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go direct to Dean Campaign Purchase instructions I had some great hang time at OSCon with Doc. Doc is the metaphor meister, but he’s nobody’s fool. I emphasize his non-foolishness because historically the king’s metaphor meister was a brightly dressed fool who was allowed to say outrageous things that the nobles could not. Many of the fool’s gems were metaphors, and Doc comes up with more pithy comments than anyone, and also reports everyone else’s. I think of him stalking through the jungle with his metaphor net and pith helmet. Yesterday he quoted Jakob Neilsen: “Cluetrain was marketers defecting to the customers’ side of marketing.” After a week at OSCon, I’m back to report that Neilson’s describing a cultural trend, not an isolated event. We’re all defecting from tired viewpoints to previously inconceivable ones. On the evening of June 30, I heard Howard Dean speak in New York. He worked the crowd with his articulate plainspokenness regarding health care, state’s rights to regulate couple’s rights, and in a clever finale to the list, the glory of a balanced budget to secure our future. He got a rousing, lingering round of cheers and applause. When we quieted down, he added, “Look what just happened: A crowd of liberal New Yorkers cheering for fiscal responsibility!” That’s a mass defection. What a contrast to the mass defecation on George Tenet this week! The Open Source Democracy
Am I just seeing penguins or is this a cultural trend?
Which is why big companies are using open source tools to do DIY IT, as Doc calls it. Is Democracy the Killer App?
What would an open source country look like? It’s been done many times before. They’re called revolutions, hard reboots that are really messy, with all those bodies and widows and orphans. Usually they end up hacking a Colonel. Those are the lengths people will go to install an open source government. Democracy, the killer demo. Unfortunately, like our current republic, most of those revolutionary open source installations suffer from a slow but persistent memory leak. The revolutionaries revert to type and act like the old leaders. Think of Castro and the NeoCons here. Remember the Gingrich Contract with America? (Reproduced below for convenience & blog stickiness. BTW, did anyone else feel a disturbance in the Force when they made a newt our most powerful legislator?) That’s why Thomas Jefferson felt that a new open source government should be installed by its users every generation or so. The Über IssueAs I said last time, an ad hoc smart mob might be reaching a critical mass around the Dean campaign. If it is, the mob’s collective sense may be that the key issue behind the movement is their new sense of empowerment, not the candidate or issues. That might not even bother Howard Dean. Every leader wants to leave behind something larger than himself, and open source democracy sure would be it. Make no mistake, these people love Dean and there are many reasons why they should, the DLC and pundits notwithstanding. Dean is smart, human, informed and charismatic. On the main points that people like in a president, he seems ahead of the candidates of both parties. On his campaign blog a while back, a worker commented that Dean had left his notes behind before a talk, but that, “as usual, he just improved on the notes.” Doh. Natural, coherent speech seems the most presidential of traits. As Doc points out in his link to my Steal this Campaign post yesterday, the candidate is just the start of the appeal. Beyond the issues and the candidate, which are features, lies the real benefit. The Dean campaign is facilitating a different character of participation, by entirely new people, who are not as focused on the candidate and issues as on the process they want to establish, which looks nothing like the process we have. Fix it in the MixThese new constituents are collectively buying the Dean campaign, just as big Republican donors are buying Dubya’s attention–I’ll bet Kenny Lay has already slipped a couple grand into his old buddy’s pocket. Dean supporters, with their $112 average contribution, seem to feel a collective confidence in Dean’s willingness to listen to them just as Republican donors feel in their ability to be heard by the candidate they’re buying. Dean’s indicated that we’ll see a White House blog in 2005, and he’s guest hosting Larry Lessig’s blog next week. It’s the transparency, stupid! If the citizens own this candidate, and there’s a way to aggregate our collective sensibilities into a coherent expression of policy preferences, then we should be confident we can steer the country after buying our candidate. Amazon knows all about its users’ preferences, thanks to all those Linux boxes, why shouldn’t the president we buy? Now that’s an aspiration greater than mere presidency: “I am the preferred puppet of the American people. My job is to understand their collective common sense and make it so.” If you have a puppet for pres Are Mobs really smart?All my smart mob talk gives Mitch and some others the willies. They say that if we get too confident we might fail to get Dean elected, that elections are won in meatspace, not cyber and so we Netizens can’t assume we’ll connect with actual citizens. My point is a different one. If the smart mob reaches critical mass, it’s a fundamentally different animal than the one that currently elects governments, with radically different capabilities. Its effect on party machines and mechanics would be like the effect of P2P networks on the music biz. And it’s all about meatspace, not segregated from it. I went to a Dean Meetup 10 days ago and wrote 3 letters to Iowa Democrats. So did about 20,000 other people. I’ve never written a campaign letter in my life nor had anyone around me. It gets no meatier than that. This was an example of the effect of the civic level of cyberspace that Jim Moore described on the eve of of Dean’s Super Monday:
Based on a series of digital messages, 60,000 people have registered to go to Meetups and do things like write letters with real ink on real paper. The experts who specialize in managing the torrent of money flowing into candidate’s coffers every other year don’t like this formula which is more complicated than buying attack ads on TV. Because it’s human. Let’s try a viral mob-forming experiment. I’m dropping this in the meme pool to see what happens. I know people who can build this function overnight:
As the salesman says, “Sign here, press hard, third copy is yours.” Next Problem? Contract with America* An Example of Memory Leak in Partisan Politics As Republican Members of the House of Representatives and as citizens seeking to join that body we propose not just to change its policies, but even more important, to restore the bonds of trust between the people and their elected representatives. That is why, in this era of official evasion and posturing, we offer instead a detailed agenda for national renewal, a written commitment with no fine print. This year’s election offers the chance, after four decades of one-party control, to bring to the House a new majority that will transform the way Congress works. That historic change would be the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public’s money. It can be the beginning of a Congress that respects the values and shares the faith of the American family. Like Lincoln, our first Republican president, we intend to act “with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right.” To restore accountability to Congress. To end its cycle of scandal and disgrace. To make us all proud again of the way free people govern themselves. On the first day of the 104th Congress, the new Republican majority will immediately pass the following major reforms, aimed at restoring the faith and trust of the American people in their government:
Thereafter, within the first 100 days of the 104th Congress, we shall bring to the House Floor the following bills, each to be given full and open debate, each to be given a clear and fair vote and each to be immediately available this day for public inspection and scrutiny.
Further, we will instruct the House Budget Committee to report to the floor and we will work to enact additional budget savings, beyond the budget cuts specifically included in the legislation described above, to ensure that the Federal budget deficit will be less than it would have been without the enactment of these bills. Respecting the judgment of our fellow citizens as we seek their mandate for reform, we hereby pledge our names to this Contract with America. 11:49:23 AM |
Category: Uncategorized
Steal This Campaign
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OK, we can’t steal it, but we can buy it. Cheap. All the campaigns are talking about money, which is what politicians care about. We can put an end to that foolishness with a simple strategy: Buy a campaign by showering it with so many $50 contributions that they won’t have to worry about corporate contributions. Apparently the Republicans are raising $200 million from their closest friends based on a single cynical premise: You can buy people’s votes The back story on that cynical assumption is that they need to be bought because they never manifest themselves other than through big time TV marketing. But someone said recently that, if a million people give $1,000, the Republican’s cynical assumptions go out the window. In an email today, Lindsley Haisley opines:
Lindsley and Mitch disagree with my assertion that this campaign isn’t about the Presidency, it’s about the Internet, because the basics of elections haven’t changed–get out the vote, raiseawareness with TV money, etc. My point, though, is that all those things are givens. Of course we need a message, a strong candidate, etc. However that’s like saying that the Battle of Agincourt was not about the long bow but Anglo Saxon fortitude, which is just silly. Of course it took great Anglo Saxon determination to trudge through the swamp all night just to show up. But, once there, the battle was about the long bow because it so overshadowed the other variables. So I believe more strongly than ever that politics in 2004 and 2008 is about the Internet. More precisely, it’s about the uneven use of the Internet because some candidates are willing to open their campaigns to the voters and put up with the chaos of that feedback loop. People are responding to Dean because they are empowered to. Confident