Author: brittblaser

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

We merely want to live in peace with all the world, to trade with them, to commune with them, to learn from their culture as they may learn from ours, so that the products of our toil may be used for our schools and our roads and our churches and not for guns and planes and tanks and ships of war.

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.

— 5-Star General and 35th President, Dwight David Eisenhower

Anybody who wants to harm American troops will be found and brought to justice,” Bush said. “There are some that feel like if they attack us that we may decide to leave prematurely. They don’t understand what they are talking about if that is the case. … There are some who feel like the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, bring them on.

— Viet Nam Avoidance Expert and Runner Up in the 2000 Presidential Election, G. W. Bush

Why do people who have not seen battle recommend it for other people’s children? Why would anyone support people who are so unaware of history that they embrace its mistakes?

— Private school & college Yuppie and Viet Nam Vet (3 DFC‘s, 2 Air Medals), Britt Blaser

11:37:47 AM    

They call it like they see it. Here’s a report from Sean-Paul, a young man writing a book about the ancient Silk Road through Central Asia. Thanks to Josh for the link.

Last night I met some soldiers here in Tashkent for a little R&R at the bar of a hotel. They’ve been serving with a unit near Kandahar.

“So, what’s up with Afghanistan?”

He stared at me. It was not a pleasant stare.

” Tell you what. Since you’re from Texas I’ll talk. But no unit or location talk, except to say Tashkent and Kandahar. Opsec, man. Know what I mean?”

“Agreed. Can I say you’re from Texas?”

“Sure, why not.”

“You gonna put this in your book?”

“I might. Depends on what you say. And what you don’t say. You know?”

“Uh-huh. Well, all you really need to know is that it’s fucked. The pockets of resistance get bigger all the time. Of course the press is obsessed with WMD, Iraq and tax-cuts. They don’t give a shit about us guys bleeding in Afghanistan. Nor do the politicians. They got us into this crap and they aren’t giving us the tools to fix it. We CAN solve this problem,” he said, “as he slammed his drink onto the bar.

“Gimme another rum and coke,” he asked the bartender.

Turning to me he said, “They don’t even care about the guys fighting in Iraq. It’s getting bad there too. You want a drink partner?”

“Sure, water, still—no gas,” I told the bartender.

“What the hell kind of drink is that?”

“Got a bad stomach,” I lied.

“Ahh, yeah, that’ll do it. Reminds me of this Afghani that was fighting for Hekmatyar. You know, the Iranian’s got their hands all over Afghanistan right now. Well, as I was saying, that boy, couldn’t a been older than 20, has a bad stomach now too. I put a couple of bullets into it,” he said, unable to look me in the eyes.

“It’s getting bad there. And Mr. Bush don’t give a shit. You got a phone number? I got a guy who might want to talk to you.”
5:10:06 PM    

Jock Gill says we need to redefine the electorate as active producers of good government, not passive consumers of government services. (Jock finds the customer label as pejorative as consumer. He’d probably buy Doc‘s distinction between the two, but perhaps finds it too subtle to make his intended point):

The crucial differences in our communications in 2004 are:

1. low cost many to many communications, supporting micro markets with zero costs, is a radical disruptive innovation that trumps one to many communications with high capital costs demanding mass markets with high financial returns.
2. the diffusion of many to many communications has crossed the threshold of critical mass and has become a self sustaining chain reaction: gone critical.
3. the technologies of many to many communications are rapidly improving — full multi-media chat, for example. Good bye text only environments. Video, voice and text, is much more compelling. This will only accelerate the adoption of modern many to many communications
4. all of the above can be seen in a new phenomena: cable modem users active, engaged, PRODUCERS.

BTW: this last point turns the business models of the cable tv companies on its head. They have neither the architecture nor the technology to support Production – called reverse asymmetry. The cable business is strongly rooted in the old model of one to many distribution to passive consumers. All very McLuhanesque. The cable companies’ best customer is the sports fan sitting at home on his couch. Bush works this particular demographic very well and makes them feel important and empowered.

