Category: Uncategorized

Doc Searls was here most of the week, hanging out at the 43rd Street Headquarters for Contrary Thinking. The weather was gnarly, so it’s a good thing he got some great photos when he was here two weeks earlier.

Free Entry

We had a great dinner Sunday night, as described by Doc and Adam Fields. Both point to my mention of a bedrock economic principle that has fallen on such hard times that they both were struck by the concept when I mentioned it. From Wikipedia:

Free entry is a term used by economists to describe a condition in which firms can freely enter the market for an economic good by establishing production and beginning to sell the product.

Free entry is implied by the perfect competition condition that there is an unlimited number of buyers and sellers in a market. In comparison to perfect competition, however, free entry is a condition often more applicable to real world conditions. To see this, suppose there is a good which not many people want, which is produced by only one firm. In this situation, there is not perfect competition. However, if there is free entry, the market is likely to be more efficient than if there is not. If the monopoly firm raises its prices too high, another firm could enter the market and take its customers. According to this reasoning, where there is free entry the economic damage caused by monopoly behavior may be mitigated.

These are smart, knowledgeable guys, so the fact that it is not their common knowledge is a Bad Thing. That’s because free entry into the market place is the First Amendment of Economics: a precondition for any legitimate economy. The absence of free entry ensures economic tyranny.

And that’s what we’ve got, folks.

11:36:11 PM    

My friend and ORG board advisor, Micah Sifry, riffs on a Thomas Friedman column suggesting that the stage might be set for a 3rd political party. In fact, Friedman is partly riffing on Micah, quoting him in his NYTimes PayWall column. Dissatisfaction with the Dems and the GOP is not surprising. When you’ve been serially dating two people for years and can’t stand either one, your eye is sure to wander. Micah points out, citing Ross Perot in 1992,

Ah yes, that pesky Age of Connectedness. Not a surprising sentiment from one of Mrs. Sifry’s boys.

Bricks, Mortar or Bits?

If you had unlimited funds and support, you’d start with some idea about what it is that a political party does and how to go about building one. Micah and I have discussed this, and we agree on some basics. It’s unlikely you’d start by renting 50,000 feet of prime DC real estate and order up a bunch of Aeron chairs and cubicle modules. You’d recognize that the core of your party will be the web services it offers and the on- and off-line organizing that your web service supports.

A political party purports to be a vote delivery system. It blesses candidates and positions and convinces people to show up on election day and make a meaningful gesture. It operates a Geographic Information System (mostly on paper) to do that, since some geography is more important than others. Its workforce is mostly volunteers but knows nothing about the genius and passions and potential energy of those volunteers. Above all, a party is credited by its candidates for getting them elected, even when it doesn’t.

Any force that does those things is a 3rd (through nth) party. It only earns the third party label if it has an effect on the real parties.

Building a First Party

Why build a 3rd party when you could build the First Party? Why not imagine a hostile takeover of American politics? There’s only one force strong enough to hijack the American political system, and that’s the American people. The stage is set for open source governance, which is the only political dynamic interesting enough to work on. I’m far more intrigued by interesting large-scale problems than by fine-tuning around the margins of a broken system. So is the American electorate. So, what’s next?

Our tiny band continues to toil away on our warez. Micah has invited me to present ORGware at Personal Democracy Forum on May 15th. I’ll make a formal announcement of our political marketing strategy for 2006. Our grand vision is not so grand, really – it’s mostly driven by how late we are to the, well, party. We think we have some useful approaches to inspiring user thought and engagement and building aggressively viral sites from those raw materials. If that’s right – a BIG If – then our platform can host lots of conversations about lots of issues and lots of candidates.

Get Yer Democracy Samples Here!

Govern Early and Often. That’s the secret to successful campaigning in this Connected Age, so beloved by the Brothers Sifry. Why hound people for donations when it’s easier to hand out free Democracy Samples? Democracy in the Connected Age means a broad and deep conversation that leads directly to specific platforms and legislation. Yep, we’re talking laws and lawmakers representing the common sense of those who help craft the and wording of the laws, in large enough numbers that it shifts the political landscape (governing early and often is described in more detail near the bottom of this page).