in that power, they’re less concerned about Dean’s specific positions, because they buy the inspiring tone and they think they’ll still be posting comments on his blog in 2005. ScaleEveryone seems to agree that 6/30/03 will be written about for years since it was the first spontaneous expression of political will by self-organizing voters talking each other into caring more and donating more through the Moveable Type Comments function. That inspiring day caused the campaign to believe more strongly in its core aspiration: to somehow get nominated and then to give the Republicans a decent challenge. If 6/30 is as important as it seems, the campaign is making a mistake: It should re-calibrate its goals. If the campaign doesn’t see the potential in the Internet, then the smart mob phenomenon just might. And a smart mob functions at an entirely different level than conventional hierarchical structures. Its force is nuclear and 20th century politics is just gunpowder. Do the MathInternet-equipped people caused $802,000 to be donated to Dean on 6/30/03. They did it by chatting each other up as the new totals were posted every half hour, and as the goal, depicted as a baseball bat, was increased as goal after goal was surmounted through the afternoon. A freely associating mob is forming around the Dean campaign. Its communication tools will soon transcend the Campaign comment archives, by organizing its own tools. The campaign can’t stop them nor should it want to, though there are surely consultants who would just as soon all this went away. Too late. Metcalfe’s Law says that this mob’s value and power will grow with the square of its population, attracting more people and volksmoney as an accretion disk in space sucks in matter from the systems around it. I believe this phenomenon is a social force too powerful to be stopped, and that historians will be more interested in 6/30/03 than 9/11/01. The smart mob is not limited by the campaign’s preconceptions. At a gut level, this mob seems to be saying, “We’ve got plenty of money for this little problem. Shit, we give $4 billion a year to Apple Computer. Apple! We can easily spend a couple billion every four years to own our own government!”
Do you hear what I hear?I hear a being waking up, wiring together its own dendrites and a little surprised at how easy it is to do what its forebears found challenging, like a Cro Magnon artist looking at a Neanderthal adornment. I hear this being forming its mouth around the word landslide. As in, “What the fuck! Is that all we’re talking about? Sure, we can afford this, but why not buy a landslide, it’s way more fun than an even race! And why not buy a congress and that little Democratic party too. We pay a lot for government already. Why not just own it outright? Of course all those little donors are giving money to buy their own votes. The ultimate bootstrap. Yeah. I think this campaign is about the Internet. 10:36:19 AM |
Design, Studied
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I’m in Portland staying with my good friend and data mentor, Nick Johantgen and his talented and stylish wife, Nina Davis. Nick & Nina and Tamara and I go way back, to Seattle, Philly and now bi-coastal. Roland Tanglao and I are meeting in Portland on the occasion of the O’Reilly Open Source Conference this week. (Flemming‘s moving to France next week, so he’ll be here only in spirit and iChat). Mitch is driving down from Tacoma to join us tomorrow. Our purpose is to hammer out some Xpertweb design details and to get some input from the Opensourcerati. If Xpertweb does its job, we might one day see an Open Data Conference. “Open Data” is meant to suggest an architecture that mirrors data among participants’ web sites. It formalizes what we already embrace in a random fashion as we scan multiple RSS feeds, blogs, news and research to triangulate what we accept as true. If multiple sources describe roughly the same story, we come to embrace it. Multiple sources implicate the truth while open data explicates it. Our resentment of dead links indicates our commitment to open data, though we’ve not yet committed to an open data standard. In transactional reporting, the kind of data that our clients and employers pay us to manage, Xpertweb wants to foment identical data in the records of both parties to the transaction. That alone is worthwhile, but the real win comes by making the data also open to other parties, anyone who may want to trade with the parties to this transaction and who would benefit from full disclosure of the character and quality of past undertakings. I find it ironic that everyone uses open source tools to create closed data. Perhaps the benefits of open data are not obvious. Lopsided, Balanced or Open Data?The more technical terms might be Asymmetrical, Symmetrical and Transparent data. Several years ago, it occurred to me that the world is built on asymmetrical data, where transaction records are maintained and controlled by the designer of the transaction. So, when a buyer and a seller transact, the seller (the designer of the transaction) keeps and controls the data. When an employer and an employee intersect, the employer (designer of their transaction) keeps and controls the data. That’s