The Production Line

I see every challenge as a design study. Sure, studies rarely lead anywhere, but neither does most thought and commentary. Of the few examples of progress, none is built without being designed. If there’s a challenge worth taking on, you have 4 choices:

1. Ignore it or complain about it (human default A)
2. Wade into it, swinging, without considering the causes (human default B)
3. Fix it based on a practical, tightly-reasoned, broadly acceptable plan
4. If no such plan exists, design one

In today’s world, there are three ways to reach consensus to effect change:

1. Web Application.
2. Web Application.
3. Web Application.

A web app is to 21st century progress as Location is to real estate. A web application is the only conceivable way of getting we the producers to stop squabbling and express our real preferences and unleash our energies.

We can’t count on government, which seems to have devolved into a partisan pit of paralyzed pedantry, focused on neoconservative initiatives and progressive reactions. But, if the government were to suddenly transform itself into a citizen-centric governance model, how would that model be expressed? Through a series of web apps, whether for citizen input or IRS forms.

The Dean Web Application

Let’s reset our perceptions about the American political process:

The Howard Dean phenomenon isn’t a campaign, it’s a web app.

The Tipping Point

The Dean For America web app (blog, contribution link, funding report, blogroll) is the primary entry point for knowledge about the candidate. Through links to its related Dean Meetup web app, the campaign web app has attracted some 45,000 citizens to ubiquitous political meetings that are unprecedented at this point in a pre-primary roll out. Those people, the most Internet-connected progressives, were then moved to participate in a related web app called the MoveOn Primary. By attracting so many of the most-connected progressives to its candidate, the Dean web app was able to win the MoveOn primary in a landslide. The campaign appears to be on a ride even it can’t comprehend. As of a week ago, Sunday morning, 6/22, the campaign had raised $3.2 million in the previous 84 days. By tonight–8 days–it will have doubled that amount. At 2:47 am this morning, $2 million of the $2.8 raised had came through the Internet. Let’s be clear: the campaign is now past the fund raising stage, it’s in the fund receiving business. In a week, we’ll see that this is a phenomenon feeding on itself like any other viral phenomenon.

For the last 20 months, our government has not allowed us to make a difference. On 9/12/01, most Americans woke up yearning to contribute. We donated blood but the blood banks ran out of room before most of us could contribute. We tried to drive to New York to help pick through the rubble, but were turned back at the bridges and tunnels. Instead, we got an ad from our president encouraging us to be loyal consumers and get on airplanes and fly anywhere but to New York! “Keep moving folks, there’s nothing to see here. We don’t need your help.”

If my premise is correct, this snub will be looked back on as one of the great political blunders in history. If it is revealed as a blunder, it will be because one candidate with enough common sense, charisma and speaking ability set up a web application and a related web log that linked to the web logs of people who still had not been permitted to make a difference.

The 44th president of the United States will be elected by a bottom-up, citizen-led production. That president will, literally, be owned by citizens, whose resources trump companies. If we put ourselves in the place of that 44th president, what kind of government will we fashion?

Probably a web app.

6:52:13 PM    

Moveon Primary

---

Monday Morning Quarterbacking

Governor Dean probably made progress yesterday on Meet the Press. But something has been bothering me all day and I finally realized what it is.

Election coverage is about electability and polls but governing is about what is good for the majority of the people. (OK, most conservatives don’t buy that premise, but that’s the sorry state that creeping suffrage has got us to, guys. Deal with it.) So the challenge that someone like Howard Dean faces is that the questions he’s asked are about the things the media cares about–ratings–rather than the things the people care about, which is how the government might deliver reasonable services at a reasonable cost without curtailing our right to create our own prosperity and to enjoy our lives (that pesky “pursuit of happiness” concept that people just won’t let go of).

So, if I were to offer the good Governor any advice, I’d advise him to use a little of Dubya’s strategy: if you don’t like a question, answer another one. Naturally, We the People hope you have better answers.