While your opponent is out mouthing sound bites, spending expensive donations on consultants and their expensive message, try governing on line and partnering with whoever shows up. If your message is and participation is galvanizing, your support will grow, will migrate off line and will carry the day.

If your message and participation is not galvanizing, why bother? Since we won’t have time to sell ORGware for the fall, we’ll just set up sites for those candidates and issues that appeal to those with common sense. If nothing else, we’ll learn what needs the most improving, but with any luck, the site will do what any political party does – deliver votes – without the money part.

11:02:24 AM    

I was hanging out with Doc in Santa Barbara the day after the UCSB CITS Forum on Digital Transitions, when he threw away one of his many throwaway lines. “Most people go wrong because they fall in love with their own rectitude. It keeps them from being practical.” Our usual scatological riffs began, so I immediately labeled him:

Doc Searls, Practicologist

I’m not sure what kind of scope we can use to peer up each other’s rectitudes, but we sorely need one. In Sunday’s NYTimes Magazine, Peter Beinart offered The Rehabilitation of the Cold-War Liberal, suggesting that old-school cold-war liberals can provide a circumspect model to lead America out of our current long days journey into right:

In America, no less than in the Islamic world, the struggle for democracy relies on economic opportunity. To contemporary ears, the phrase “struggle for American democracy” sounds odd. In George W. Bush’s Washington, such struggles are for lesser nations. But in the liberal tradition, it is not odd at all. Almost six decades ago, Americans for Democratic Action was born, in the words of its first national director, to wage a “two-front fight for democracy, both at home and abroad,” recognizing that the two were ultimately indivisible. That remains true today. America is not a fixed model for a benighted world. It is the democratic struggle here at home, against the evil in our society, that offers a beacon to people in other nations struggling against the evil in theirs. “The fact of the matter,” Kennan declared, “is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us.” America can be the greatest nation on earth, as long as Americans remember that they are inherently no better than anyone else.

In other words, we are being hoisted by our own rectitude. This is a theme that many have tried to teach us. Just the other day, Musician Neil Young offered a clue when interviewed by Showbiz Tonight’s fabulously big-haired Sibila Vargas. Forgive a moment of ad wominem carping: I swear, as David Weinberger reports, these words actually escape her collagen-blessed lips: “You’ve got one song, called ‘Let’s Impeach the President’ What is this song about?” 

A question so colossally dumb that Young hardly knows what to do with it.

She goes on to ask if he’s concerned that he’ll be considered unpatriotic, suggesting that “cynics” might say that Neil Young is capitalizing on the Bush backlash to sell more records and that he might not be justified in saying these things because he’s a Canadian (who has lived in the US longer than Sibila Vargas has been alive. If this made-for-TV hottie had a triple-digit IQ, she might have better questions.

Neil Young: “If you have a conscience, you can’t go through your day without realizing what’s going on and questioning, and saying, ‘Is this right?’ We have to be cognizant of the fact that we can make mistakes. That’s part of freedom. We don’t all have to believe in what our President believes to be patriotic. . . No one, George Bush or anyone else, owns the 9-11 mentality.”

She still didn’t get it. “Are you concerned about any backlash?” Young: “I’m not in the least bit concerned. I expect it. I respect other people’s opinions. That’s what makes the United States and Canada great is the fact that you can differ from your friends you can still sit down at the same table and break bread with your friend.”

Don’t miss the Anchor’s heated, pointed retort to the surprised Sibila: “It’s terrific hearing Neil Young speaking out on this very controversial subject, and, on the theme of what he said, anybody who feels that the themes of this album are motivated by the need for publicity, I think that‘s ridiculous.”

As Victor Frankel put it:

“From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two  the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense, no group is of “pure race”  and therefore one occasionally found a decent fellow among the camp guards.

“Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths. Is it surprising that in those depths we again found only human qualities which in their very nature were a mixture of good and evil? The rift dividing good and evil, which goes through all human beings, reaches into the lowest depths and becomes apparent even on the bottom of the abyss which is laid open by the concentration camp.”

Al Solzhenitsyn Chimes In

Then there’s the Alexander Solzhenitsyn viewpoint, troubling to absolutists because he’s an even more famous concentration camp survivor, in his native Russia.

“The universal dividing line between good and evil runs not between countries, not between nations, not between parties, not between classes, not between good and bad men: the dividing line cuts across nations and parties, shifting constantly. . . . It divides the heart of every man.”

