found that Zack would be out of town. I plan to meet with people more senior than Zack, but connecting with him is vital to several things I’m doing.

If the headline of this post makes sense to you, go to the Link and become a part of the solution!

2:35:18 PM    

Doc‘s at DigitalID World in Denver, bored out of his gourd.

“Very arcane, this identity shit, from the abstracto-techie world of folks who professionally care about this stuff. I’m glad they’re doing it, I guess, but…
 
It’s also dull. I just heard service oriented business solutions coming from the stage.
 
Translation: It’s not about anything interesting. It’s about delivering business value.

He points us to Robert X. Cringely, who has a practical, Xpertwebby approach to Identity: Locate each of us in a web of our acquaintanceship. Here’s the heart of it, but the whole article’s worth reading: It’s called I’m With Stupid: How Having Friends Might Be the Key to Both Privacy and Identity:

What works against us is that we have a million years of societal and biological evolution based on the concept of small tribal groups, yet only a few centuries of urban life and less than two centuries of mass transit. One characteristic of tribes is that the members know each other. So when the lady at the bank recognizes you — really recognizes you — it decreases to almost zero percent the likelihood that somebody can come in the bank claiming to be you and steal all your money. This isn’t some clever security design, but an artifact of tribal life. You don’t resent the lady at the bank for knowing you. You are flattered that she does. You don’t fear that because she knows you that you are more likely to be a crime victim. Just the opposite — we feel safer because we are known.

My system is based on a registry of friends because we all participate in virtual tribes that are geographically dispersed. Every person who wants to have credit, to make a big purchase, or to board a 747 has to have a list of 10 friends — people who can vouch for their identity and know how to test it if needed. That takes us out of the realm of the mother’s maiden name, replacing it with, “What was the nickname I called you in the fourth grade?”

I am Bob, and these are my 10 friends. 

They don’t even have to be friends — just people who know you. You don’t have to tell them they are on your list and you can change your list as often as you like.

Imagine an aerial view of this network of friends. It is so large it could only be analyzed by a big honking computer, but there is a great deal to be learned from that analysis. People could disappear and be noticed, perhaps to be found. Deadbeat dads could be tracked, as could sexual predators. Epidemics would ripple across the surface of the model, perhaps leading to targeted anticipatory preventive care, saving lives. Guys who buy enough fertilizer to blow up a Federal office building would stand out.

Now before you can say the words “Big Brother,” remember that YOU choose your list of friends so they can be people from work, from school, from the tennis club, but perhaps not from your Communist cell or from your swingers club. You can keep private what you want to keep private because the big picture is what matters here.

The system would be tied together by phone, e-mail, and Internet messaging. Ultimately,, it would come to function like a much larger version of eBay’s feedback system which would result in subtle pressure toward more civil behavior — something we don’t have in any practical sense today.

Maybe this system wouldn’t work. You tell me. But I know that what we have right now isn’t working, and I am not sure it can be made to work. The only answer that makes sense to me is to hearken back to a simpler time when these crimes just didn’t’ happen. And it is only through clever application of technology that this can be done. 

But it really needs a clever name. Too bad Friendster is already taken.

I’d go with Xpertweb. The purpose of the Xpertweb protocol is to locate each of its users in a web of acquaintance. Every user is located in a formal, stable web like Cringely describes, but each is also in an ad hoc web of those with whom she buys and sells stuff. Here’s an example of what the formal web looks like, in this case with explicit connectors to, mirabile dictu!, 10 others as in Cringely’s example:

This structure is a form of a bribe, a chain letter, really, where each person has an explicit relationship with one person at each of five mentoring levels that pre-exist her adoption of the protocols. She has her own Mentor (level 1), a Senior Mentor (level 2, her Mentor’s mentor), that mentor’s mentor (level 3), etc., for 5 levels total.

When this Xpertweb user is ready, she can mentor any number of other new users. And each of them will send her 1% of whatever business they process using the rating system, just as she sends out five 1% transfers every month.

That’s the tribal part that Robert yearns for, but what about the mechanical electronic part of the process? What’s the DigID widget?

This month Roland and I further refined the Xpertweb DIY DigID architecture. It’s an approach that’s obvious, unsophisticated and totally user-controlled, enough to earn my affections. This won’t help get you on a 747, at least initially, but it will help you do business with people you don’t know and will never meet.

The Xpertweb DIY DigID Authentication Drill

Every Xpertweb user must have his own web server. The system assumes that only the owner of a web site can quickly write a new file on it, while another person watches while it’s created.

The other assumption’s a philosophy, really, but it’s important. Web sites don’t do business with people, they do business with a reputation. The DigID challenge is to associate the current session’s keystrokes with a trusted reputation. If the reputation is stored on someone’s web server, the seller needs a way to be certain that the fingers on the keyboard are attached to the person whose reputation lives on a certain web site.