Playing the Doctor Card

Governor Dean properly invokes the success that he has had in steering Vermont on a healthy course, but I’d suggest that there are times when he ought to play the Doctor card. A good reason to play the doctor card is that each of us formed our sensibilities very early in life and, though we’d like to think we’re quite sage and objective, we each carry a lot of infantile preconceptions around.

Doc Searls keeps reminding us to read and listen to George Lakoff for a good reason.

If the Democrats want to win in ’04, George Lakoff points the way…You really need to get the book-length version of the essay: Moral Politics — What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don’t.

Lakoff is a conceptual linguist, a guy who looks at the words that people use and the metaphors they invoke and sees why some mental images are more compelling than others. Here’s the quote Doc wants us to remember, based on the strict father model:

Life is seen as fundamentally difficult and the world as fundamentally dangerous. Evil is conceptualized as a force in the world, and it is the father’s job to support his family and protect it from evils — both external and internal. External evils include enemies, hardships, and temptations. Internal evils come in the form of uncontrolled desires and are as threatening as external ones. The father embodies the values needed to make one’s way in the world and to support a family: he is morally strong, self-disciplined, frugal, temperate, and restrained. He sets an example by holding himself to high standards. He insists on his moral authority, commands obedience, and when he doesn’t get it, metes out retribution as fairly and justly as he knows how. It is his job to protect and support his family, and he believes that safety comes out of strength.

Dad.

Our idealized Dad is our reference when we elect a President. Sure, we go off on a tangent sometimes when we choose a Kennedy or a Clinton, but those are aberrations. Mostly we want someone like Dad to guide us.

No authority in our lives trumps Dad as the force to be reckoned with. But we each learned early on that there was one (and, often, only one) person whom Dad always deferred to, willingly, in whose presence Dad seemed suddenly meek and submissive, as before a true superior and a moral authority. That person was the family doctor. I’m sure that Howard Dean’s handlers exhort him to only play the Doctor card when talking about health care or abortion, but I wonder if George Lakoff might urge him to go for it–to employ linguistics as skillfully as the conservatives. If he did, Maybe this is how he might have responded to Tim Russert on Meet the Press.

Even Tim Russert respects Doctors

(Russert’s the guy who caused all the trouble on election eve 2000 when he said it would come down to “Florida, Florida, Florida”)

Russert: Why do some Democrats fear his nomination? Where does he stand on the issues? We’ll ask him… Doctor Howard Dean. And tomorrow, Doctor Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont plans to formally announce for President.

Yep. Cognitive Linguistics at work. There were a couple of challenges that Dr. Dean answered well, but might have done better as a physician. Tim Russert felt it was important for Dr. Dean to know how many people there are in the military, Dean said he thought there are between 1 to 2 million people at arms. I wonder how that vague answer would play in Peoria. Here’s a good place to play the Doctor Card. Imagine this exchange:

Russert: Don’t you think, as a Presidential candidate, that you should know how many people are in our armed forces?

Dean: One thing I know for sure is that one soldier is being killed every day in Iraq, and that’s more important than knowing how many others we have left to sacrifice. But let’s talk about facts, Tim. I’m an Internist. If you came to me with a cardiac arrhythmia, do you think I should treat you myself or refer you to a cardiac specialist? In medicine, the facts are so important that we don’t pretend that any one person can know them all.

I learned the names and function of the 206 bones in the human body without much difficulty. Do you really think I’ll have trouble learning the facts that matter to the presidency?

Moreover, Tim, do you honestly believe that George Bush, whether or not you like his radical Republicanism, has the mental equipment to master the important facts and subtleties of government? Even if he knows how many soldiers we have, he doesn’t seem to know when to use them and why.

The Doctor is in, he doesn’t like idiots, and he hates what they’ve done to the country while we were concerned with other terrorists!

11:09:06 PM    comment [c
ommentCounter (155)]

Meet the Press. Today. Howard Dean.