Old News

Why Bother?

“For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best. So let us be alert – alert in a twofold sense:

Yep, we need to guard against our own rectitude and its codependent, Certitude.
11:02:09 PM    

Over at Greater Democracy, they’ve been having a heated discussion this week around who did what and why during the 2004 Democratic campaign, Dean and post-Dean. It starts with a post by Jock Gill regarding the traditional Master/Slave structure to campaigns and the peer-to-peer model that the Dean campaign embraced pretty well (Jock introduced me to the Dean campaign). There are comments by, in order of appearance:

Valdis Krebs “Democrats don’t get “social networks” as well as the Republicans.”
Jon Lebkowsky  ”The Kerry campaign focused on raising money, not building community.”
Aldon Hynes “After the election much of the work promoting P2P activism slowed to a crawl.”
Joe Trippi “It was a fight every day to keep the master/slave beast at bay. [vs. P2P]”
Rayne “We are now in the middle of ‘making it up as we go along’ yet again.”
Zack Exley “We have an excess of ‘ideas’ and a deficiency of developers/engineers. It’s a shame.”
Robert David Steele “Gore needs to form a coalition shadow government and use it to help elect people in 2006”

You can taste the frustration, catalyzing the kinds of who-shot-John claims and counterclaims that feel so wasteful but which probably help energize the group. I’m as amazed as anyone that there is no comprehensive set of campaign tools out there, and that’s why we’re working so hard on ORGware. I’m also amazed at how long it has taken us to get as far as we are. If I’d realized in December 2004 that, in the spring of 2006 we’d still be where we were in the fall of 2003, maybe I would have got moving earlier. As I described last time, our development was as accidental as purposeful. 

We really need better ways of presenting the vital discussions that Valdis Krebs describes in It’s the Conversations, Stupid! (pdf). As David Weinberger said recently, The nits are determinative. Consider how the structure of the Greater Democracy site dissuade the reader from digging into this important conversation, and how ORGware addresses the determinative nits:

• The main post and comments all run together, making the text hard to even approach, much less follow.
• Long posts should be automatically truncated, but expand in place when the reader wants the whole thing.
• Two LONG documents are embedded in two of the comments. Because the comments are not automatically truncated, these lists of political requirements dissuade the reader from continuing. ORGware encourages the writer to upload the original text files, which the reader can open in a separate window to maintain context.
• All blogs and comments are also displayed as threaded discussions, which can be collapsed and expanded as needed.
• Comments must be on the same page as the main blog, condensed to a single line that the reader can expand at will.
• Comments need individual hyperlinks. It’s also helpful if a comment is posted to the reader’s personal blog as a primary post.

Nevertheless, you really should read the whole thing. The rest of this post is a summary that may be a helpful introduction.

From Jock’s original post:

We must understand how the dominant organizing principles of our national communications infrastructure shapes and determines our politics. If we want a truly democratic politics, based on the notions of equality with justice and fairness for all, based upon truly symmetrical relationships, we will have to have a communications paradigm that supports that goal.

Here’s Rayne‘s description:

These needs aren’t restricted to candidates, either; there are groups like Congressional District organizations, caucuses, more, that all have similar needs. I’m involved on the tech team for one caucus, has tech folks on board, but the tech folks end up in a turf-war over the best technology, confusing the rest of the non-techs on the team. The techs are also damned busy with day jobs, can’t afford more time to code. (Same group has spun its wheels for nearly a year…) Part of the problem is leadership and accountability, but part of it is that the question of best practices (for each platform, if multiples are there, including a tool for weeding out the platforms based on capital available and technology on hand) even enters into the equation. What is a best practice, in layman’s terms so that we can cut to the chase and spend the time on coding and content?

We at Open Resource Group think we have the answer, but we’re forced to build a comprehensive set of tools for each campaign-in-a-box, for reasons I described after the Berkman presentation 6 weeks ago: The public will not use any tools that a campaign site does not provide.

