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February 09, 2004
DDTI: Emergent Democracy Worldwide
Joi Ito and Ethan Zuckerman are doing a session on Emergent Democracy Worldwide.
Joi mentions that much of what we're talking about today is America and white and not generalizable to the rest of the world.
Ethan says he's the token African today to show how much we're fighting for diversity. How does this play once we get out of the highly wired, rich United States? While blogs have done a good job of giving alternative views of alternative stories, we haven't done a good job of covering news.
In response to a plea for Japanese to have more influence on US politics because it affects Japan so much, someone wrote: "when things are going well, we have time for you, but when we're in crisis, we don't care and you don't matter."
Joi: Analytically I realize that Africa matters, but how does that translate into my life?
Ethan: Its not just whether things get reported, its whether anyone is paying attention. Blogs are fair, in a mathematical sense, but for someone in Africa who doesn't speak English, doesn't have an Internet connection, or even a computer, blogs don't provide much.
Joi mentions Witness.org, an organization that gives video cameras to people to document people who are being oppressed. This gives a huge amount of raw material and a method for people to speak to the greater world with their own voice.
For some discussion, including links to sites, see this entry on Joi's blog and this entry by Ethan. Here is the link sheet
06:48 PM | Recommend This | Print This
DDTI: Advocacy as Application
Jon Lebkowsky leads the Advocacy as Application panel
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Jon Lebkowsky is moderating a panel on Advocacy as an Application. The other panelists are Bill Greene, from RightMarch.com, Adina Levin, from EFF-Austin, Jonah Seiger, from the Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet, and Cory Doctorow, from EFF.
Jonah leads out talking about how tools can facilitate advocacy. These are evolutions of things that started long ago. The essence of MeetUp is online organizing for offline action. The business world is about making something bigger than what you started with. Applications are useless without users. The tools are only half of the solution. Message matters. You have to have clarity. You have to motivate people to participate. MoveOn works because their message resonates with their constituency.
Cory says "architecture is politics." We want the Internet to be something that is inherently resistant to regulation. That is not true. We all live somewhere where we are subject to those regulations. If you want the Internet to survive, you have to be involved. Early on in the Internet, the FCC was considering taxing modems. Kevin Werbach, working at the FCC, put in a electronic comments box and in 24 hours 300,000 letters came in (against naturally). We can fix bad laws. Defeatism is not an option and not necessary. We can make a difference.
Bill Greene talks about outsourcing. RightMarch.com outsources most of its backend services. CapitolAdvantage, for example, syncs with Congressional contact forms and RightMarch.com just uses CapitolAdvantage to create "email your congressman" on their site.
06:13 PM | Recommend This | Print This
DDTI: eVoting Panel
The eVoting panel went well (at least I thought so). While I couldn't blog it, several other people did. Here is Ross Mayfield's entry.
I think the summary of the panel would be:
- The current systems and process leave a lot to be desired.
- But, they're not going away.
- So techies need to be involved to solve the problem.
Here's some ideas about how to get involved:
- Start with your county clerk and find out what election system your county uses and how it is certified. What issues do they face? Is there a way you can help them?
- Meet with someone in the state election's office. Ask them the same questions. What is the certification process is your State?
- Engage your legislators. Send them an email and ask to meet with them. Help them understand the issues surrounding eVoting so that they're educated.
05:26 PM | Recommend This | Print This
DDTI: Wes Boyd on MoveOn.org
Wes Boyd, of MoveOn is talking about "Bringing Ordinary People Back into Politics." Broadcast is about story telling and story telling is about conflict. Attack and defend leads to cynicism. Everyone backs away and watches on TV.
MoveOn started as online petition during the Clinton impeachment. In four days, 23,276 people signed the petition. They realized that these were people who were looking to be heard and they could be reached cheaply.
In 2001 MoveOn asked people what they cared about. The answers were Campaign Finance Reform, Energy, and the Environment. MoveOn has been effective in raising money around specific issues, including financing ads about the Iraq war. MoveOn's membership doubled at this time.