Says here, 9 AM ET. NYC RR says 10:30. YMMV

7:59:13 AM    

Like a moth to flame, I was drawn to Howard Dean’s seminal pronouncement on 5/28:

You need to support Dean because he has said the most important thing that any candidate has ever said:

“I’m not unwilling to change positions based on facts,
  but I am unwilling to change positions based on polls.”

Since then, I’ve found myself drawn to another flame–the fervor of passionate people who want to help anybody besides Bush, preferably Dean, become our next president.

These denizens of the ‘Net think like open source people. Given a problem, they start coding, and collaborating, and spotting bugs, and improving the code base, and welcoming positive suggestions and including new voices, and not paying much attention to the economics of the project, or why something can’t happen.

It sounds a lot like how a society works and nothing like how politics works.

The contributions these guys want to make involves doing real work for real campaigns to accomplish real change. They want to set up wikis, websites and WiFi; not press the flesh and position themselves for political appointments. How can you not do what you can for these guys? So we started imagining, together, how we might help candidates with lots of admirers but who aren’t set up to sell $2,000 hamburgers.

Specifically, we imagine a specialized sets of open resources for campaigns that deserve more help than they can afford. We’re particularly focused on the Dean campaign, but the infrastructure is agnostic. As Jon Lebkowsky said recently:

…the real importance of nodal politics is not in successful support for specific candidates, but in the successful construction of a more democratic model, with increased participation and increased understanding of the process and the issues. We get there by building a network, many connections and many nodes, and distributing quality information over that network, ensuring that there is at every node someone who can facilitate understanding of the messages we’re distributing.

Struggling campaigns deserve to have access to A-teams of geeks covering each area of production and IT, addressing needs common to any campaign:

1. graphic design (flyers, postcards, websites)
2. online organizing and communications
3. working with local parties
4. html emails
5. technology advice

The most urgent need is to establish communications & production support for meatspace functions. Here’s where we confront the problem every enterprise struggles with: sharing the knowledge of its individuals with the rest of the team. This is where forums, wikis and other collaborative tools are crucial.

This raises an interesting distinction between a big business and a time-limited campaign, whether military or political. In business, sure there’s a sense of urgency, but it lacks the visceral imperatives of people in mortal danger or a looming election.

Tech mentoring/task completion is a big part of the support picture. Like all of us, campaign staff will only use tech to the extent they’re comfortable with it and trained on it. Experts need to be on call to help complete a task, take over the task, or coach completion if the skills will be required repeatedly.

Anvil Chorus

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I’m embarrassed and a little amused that I feel like that. Xpertweb’s my hammer, and work is the nail. The more Josh and I (and Mitch and Jock and Jon and Doc and Flemming and others) teased this idea out of its cocoon, I began to see it as a mini-Xpertweb: An open set of resources available to whoever the experts choose to serve. Well that really got me excited!

Tomorrow a few of us will meet to see if we agree that our vision is that the best of geekdom should rally ’round NOW and deliver the Dean campaign into IT Nirvana. It helps that many in the Open Source movement would like to prove they can outperform the big guns at conventional projects AND innovation.

We speak a lot among ourselves of the need to give the campaign an ego-free zone. We know geeks can get in the way of enterprise, but it ain’t happening here. Our adhocracy will focus on the skill sets every enterprise needs but few can afford. Once organized and staffed, the capabilities will be described on websites private to the campaigns – intranets – with forms that campaign staffs can use to describe needs and their deadlines.

Or, as described in below, they can just just pick up the phone and say what they frickin’ need.

Make sure Campaign HQ runs like clockwork. Find Dean-leaning tech-heads who can go up to Burlington and make sure their campaign is running like a swiss watch

JOB 1: Master the IT basics for the campaign ASAP, whether as flunkies reporting to a big-time consultant or as professionals prepared to carry the IT ball for 17 months. Like any Open Source project, this work can follow the sun around the planet.