when I started my quest for a symmetrical data standard, where both parties maintain identical records of their transaction. And realized how profound is the power to design transactions. Later I realized that was a partial step. Symmetrical records may help the parties approach parity, but the smaller party will still be subject to the larger party’s, well, largesse. (It sounds like a contradiction in terms. Do we ever see largesse practiced by larger parties?) After some digging, I realized there’s lots of symmetrical data, but it’s hidden from view. Symmetrical data is built cooperatively when businesses insist on parity of transactional data, using standards like EDI. So far, only largish businesses have had the luxury of symmetrical data, since it has required expensive tools, data servers, staffs and usually lawyers. And there’s nothing inherent in symmetrical data that will keep a GM manager from trashing a supplier as a smart career move. Open Data is the next step. An ideal Open Data transaction is one where the symmetrical data is published on the web so it requires no permission for any interested party to examine it. Further, the data need to be persistent over the life of a transaction, not just archived at the close of the deal. This encourages the parties to deal as they say they should, since the details of failed transactions will be as visible as successful ones. What’s in a Name? We had no ID…We seem to have solved the hard part of the Digital ID challenge, as Doc described after we showed it to him in May. There’s a review of our digital ID system at the end of this post, for those patient enough to wade through it. We have an ID process, which would seem to be the hard part, but not an ID format, which is harder than it seems. Our naming challenge stems from Xpertweb’s lack of centralization–there’s no central registration authority as for internet domains. Instead we have to rely on each mentor to generate a unique Xpertweb ID for all those who come after her. It’s a little like surnames, where John’s son Dave became Dave Johnson. Too bad that medieval standard wouldn’t scale past the first metadata level. But the geneology model is compelling. Since we can compare satisfaction ratings for any users or groups of users, then, if each Xpertweb user’s ID contains the IDs of all the mentors who form the user’s “family tree,” so to speak, we can quickly compare any mentor’s effectiveness to any other’s. This seems to me an overarching value. The following method is the least worst we’ve come up with, which Roland describes as “Britt’s method.” Perhaps he’s distancing himself from it…
Simple enough, right? Unique IDs all around. But we need a lot of unique IDs, since Xpertweb means to be a data collector and an alternate economy and globally virulent. Further, each human may have more than one persona, operating in parallel or serially. The issue is the length of each ID. As we add users, their IDs get longer. At what length does an ID become unwieldy? Are ten digits too many? 15? 20? Does it matter, since each mentor’s web site will point out who begat whom? Theoretically, you can imagine a string as long as the number of users, if they’re added serially. However, since the Xpertweb system depends on each person training several others, (four is the recommended minimum), 4x4x4, etc. yields I While we need to anticipate every eventuality, such as a thousand people at a meeting, each of whom mentors the person seated to their right (AKA “Ming’s Nightmare”), I feel human nature is on the side of one person mentoring several others, so the digit-length tax on each generation seems likely to earn a four-fold population gain:
Xpertweb has generous rewards for mentoring new users (some say they’re too generous), so it’s likely that many mentors will introduce more than four new users. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Unless we can come up with a better story. Whaddaya think? Does this approach make sense? Do we need a more elegant, computing-intense way to generate IDs? How important is it to provide a simple means to look at ID strings and see within them the ” geneology” of the mentors who trained an Xpertweb user. Please send any comments to Roland. Why work on an idealized, theoretical economic system?Is one better off to work directly on the symptoms of the real socioeconomic climate, like getting an Internet-based President elected? Or is it better to fantasize that a novel transaction data model could grow to significance? As you guessed, I like to place both bets. Clearly, Xpertweb is a delicate, tentative little evolutionary economy. Like all evolutionary species, you can almost hear it gasping and flopping around at the edge of the water hole, wondering if breathing air is really such a great idea. But it’s a little horny, nonetheless. “Oh well, maybe it’s wo Current Method for Authenticating an Xpertweb BuyerSince both parties control web servers containing the ID data they wish to selectively expose, we can use cooperative scripts to identify ourselves to each other, making the steps fairly straightforward. Here’s an example where I might want to buy something from Flemming Funch, but he doesn’t know if I’m the person I say I am.