The Virtual March on Washington let people schedule calls to their congressperson so that there were be a continue roll of calls against the war in Iraq. The was an easy way for people who called to post the responses to their questions in real time.
Rated discussion groups allow people to participate and for the good posts to rise to the top. (Although this seems to reinforce the echo-chamber effect.)
05:03 PM | Recommend This | Print This
DDTI: Traditional Media and Digital Democracy
Dan Gillmor, San Jose Mercury News, Jeff Jarvis, Advance.net, and Jay Rosen, NYU Journalism Professor are doing a panel called "Gatekeepers No More? The Grassroots Challenges the Journalist Priesthood."
Jay asks the question: what makes the moment different? Public opinion grew up hundreds of years ago as a balance to the power of the crown. The idea applied to a small percentage of the people, but the organization was egalitarian. Overtime, the small group grew to include almost everyone, that is, we consider "the public" to be everyone. As it grew large, however, the ability participate declined. People have perennially hoped that new technology would change this, starting with the telegraph. The original promise of the public in not just readers but also speakers. The Internet has given voters a mouth.
Jeff says he's been in journalism his whole life, but he's never seen a time as exciting as this. Everyone now has access to a printing press. There have been some big changes: the reader has a voice. Reporters need to stop looking so closely at the stump and pay more attention to the green. Political reporting is not so much "reporting" as it is "repeating." They repeat the same story and message over and over. (I've seen this many times in my own experience.) Jeff's manifesto:
- Every meeting webcast
- Every politician has a weblog or equivalent
- Federal agencies have Web sites that are easy to use and citizen friendly.
- We should expect elected officials to have a dialog with is
- We should expect journalists should report and not just repeat.
Jay: the media doesn't go away, but what has changes is what I call the "terms of transaction." We don't, as a society, want to discredit the press. But the nature and foundation of their authority is changing. Journalists think we need to give people more information so they can participate. Its more likely that if they participate, they will seek more information. Journalists don't care whether people are engaged, only if they are informed. Tools like blogs let people engage and encourage them to be informed.
There ensues a general discussion of how some people don't read or write effectively, but audio and video can let them participate. This leads to a discussion of P2P and DMCA.
03:12 PM | Recommend This | Print This
DDTI: Effective Political Blogging
Effective Political Blogging panel
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Doc Searls, Halley Suitt, Mitch Radcliffe, Cameron Barrett, and Dave Weinberger are doing a panel on effective political blogging.
Cam is talking about his efforts to help the Clark campaign. Clark's blog has the ability to support group forming around specific events and issues.
Dave talks about how unexpected and emergent what has been happening in the blogosphere surrounding politics is. There a surprising attachment between supporters and bloggers.
Halley talks about how blogging and reading political blogs got her interested in politics. She quotes ten trends of political blogging from her blog:
- Political blogs are simply political. Regular-people-telling-the-truth-about-their-lives blogs are subversive and radical.
- The blog swarm giveth, the blog swarm taketh away. (What bloggers write about -- jump all over -- swarm all over -- put at the top of the charts -- these issues can define the discussion, not because they are necessarily more correct, more fascinating or more important -- but because they are so FAST AND FRESH.)
- FDR: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Bush: "We have nothing so profitable as fear and fear itself."
- Cheney is not, and never has been the Vice President.
- "It's the credit card economy, stupid."
- There are no more Democrats. There are no more Republicans.
- We should kiss Europe's ass for reminding us who we are as a nation and who we must be and who we can not be.
- Remember the video of the LA Riots -- dads smashing store fronts, moms carrying away jumbo pack diapers.
- The Diebold Riots will not be pretty.
- Blogs opened our hearts, our minds, our lives. Dean opened our hopes. Meetup opened our homes. Can you spell C-O-M-M-U-N-I-T-Y? There is no going back.
I'm not exactly sure what 3, 4, and 6 have to do with political blogging. They out of character with the rest of the list. I guess you've got to get your licks in somewhere.