We assume the campaign is at this point a small business with the conversation load of a big one. So for now we assume it needs contact management, data bases, Excel support, outsourced typing, research, writing, graphics, etc. Pros are expected to volunteer to work the systems as required, using best practices, free from FUD and vendor agendas. Security’s huge here, but sharable to the grassroots as required.

Make the flow of ideas open and quick and -actionable-. Need to move ideas from idea-makers to action-doers. Idea processor

The campaign staff, up to and including Dr. Dean, need to be able to shout out an idea and have others vet it and DO it. This allows good ideas to happen chaordically and promptly. After vetting, pricing, resourcing and outlining the project, THEN a go/no-go can be given whether to proceed. The pricing function acknowledges that there are always some costs, but not for staffing and implementation.

People have more ideas when they don’t have to implement them, and that’s the thinking behind Idea Processing.

Friendly Interface for conversations.

We have a forum tool with a user-seductive GUI to add to the volunteers’ kit for collaboration, featuring an XML data store. We hope it will be as useful as a Wiki to the geeks, but more accessible, perhaps even the staff & Dr. Dean can use it as a dashboard interface to monitor the campaign’s production aspects.

Creative graphics people, get some leaders on board

Tomorrow, Josh and I will define the presumed zones of expertise: copy writing, graphics – prepress & web. Media development. This is basically the NYC Creative dream team I had blogged about after the Dean meetup. The categories are probably obvious, but suggestions are needed.

At this point, we want to finger the leaders and project managers in each area – the best we can find. Then they’ll ID the workers and coordinators.

Build the list of talented, vetted, responsible individuals who are ready to do something for the campaign

Rapid response campaign collateral, print to Kinkos (or Everett Studios)

With the creative people in place, digital pencils sharpened, campaign staff can describe requirements, which will then be translated into a task spec by one of our volunteers, then staffed, created, checked by another and sent through pre-press or to the media outlet. For print jobs we’ll provide a print-to-Kinko’s protocol (or email for media placement), so it’s printed in Burlington VT or Burlington IA as needed, and delivered to the client on time and WAY under budget. Josh proposes Everett Studios for higher quality materials.

Support for idea generation: talk to the web, leave notes to be perused, allow the idea makers free reign to pour it out

We propose an 800 voicemail number with people checking it several times an hour. Campaign people can dictate their notes to be parsed into communications, ideas, orders, position drafts, research, whatever. Some materials (after client approval) will be emailed or faxed to volunteers with good penmanship to hand write a letter and envelope, lick a stamp and confirm the posting of it – high tech/high touch.

Provide detailed data to voters based on their specifics; up to the minute statistics aimed at specific situations

Research can make issues come alive. Compelling facts can be on 3×5 cards or as sophisticated as a WiFi-equipped tablet computer/teleprompter in the speaker’s hands, perhaps with a technographer speaking into an ear mike. Obviously this applies to foreign affairs, Bush’s Fiscal Follies, etc.

Allow cross geographic/interest collaboration. Sure-thing blue states can lend resources to battlegrounds. Isolated talent in sure-thing reds can do the same

GREAT idea from Josh and/or Zack: Engage the people in non-swing states to help from afar in crucial must-win states. Let volunteers from Idaho and California help out in Florida or Michigan.

Meet Level, the playing field

IT’s interesting and a little heady to realize that there are far more talented people, fans of particular candidates, waiting to be put to productive use, than there are workers in even the best-funded campaign.

There’s nothing magic in this approach. We’re simply going to expose a set of well-described resources to the campaigns, and let them use those resources as their imaginations allow. Naturally some campaigns will inspire the volunteers more than others. If the resources are useful, responsive, professional and knit together into ad hoc teams that are truly productive, they’ll surely be used. When that pattern is established, a new force will have been added to American politics: Open Resource Elections.

It’s been said that candidates might as have their donors send the money directly to the TV stations, since that’s where it’s going anyway. So money, media and voters are the vital forces in elections. If Open Resource delivers useful work products and collaboration tools to campaigns, Those workers will be a new force, leveling a field which seems more tilted than ever.