Trusting the casual visitor

All Xpertweb vendors want the world to know about their skills, reputation, products and, probably, thoughts and ideas on their blogs. Those are all published as broadly as possible, with skills and products organized into an Xpertweb index. The blogosphere is demonstrating that we crave notice more than we fear exposure.

However, Xpertweb vendors only want to transact with others having a proven reputation since, like a waitperson, the vendor’s compensation is subject to the buyer’s rating of their work. So here’s our homegrown digital ID sequence, assuming a vendor whose unique ID happens to be SSELLER and a shopper with BBUYER as a unique ID (gross simplification in effect–unique IDs are hard but possible).

1. An Xpertweb-equipped shopper is attracted by SSELLER’s reputation and clicks on a product link.
2. The product page ask
   s the visitor to enter his unique Xpertweb URL.
3. Upon submitting the URL, SSELLER’s site visits the URL and discovers there IS an Xpertweb site present with a properly formatted me.xml file at the root level and a script that says it’s ready to play nice. Only then does SSELLER’s script learn that the visitor purports to be BBUYER.
   ( Because each task has different requirements, BBUYER’s site can selectively expose needed information from the me.xml file, like a physical address or website admin info)
4. SSELLER’s script still doesn’t know if this visitor is BBUYER, so the script notes the current time, the visitor’s IP number, composes a unique ID and task file for this contact and places a cookie on the visitor’s browser, something like:
        taskid SSELLER.BBUYER.1066274480; IP 66.65.84.10 + some product info
        (a task ID = users’ IDs + the Unix epoch [# of seconds since 12/31/1969])
   SSELLER’s script knows for sure that there’s no task file with that name in BBUYER’s home/buystuff/sellers/SSELLER/ directory.
5. SSELLER’s script directs the visitor to the URL presented
6. The script at BBUYER’s site asks the still-mysterious typist to enter BBUYER’s name and password.
7. If the challenge is passed, we need a stateless way to confirm to SSELLER’s script that this is indeed BBUYER.
8. BBUYER’s script looks in its buystuff/sellers directory for a subdirectory labeled SSELLER.
         [If absent, it creates a buystuff/sellers/SSELLER directory]
         It then creates SSELLER.BBUYER.1066274480.xml in home/buystuff/sellers/SSELLER
            … listing the now-current epoch, BBUYER’s IP # and the product info
   Here’s a sample:
   <?xml version=”1.0″?>
   < xw_task>
      <phase>awaiting_buyer_specify</phase>
      <created>1066274480</created>
      <modified>1066274480</modified>
      <last_phase>phase_initial</last_phase>
      <iteration>1</iteration>
   < /xw_task>
9. BBUYER’s script returns BBUYER to the SSELLER site
10. SSELLER’s script visits BBUYER’s site and notes that the properly formatted task file was created in the proper directory at a time shortly after the task ID creation, from a browser at the known IP number.
11. SSELLER’s script looks in its sellstuff/buyers directory for a subdirectory labeled BBUYER.
          [If absent, it creates a sellstuff/buyers/BBUYER directory]
          It creates SSELLER.BBUYER.1066274480.xml in sellstuff/buyers/BBUYER
             … listing the current epoch, BBUYER’s IP # and the product info

Good Enough for Tribal Work

It may not be perfect, but it’s close enough for SSELLER and BBUYER to proceed with a transaction, whether it’s reading a blog for $.06, trying a $15 shareware, ordering a $75 Afghani carpet or paying a personally negotiated $10,000 retainer.

11:31:49 PM    

Jim Moore gives us a great sense of what’s important about people power by sharing his experience with insider politics:

I saw this problem up close and personally in the Gore campaign. I remember being at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, and having the sinking sense that the Gore campaign was moving farther and farther away from connecting with the exciting, vibrant, fresh ideas and people and groups making up the new American polis.  I was not alone. Many others at the convention had a similar sense.  But we were not able to access, much less influence, the small group of pros who had encircled Al Gore. These pros were exquisitely attuned to the traditional interest groups who make up the old Democratic demand environment. I remember voicing this concern personally at the convention to a friend who is a pillar of the party. He replied in a very nice way, “Jim, campaigns are best left to the pros.”

Well, I don’t think campaigns are best left to pros if those pros can’t understand and accept the reality of the new landscape, and can’t related to the new people, processes and issues raised by the new politics. More importantly, we need to encourage the evolution of a new political landscape in America, freed of the narrow interests that tend to define politics of both left and right. We need to use the web to bring together large groups, focused on large issues, who can counterbalance the small, well-funded and more self-centered players who currently hold the stage. I believe this is what the blogosphere is capable of helping to enable, on both left and right. This is what I personally want to work toward.