Mitch says we're making a fundamental error by treating the campaign as a horse race. This reinforces the position of the mass media in the election. We strengthen them by talking about them so much. We give CBA, ABC, and CNN power by naming them. We'll move past the Dean campaign.
Dave says that political blogs are social, not informational. The goal is to connect with each other, not to influence. Deanblog comments discourage flaming. This style gives people a sense of connectedness without letting them fight. Halley mentions that these people call what they're doing "blogging" even though most bloggers would laugh at the notion of comment posting as "blogging."
Is there something unique you want in a political blog? Cam: No, blogs are blogs and very generic. Halley: As a consumer of political blogs, I'd like to have a hefty "about" statement to understand who they are. Dave: Wouldn't blogs being fielded by a campaign want to have more social networking stuff built in? Cam: yes, for example, we'd like to have a way for people to enter their zip code and get a map to their polling place.
What is effective political blogging as opposed to popular political blogging? Cam: Comments add a community aspect of political blogs.
Blogging is the first step of many steps. How does it lead to action? I've long advocated techies being more involved in the legislative process.
01:09 PM | Recommend This | Print This
DDTI: The Influentials
Jonas Seiger, Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet at GWU is presenting some interesting statistics on the nature of people accessing political web sites. The survey was done using pop-ups and telephone surveys. The people had to have visited a political web site and done two of a large list of other activities that would indicate political activity. About 7% of the US qualifies as an "online political citizen" (OPC).
In general they are male (62%), well-educated (59% college degrees), have good incomes (42% over $75,000), and 36% are between 18 and 30. Mic of old and new--44% are new. 49% are Democrats, while only 29$ are Republicans. This is due to the opportunities Democrats have had in this election cycle. 46% of OPC make campaign contributions, while only 10% of the general population does.
Keller and Berry say that 10% of Americans influence what the other 90% think, through their networks. They are activists and trendsetters. Using some qualifiers to find out who were influentials, the study found that 70% of OPC were influentials compared to 10% of the general population and 13% of the online community as a whole. This means that reaching OPCs has great leverage because the exert a disproportionate amount of influence on their friends and family.
59% of Iowans used the Internet to get information about the candidates. Dean did better among top users, but Kerry beat Dean in people who sometimes used the Internet to find out about candidates.
The lesson: message matters. Dean failed to close the deal. Just as Dean's success cascaded through the network he created, so did his failures. Polls show that Dean got people energized and they came out to vote, but voted for Kerry.
Scott Hefferman, CEO of MeetUp.com, shows some pictures from MeetUp's around the country, including the Heritage Foundation, which is the fastest growing MeetUp application lately. Hefferman was influenced by Putman's " Bowling Alone." His girlfriend drug him to a Lord of the Rings meeting that was poorly organized and he thought that the world needed a site to allow people to meet up. The big bet was that if you give people a tool to find each other, they'll self-organize and the answer, apparently, is yes.
MeetUp is alike Hallmark, they create holidays. MeetUp let's people create "Mini Cooper day" or "pug day." Politics is the same thing. Over 50% of people going to political meet-ups have never been to a political meeting before. People go to meet-ups to learn. They go because their co-workers, or neighbors take them. Being at a meet-up doesn't imply strong support. People go to meet-ups who don't know that it was organized on the Internet. The Internet is enabling non-connected people to meet as well.
1800s to 1950's was the era of joiners and organizers. 1950 to 2004 was the era of broadcast. No need for members, chapters, organizations, or meetings. 2004 shows the trend to grassroots meetings again. He quote De Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" on the liberty of associate and the power of meeting.
12:15 PM | Recommend This | Print This
DDTI: Trippi Keynote
Trippi delivers his keynote address to several standing ovations
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Its a mistake for anyone to buy into the spin that's coming out the broadcast media. They didn't understand what was happening before, why should they understand now? Broadcast democracy has failed us. DMCA and Patriot Act aren't being discussed by the mainstream media--they're being discussed on the net. The current system is rotten and broken.