10:52:50 PM    

I hear through the grapevine that the Dean campaign does welcome geek support, but, like any client, they’d like to get their current tech together and then imagine a bigger picture.

I’ll put on my consultant’s hat here, and predict with some confidence that the campaign’s priorities look something like this. I have no direct input, so All of the following is conjecture:

1. Pull together the campaign’s existing systems, which are probably ad hoc and surely need to be optimized
2. Consider the data flows they’ve got now and that they anticipate, and create a structure that grows with the campaign. You can bet the ideal structure will be a series of intranets, extranets and web apps.
3. Tune the current effort until it runs like a Swiss watch, unlike most businesses and all political campaigns.

                         then the campaign can afford to dream:
   

4. Brain storm and prioritize the exciting web apps that Dean’s Army of Geeks might implement.
5. Assign a team to each web app, with hard but possible schedules, milestones and deliverables.
6. Craft a networked mesh of citizens, fence straddlers, influencers, volunteers, commanders and SWAT Geeks, all knit together by a system of web communications that talks to the team and also to fax machines and citizen callers, Tupperware activists, bake sales and to volunteers handwriting letters from their PCs or fax machines.

Above all, like any enterprise, the Dean Campaign can only flourish in an ego-free zone. Helpers need to understand that just because geek volunteers have passion and a sliver of competence does not mean that we can push our pet technologies and agendas.

A sure-fire way to kill the spark that Dean has ignited is to drown the campaign under a Slashdot flood of good intentions.

Some tech Czar must emerge who has the respect of the campaign and the geek volunteers, with the background to pull together the solutions and opportunities that Dean’s Army of Geeks makes possible. That person needs to be the right blend of suit and geek, dreamer and hard-headed realist. Maybe the campaign’s already got that miracle worker, but probably not.

If you know that one-in-a-million leader, have him/her volunteer. If too busy, you know you’ve got the right person, so ask what anyone is doing for the next 16 months that’s more important. Re-tell the Cincinnatus story. Gag and tie the reluctant hero and drive non-stop to Vermont. You can work out the details later.

Update from Josh

On Thursday, June 12, 2003, at 12:08 AM, Josh Koenig wrote:

Just FYI — hack4dean is the hacker-facing element of the project; intended to lure in willing techies. Our citizen-facing elements will be americansfordean.com which is the meta-site, and fordean.net, which will be widely available domain suffixes (e.g. eastvillage.fordean.net) w/cheap server space and community tools that feed eachother top down and bottom up with RSS and other blog-like widgets.

This is the plan that emerged from out first IRC meeting. I’ve taken on the responsibility of keeping in touch with the “digirati” and making sure our efforts can dovetail when the time is right.

Cool.

Into the Chaordic Zone

Despite the need to manage the campaign so they operate in tech Nirvana, fine-tuned and smooth-running, chaos must be married to order so that the grassroots effort allows a thousand flowers to bloom. With Campaign Ops under control, grassroots geeks can do the unimaginable, like the Apache model, where each piece fits into a well-understood context. As long as the context is well communicated, the geek contributions can be useful campaign objects that work together as an ad hoc assemblage of passion and purpose.

Yeah. We could do that.

1:06:25 AM    

Sleepers Awake!

Tomorrow afternoon will be election day 2004. What will we have done to end the madness in Washington?

A bunch of proactive geeks want some Bush blood, believe that Dean is the best hatchet, and they may not wait long for the more active (self-important?) bloggers to get on board. For the moment, they’d like our help, perhaps in the manner I suggested some time ago, with Lessig & Searls getting together with the Dean campaign, as Josh Koenig reminded me today:

On Wednesday, June 11, 2003, at 01:02 PM, Josh Koenig wrote:

Any progress on that Doc/Lessig/Blaser/Trippi/Dean summit?:

1. Someone arranges a meeting with, at least, Dr. Lessig, Doc Searls, Dr. Dean, and Joe Trippi. The agenda is simple:
   1. Will you go to the mat to return fair use of published works to the people?
   2. Will you sponsor a blog-oriented, blog-responsive administration?
   3. Will you promote a fact-based judiciary?
2. If those answers are public, unequivocal and satisfactory, Searls, Lessig and other Net thought leaders should pull out the stops and get behind Dean, our last best hope for an administration knowing that managerial capitalism is about to consume the seed corn that makes capitalism possible. The nutrients they’re snorting up are the major food groups of the American miracle:
   1. A free and informed electorate
   2. The freedom to oppose the majority opinion (which usually isn’t)
   3. Freedom of speech, and, implicitly, freedom from single-agenda broadcasting
   4. Freedom from unreasonable seizure and, implicitly, limits on fair use of purchased media

The hack4dean movement has begun in earnest. Zack in Pittsburgh has set up a wiki and a mailing list, and we’re starting to have IRC meetings: http://www.pgh4dean.org/hack4dean/

The goal is to create something on the order to technorati but focused exclusively on Dean sites. We’re also planning on setting up a helpdesk for technically literate non-hackers to get support for their Dean efforts.

Having the endorsement of a few of the “A-list” people would be a big boost. It’s high time the geek community was activated as a political constituency. There’s too much to lose in the next four years not to do this.

Kingmakers Awake!

This is a time for leadership and not waffling, a time to pick a horse and not worry about picking the wrong one. This may also prove to be the time when Internet opinion leaders became the kingmakers in our society in the same sense that past kingmakers have been, by turns, the robber barons, the Hearsts, the Sarnoffs and currently the Murdochs.

The question is, will we collectively act or shall we keep discussing best practices? Josh feels geeks should be organized to be most effective.

Here are some obvious web applications that beg to be set up:

1. Pro-active online help to get voters to the polls, especially in places like Belle Glade, FL where the year 2000 shenanigans will be going on. (Mitch suggested yesterday that an online service could analyze the public registration records and turn up anomalies)
2. Web cams at polling places, so voter intervention can be publicized.
3. A web app to match up drivers with voters who need transportation.
4. A web app to train zealots how to communicate with humans, the point being to make friends, not flames. (E.g., hack4dean may be a poor message since most voters think hackers are criminals)
5. Widgets to put on our web sites/blogs
   1. I like the GOP Words, Totalitarian Deeds concept:
      A daily quote from Ike/Lincoln/Teddy Roosevelt, etc. (non-Democrat statesmen), provided to subscribing sites so visitors see the same quote several times a day, with the date and venue of each quote and a link to a statistical example of the quote’s relevance to this world we’ve inherited. (Links could be from http://www.nationmaster.com:
            Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
                             —Dwight D. Eisenhower, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 4/16/63
      Military expenditures
      
      Prosecution rates
      
6. Seemyvote.com:
   A database of voters who have abdicated their secret ballot to advertise their responses to current issues. The database would match issues and outrage with politicians and their current actions:
   

   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, the Republican and Democratic National Committees and major media outlets. View details at http://www.seemyvote.com/fleemer."

The Root of Ideal is Idea

Elections are grand ad hoc communications projects, which is why they’re so expensive. Communication Ideas are cheap and now, implementing them is cheap, thanks to the open source mentality. The political parties have never conceived of self-organizing groups, smart mobs, moblogging, and have barely heard of blogs.

Just Do It

Mitch and I discussed geek activism at length yesterday and he raised the concern that the kinds of efforts that Josh Koenig and Zack in Pittsburgh are promoting could run them afoul of the campaign finance reform laws, which prohibit individuals from donating more than $2500, cash or work pr
oducts, to a single campaign. The way around the limit is to make our web apps in support of a cause, such as the progressive politics. (It might be cool to have enough faith in the electorate to make the tools available to all campaigns, but that’s another conversation.) Mitch just wrote (while I’m typing this up):

Britt, Doc,

I was on the phone today with someone close to the Dean campaign, talking about creating some tools using Technorati, etc.