When people raise their voice in concert, it’s poetry, as Walt Whitman taught us, transcending the prosaic, petty messages of the “pros” in any field. The galvanizing effect of the Internet is just now kicking in, having completed its mandatory 10-30 year gestation described by Paul Saffo (we over-hype new tech in the short run and underestimate it over the long haul). The Internet encourages, even requires the collective, human voice of we the people to drown out the self-obsessed mechanical trivia of the pros, whether they’re navel-gazing on Madison or Pennsylvania Avenue. In fact, is there any discernible difference between marketing soap, politicians or pre-emptive war? Andrew Card doesn’t think so.

Jim is writing about the remarkably visible struggles in the Clark campaign and escalates the issue to where it belongs: Closed-source campaigns can’t compete with open source movements.

The highest hope for the emerging role of the blogoshere in politics is that we can increase the concentrated power, activation and activation speed of citizen groups with broader, higher minded interests.  The web allows millions of people to come together easily and inexpensively. Web discourse on blogs enables the co-evolution of facts and arguments that results in thousands of people becoming more aware of the stakes in any given political decision, and thus more activated to try to be involved.  And the web enables swarms to come together in minutes rather than days.  Our hope is to improve the adaptability and openness of our democracy.

The Clark case is not just a story about a group of Clinton and Gore advisors who are consolidating power over a campaign.  My sense is that the professionals who have taken over are attuned to the former demand environment, but are not appreciating how much the new demand environment differs from the old.  They are attuned to traditional Democratic interest and donor groups and power brokers, but are missing out on the new, more broadly constituted groups that are swarming across the blogosphere.  The professionals running the Clark campaign do not understand the new emerging topology of Democratic politics in America.  Most profoundly, they do not understand that the leadership of our nation requires that candidates help reshape the topology of politics—and that the Dean campaign is deeply involved in that process.

Further, the Dean campaign enjoys a classic “first mover” advantage. They are offering the one thing that every campaign needs to offer, visibility into the campaign and its staff, a product that bears up under scrutiny and is more comforting with use, and a sense of community that forms a kind of gravity well attracting more participants. People sense that a campaign so open and responsive is likely to operate a similarly open and approachable White House, a kind of Jacksonian reformation, without the korn likker. They know what the pros don’t, it’s about the governance, stupid!

Where Google offers the search results you’ve always wanted, the Dean folks have built the responsiveness people never thought was possible. It’s the Google of Presidential campaigns, so it’s hard for a later entrant to get traction, and impossible unless they embrace the new algorithms.

11:38:14 AM    

I have an additional cause for optimism even beyond the euphoria some of us expressed at BloggerCon, that blogging can revolutionize the world. That’s because I see blogging as an intermediate step toward a richer metadata protocol linking blogs about me to blogs about you and describing in detail how successfully we do business. The aim is to do more business, increasing money velocity, and hence prosperity. But the secret sauce is to create a conversation about quality in our economic life.

Xpertweb equips its users to add transaction data to their private permission-free publishing (blogging) environment. If two such bloggers trade with each other, they can agree to expose their progress to their audiences in real time. At the end of the transaction, they can give each other a 1-99% grade and a written comment. Their metadata archive can then inform others as to their reliability, as rated by trusted bloggers. Just as bloggers despise broken links, so will Xpertweb bloggers disparage erosion of transactional data. However, by mirroring transaction data, the sting of lost Xpertweb metadata is salved.

Prior to BloggerCon, Doc had suggested I post an Xpertweb description, so I wrote Blogging for Business. The suggestion then was that the Xpertweb protocols provide a specialized kind of trackback that’s highly explicit about the universal data types that describe all transactions. In fact, Roland believes that it might be possible to use the trackback mechanism as a way to propagate Xpertweb data.

I describe Xpertweb as if it will be a site you can go to and which has a proprietary hold on the “system.” But that’s just a way of describing the protocols, just as we describe cyberspace as a place when it’s really just an agreement.

Agreeing to Agree

Agreement is a powerful force. Doctor Weinberger and Doc Searls have taught us that the Internet is simply an agreement embedded in our habits, software, firmware and hardware. The Xpertweb protocol is a more abstract agreement dictating how we’ll deal with each other, and to publish the outcomes of our resulting actions. Since it’s about mo’ money, it has the opportunity to be of mo’ than passing interest. Since the protocols reward the agree-ers hugely when they get new people to adopt the agreement, it has a chance to be adopted quickly and enthusiastically. Its purpose is to terraform the global economic desert as dramatically as any Star Trek visionary.

There’s a high-level intro to Xpertweb here, and a more detailed look here. And there’s a depiction of the shamelessly viral money-spreading meme here. Some people will go to any length to invent a buck.

12:31:50 PM