If took 5-6 years to understand that the Kennedy-Nixon debate was a defining point in history. No one understood that it would come down to buying one-way media messages using $2 million contributions.
The Dean campaign was about overthrowing that system. That you couldn't get there in 13 months isn't surprising. There is only one tool that will allow the American people to take their government back and that's the Internet. Its not going to happen on CNN or in the LA Times.
The Howard Dean campaign is an Internet miracle Dean started with 432 known supporters nation-wide and and $150,000. He raised $45 million, a record and raised his stature to hundreds of thousands of supporters. The American people now have the beginning of tools and a platform to act. No one is going to do it for them.
The fact that the campaign had a clue that MeetUp.com could be used came from a relatively obscure blog. Joe read the blog and the campaign decided to embrace it. Now 200,000 people are signed up for Howard Dean at MeetUp.com. This was the Internet to get people to do something offline. Its not just the online tools, its the tools online that help people fulfill that energy offline in their communities and their neighborhoods. The Dean campaign didn't happen on TV, it happened over the watercooler and the Internet.
MoveOn was instrumental in teaching the Dean campaign about online tools and techniques. The political press has no clue what the Internet is or how it works. They have no way to write about it, they put it in their old context. The Internet community doesn't understand the political context.
The Dean campaign worked because all the people around the country gave him the standing to be an opposition candidate. Dean led the rest of the Democrats in this and could do so because the grassroots gave Howard Dean the power and voice to make that argument.
Broadcast politics is on the wane. Broadcast media has jumped the shark on the war and on the Dean campaign. Our democracy is seriously threatened now in ways the American people hasn't grasped yet. The Republicans raise more money under $100, $1000, $10000, $100000, $1000000. The Democratic party only leads in contributions over $1000000. The Dean campaign and Internet turned that on its head. Dean raised more money on $75/head contributions than any other candidate. Politics is about the money.
We're in the beta stage of Revolution 2.0. Its about the American people having the tools to say enough. The people in this room can give them the tools. This is not over. We need to reach deep enough to make the change. The day isn't that far off when 2 million people wake up, donate $100 each, and change America. Howard Dean is 670,000 people.
People are now comfortable enough and the technology is mature enough where Emergent Democracy can take place. The Internet took a party with no message and gave it a message. It took a party that raised only big money and turned it into a party that can raise money from small donations.
The current primary system was set up to ensure an insurgent candidate like Jimmy Carter never happened again. The cycle has been moved up to happen very fast and favors established candidates. The only way to win was to win Iowa and New Hampshire. Without the party institutions being for you, it was impossible to do this. The Dean campaign showed that there are new and different ways to get there.
The Dean campaign ran into broadcast media. When Al Gore endorsed Dean, alarms bells went off in every newsroom and every other campaign in the country. The alarm said "kill him now." "If we don't kill this son of a b, he'll be the nominee." The press corps determined to hammer him because they think that's they're responsibility. Gephardt wrecked the Dean campaign and the committed suicide. The Internet couldn't stop that.
Why does the establishment want it to fail? What's so scary about the American people getting evolved in their democracy. Its too easy to say that Dean is a dot.com crash. Dean gave them the ammo and the broadcast media used it to hammer him.
The system has taught Americans that their $25 contribution doesn't count. That their four hours as a volunteer is a waste of time. The system is so rotted, so corroded, that people believe they can't make a difference. The Internet has taught people that they can turn a race upside down. The Internet shows that people working together for the common good are powerful.
Ed Cone questions Joe Trippi during the O'Reilly Digital Democracy Teach-In
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A woman at Penn State sold her bike for $79 and sent the check to Howard Dean. She sent an email saying "I sold my bike for democracy." Now all kinds of people do that. That's the power of connections on the Internet.
We didn't have the luxery to say "I think John Edwards is a great candidate." But given what we were up against and what we were trying to do, there has to be some way to build unity and not be in camps. No knight on a white horse, shining armor is going to ride into Washing ton and change it. It has to be us and the Internet is the platform that gives us the power to take the country back. (Standing ovation.)