He agreed with me that creating a set of tools is important and should be tied not to a campaign but to progressive organizing. He suggested looking at OrganizeNow.net, which is an open source campaign database, as an example.

We would not face any campaign donation questions if we made tools and made them available for campaigns as open source applications. We’d have to report in-kind donations only when asked by a campaign to build something, and could even be paid for that.

Who will inspire and implement the inevitable smartmob takeover of the American electoral process? When will it start?

4:32:46 PM    

My first blog last summer was titled “Outted by the Doc” since he was my blogging mentor who convinced me to post my speculations. Today, in a post about No-Fi in Boston, he notes that, compared to Manhattan, Beantown is a 2.4GHz wasteland:

Here in Boston? Zero. Nada.
 
From Britt Blaser‘s apartment window in Manhattan I got 12 signals. From here on the 15th floor of the hotel, with high buildings nearby all around… Nothing.
 
Not sure what gives. Must be around here somewhere. It looks like a civilized place.
 
Of course, I’m writing this from the bed, before crashing using my own little portable wi-fi access point, which is hanging off the hotel’s broadband.

The subtle message sent by Doc’s subconscious is the interesting subtext here. The link (as I write this) doesn’t point to this blog, but rather to an article by someone named Andrew Orlowski in the Register, Most bloggers ‘are teenage girls’ – survey:

Those raging–hormones… capricious tantrums, those endless hours devoted to navel gazing … the helpless feeling that world is conspiring against you … the frustration of trying to use grown-up words, but failing … popstar fantasies … toe-curling slang … those nightmarish swings between binge eating and dangerous, faddish diets. It’s all there. And don’t even mention the first, awful encounter with alcohol.

“What am I,” asks David Weinberger, adjusting himself to the medium, “a 12-year-old??”

Cute but pointless. I hadn’t spent any time reading Orlowski and wouldn’t have read this if Doc hadn’t turned me into an accidental tourist. If the rest of his stuff is as parlous and soft-headed as this, Orlowski’s clearly a waste of time. Perhaps everybody else in the blogging mini-world has already tarred him, but I arrive with a clean slate, sort of recognizing the name but with no particular bias.

And then I read this foolishness:

The reason that 99.93 per cent of the world doesn’t blog, and never will, is because people make simple information choices in what they choose to ingest and produce, and most of this will be either personal and private, or truly social. Blog-evangelists can fulminate at the injustice of this all they like, but people are pretty smart and make fairly rational choices on the information they process.

Interesting people run interesting blogs, but it’s remarkable how few of them there are.

Clearly, this guy assumes he’s interesting or smart or informed or some combination thereof. But let’s take his pompous little absurdity apart. He proposes that only .07% of the world will ever blog because no one cares about what they have to say. Aside from the obvious fact that only idiots make predictions about new phenomena, he’s saying that blogging is a function of reader demand, rather than writer reflection. Of course that’s just silly. People have always written to work out ideas for themselves, and bloggers seem to appreciate the appearance of being a global voice more than we expect it. What surprises most bloggers is that anyone reads us at all.

(Hoo-Ha! I just now googled Orlowski and discovered that everyone knows he’s blowing smoke. Sorry to be so shut away here. I feel like a kid in middle school who, minding my business, has been convinced to look at something in the dumpster by Andy the class clown, followed by screams of infantile delight: “Neener-neener, made ya look! Ha Ha Ha!” There are a lot of journalists like that who, since they are paid to write for the calendar rather than the intellect, often put out nothing dressed up as something.)

So I won’t waste any more time taking Orlowski apart, and wouldn’t have gone this far were I more plugged in. Orlowski’s just a smoking clunker driving 45 in the fast lane, loving all the attention. Such writing has no purpose other than circulation, and the Register should know better.

There’s an old warning against challenging anyone who buys ink by the barrel. Mr. Orlowski may understand, when his 15 minutes of fame is past, that you shouldn’t fight anyone who buys ink by the bit.

 

12:08:05 PM