Now the two of us can transact with high confidence that our reputations are accurately represented. Naturally, no system can guarantee that we’ll behave well. All it can do is report what we say about each other’s behavior. And that seems like a good start. [back to the Unique ID discussion] 9:31:45 AM |
Crossing the Chasm
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…Was a wildly popular biz book for the tech biz a few years ago, for good reason. It described the dilemma of tech companies trying to convert early success into lasting success. It’s all your fault. And my fault. And the fault of most people who know what “blog” means. We’re early adopters and if a new product or service gets our attention, the company can experience an immediate flash that doesn’t pan out. Their hopes are dashed when the growth stops and they wonder where the market is. The market heights they seek are on a tall mountain across a deep chasm which they must cross in order to climb higher. It turns out that lots of companies can win early sales and 15 minutes of fame, but few have the will and resources to cross the valley of the shadow of death that yawns before them. Certainly if I’d foreseen the chasm dilemma in 1987, I’d not have been the angel investor behind Dynamac, but what fun would that have been? Our nation has a cultural chasm to cross, the rift between those who applaud our get tough stance with the world, vs. those who aren’t sure that we’re tough enough to beat everybody we’re now pissing off with our bluster. Books of a FeatherJock Gill pointed me to an amazing depiction of connections among books. As you’ve noticed, Amazon and Barnes & Noble relates books to each other by noticing what other books are bought by the buyers of any given book. One curious reader, Valdes Krebs, wondered back in 1999 whether there might be any useful insights by charting those associations. His latest look at books, Divided We Stand???, generated an interesting insight illustrating the echo chamber phenomenon:
If only because he thought to lock down the domain orgnet.com, you’ve got to admire Valdes Krebs, but his is a masterful connection of meaningful dots. All the little squares represent books purchased at the same time as the other books they’re linked to. There are two echo chambers depicted here:
So Valdes Krebs discerns a disconnect between the people who buy books described as liberal and those who buy books described as conservative. The only book these two echo chambers have in common is Bernard Lewis’ excellent What Went Wrong? Lewis is considered our leading Islamist scholar, making him acceptable to “intellectuals.” In What Went Wrong?, he dissects the failing of Islam, which makes him appealing to whoever yearns to feel superior to the presumed enemy of our new Crossing the ClassismIt’s class warfare. But to me it looks like a war that started in the classroom, where the compliant, eager-to-please, more curious kids ran circles around the guys in the back row and never got over their feeling of mental superiority. Since school, many of those kids in the back row have done much better than the former brainiacs, for whom they feel nothing but contempt, knowing that clear purpose, not introspection, is the key to success. Success in business requires a kind of drive and bonhomie mastered on the playing fields, not in the classroom. Intellectuals rarely master the American version of the good life, which rewards the kind of unwavering, unquestioning confidence that intellectuals seldom possess. Nor is it clear that those who are outwardly most successful have the will or perspective to avoid the narrowmindedness of any petit bourgeoisie. If you don’t think there’s a civil war going on, here’s Newt Gingrich rallying the troops in 1988:
15 years later, it’s the Republicans who are taking no prisoners. We must cross this uncivil chasm, and this would be a good year to start. 8:13:50 PM |
Contrast
11:37:47 AM |
Bless the Troops
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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.
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The Sound of Democracy
Government Producers Council
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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 Production LineI 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:
In today’s world, there are three ways to reach consensus to effect change:
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 ApplicationLet’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
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 |
Register to vote today, 6/23 in the
Moveon Primary
Monday Morning QuarterbackingGovernor 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 CardGovernor 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.
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:
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”)
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:
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 |
What’s the Big Deal?
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Meet the Press. Today. Howard Dean. Says here, 9 AM ET. NYC RR says 10:30. YMMV 7:59:13 AM |
Escapable Logic 