Questions (led by Ed Cone):
- What work? What got people to the polls? Tools that let people take action offline. Meetup.com. Tools that let people put in their zipcode and find out what was happening in their area. Deanlink allowed people to get their friends involved in the campaign. There was a very broad spectrum of people who were using the tools (14 year old kid from Alaska, 72 year old retiree). Eighty-nine year old man bought a PC and became a MeetUp host and team lead in his area. How do we build tools that let people take this straight into their community. The other problem is that its so transparent. Every other campaign can get the info. Kerry campaign came the Dean site, got the names of undecided voters and sent their own letters. There are authentication issues. There are significant suceptibilities to dirty tricks.
- You make an analogy to eCommerce where bricks and mortar are often incorporated into the business. How well were you able to mesh Dean's organization with unions and other offline groups? Delegate selection is Byzantine. Dean's campaign thought MeetUp leaders ought to be delegates while the local Democratic chairs fought that. The establishment was reistent because the Dean campaign didn't do anything the way it had been done before. There's a large group, including broadcast media, who do not want to give up power. The media never turns the camera back on themselves.
- There have been stories about your pay. The Internet should make things cost-effective. Talk to us about Joe Trippi getting rich on the campaign. The Kerry campaign will put on a dinner where you spend $350,000 on a ballroom, steak, entertainment, and fill the place with $2000/plate folks. The dinner is a huge success because you make $650,000 on it. Dean bought a $100,000 ad in Austin to take Bush on in his home state and used it to raise $1,000,000. The implication isn't just that I'm a thief, but that I'm a really bad thief. I made $165,000 on the Dean campaign. That's a lot of money, but its not millions. This is just broadcast media disintermediating me from the people who gave $75 to the campaign. I didn't have authority for budget and spending. We raised $45 million. My firm would have been Dean's media advisor whether I was the campaign manager or not. I would have made $165,000 either way. My partner has done the media buys for Dean for 12 years. This is about knocking down what happened. If people come to believe that this was a get rich scheme, then it will stop the movement, not just me or Dean.
- How well was the campaign able to incorporate ideas from the grassroots? How important is that? The biggest problem was that there were so many ideas and keeping up on top of them. It's hard to be sure you're seeing it. It was an idea from the blog about the Governor eating a turkey sandwich while the VP was eating a $2000/plate dinner. MeetUp came from the blog. The idea of Dean bloggin on the Lessig blog came from Lessig and was, as Dave Weinberger said, one of the most authentic moments. The campaign stopped growing in the fall when they stopped putting energy into the growth and changed the focus to organizing on a state by state basis.
- Is there a disconnect between what Dean was proported to be and what he was and how did that affect the campaign? Most people don't get a chance to meet the guy and talk one-on-one and so people put their own belief system on him. For example, many people voting for Kerry believe that he voted against the war.
- What are the online missteps? After November, we couldn't figure out how to communicate with people. When Dean was ahead and looked invincible, many people didn't understand the urgency of what was happening and how vulnerable the campaign was to the outside forces. The blog comments to pleas were incredulous. The campaign could get messages to people, but they were public messages and they couldn't say what they needed to say. Transparency hurt honest communication with the support base. How do you maintain the openness and directness of the campaign and still not give away your strategy?
- What will it take from people in this room to get a different kind of journalism that has some power and authority? I think its happening already. The Trent Lott affair was dropped by mainstream media and the blogospehere kept it going. The mainstream media didn't write about the Dean campaign or anything that was happening until Dean raised money. "Its the money stupid." IN the end, its the special interest money vs. us. The only way to get attention is to raise money.
10:27 AM | Recommend This | Print This
O'Reilly Digital Democracy Teach-In
The Digital Democracy Teach-In is about to start and Joe Trippi will be the keynote speaker. If you're interested in following along, I'll be blogging the event, but you can also listen in live courtesy of IT Conversations who wil be streaming the audio of the event live.