Valdis Krebs has thought about this deeply in his PDF:

Using the small-world model, researchers investigated the effect of a single person’s decision to
vote.  A person’s influence spread throughout their local group.  People were 15 percent more likely
to vote if one of their political discussants made clear their intentions to vote.  Within the research
population a citizen would positively affect the turnout decision of up to four other people.  The
researchers called this a “turnout cascade”.  In addition, the increased turnout was found to favor the
candidate of the initiator.  Human clusters tend to contain similar preferences for candidates and
issues, thus an increase in participation was equivalent to an increase in between two and three votes
for the candidate.  Denser clusters tended to show higher rates of voter participation.

Jon Lebkowsky:

The approach we were advocating could be a factor in future elections, and an online, community-based/grassroots movement, could provide an effective alternative to the current two-party structure that wouldn’t necessarily replace either party, but would provide for greater participation at more levels. We shouldn’t be too idealistic about this, however. Concentrations of money will always be a significant factor, and millions of people with no money will still have less power than a few wealthy corporations and millionaires/billionaires.

I don’t agree, for reasons that will take two years to make clear. Aldon Hynes remarks also on the lack of work being done to bring the needed tools on line:

There is a lot of focus, some of it very important, on who is really adding to campaigns. Some of it can be about ego and not especially productive, but some of it is about measuring activity and helping people become more productive.

My big concern is that after the 2004 election much of the work promoting peer to peer networked social activism seems to have slowed to a crawl.

Hopefully, with the 2006 cycle we can see a resurgence of interest in peer to peer enabled politics.

Joe Trippi thanks Jock Gill for his contributions to the Dean campaign and reminds us:

Two points I would make. 

1. We were making it up as we went along and (initially at least) building it with no funds and little political experience.
2. There is an implied belief among many that there was tremendous agreement inside the Dean Campaign to take the Peer-to-Peer path over the Master-Slave model — this simply was not true. 

It was a fight every day keep the master/slave beast at bay. In hindsight the miracle was that we held it off as long as we did given how many inside and outside the campaign relished master/slave over peer-to-peer.

Zack Exley reminds us that there are far more ideas than working code embodying those ideas:

At Kerry, we would have jumped at any help offered in community building — or any area. But what was most often offered from outside the campaign were ideas – not implementation. Sure, ideas can be a big help. But we needed developers to implement, designers to design, and testers to test. And of course we know that not all ideas actually take off in practice (remember Deanlink?) — so you can’t blame a campaign for not sinking precious time and resources into ideas in the run up to a critical election.

And I’ll say once again, we didn’t just raise money. (Though we did raise a huge portion of the entire campaign budget online.) Most of our team’s effort for the last several months was spent on driving field organizing. We built tools to enable that. It WAS a great tragedy that it was focused almost 100% in swing states, which is why most people who comment on this stuff didn’t see it.

We could have done it all way cooler if we had more talented developers who could build stuff as fast as all of us *idea people* could think stuff up. But we didn’t. So we had stark choices to make: give Deanlink another shot, or raise more than $100m and mobilize 250K volunteers in the swing states.

If we only had one good developer for every Internet strategist/guru/author — then we’d be living in a new and wonderful world of online organizing indeed.

Robert David Steele writes:

I think we also need to go into stealth mode. Gore needs to form a coalition shadow government and use it to help elect people in 2006, and then use the 2006-2008 period to do peer to peer not just in the USA, but overseas as well. If Michael Cudahy can deliver a 20% bounce from moderate Republicans, I believe I can deliver a 20% bounce from other non-Democrats, and a further 20% bounce from foreign relatives of voting immigrants.

And Jon Lebkowsky wraps it up:

What are your requirements? I pointed this discussion out to members of the demtech email list and invited them to drop by, but members of that coalition developed platforms like CivicSpace (for community development) and Advokit (for GOTV coordination), and other Open Source tools have appeared (e.g. CiviCRM). You can usually get volunteers to set these up.

I hate to disagree with my editor and co-author twice in one post, but I must. Unfortunately, campaigns do not have the insights nor the patience to engage in the long and arcane conversations that might theoretically result in the volunteers setting up “CivicSpace (for community development) and Advokit (for GOTV coordination), and other Open Source tools”. They want their site working by Tuesday, not an involved conversation that might start next Tuesday, if the volunteers show up. 

And I cannot over-emphasize that the campaign site’s users will not put up with a User Interface any less obvious than an airport kiosk.

9:03:12 PM