How are we going to implement in governance the Net-based citizen involvement that the campaign has initiated? Here’s one idea.

Let’s say you care about the e-voting scandal that’s just waiting to happen. So, you go to your Senator’s site. There you find a “Citizen-to-Citizen” (C2C) page that lists the current issues constituents are discussing. A search for “e-voting” turns up nothing, so you are now prompted to create a C2C group on the topic. You write up your description of the problem and include some supporting links. Automatically, a new space is created with its own page and with the sort of collaborative capabilities were coming to expect: shared library, email archive, threaded discussion, maybe a MeetUp link, etc. Anyone who cares about the issue can find your space and join the conversation. (People can also register as caring about the issue without having to participate in the issue space.)

The site automatically reports metrics so that the most popular issues are surfaced. The Senator sees that there’s been a lot of activity in the e-voting issue space, votes to ban e-voting machines that don’t have some type of acceptable audit capability, and our democracy is saved. It’s just that simple!

Forget the implementation details. What I like about this ideas is its focus on connecting citizens who share interests, rather than on tabulating polls or instant ballots. It’s a way, potentially, of handling the scaling issues that turn citizens into data points. Democracy is a conversation, after all.

(This idea was sparked by conversations with Jock Gill and Britt Blaser, neither of whom should be assumed to agree with it.)

6 Comments »

You can listen to Doug Kaye’s interview of me at the ITConversations site. I pontificate about the Dean campaign and e-democracy.

1 Comment »

Here. Heavy on what’s actually need to make this country more secure — read it and tell me that you don’t think it’s a more sensible program than what we’ve got now.

Also, $30B over 4 years to fight AIDS globally.

1 Comment »

Good. He’s a very very bad man who should rot in jail for the rest of his life.

If, as we all hope, this ends the insurgency — the image of Saddam cowering like a rat in a cellar has got to be discouraging to his supporters, but I suppose it depends on how much the insurgency is pro-Saddam as opposed to anti-US-presence — it neutralizes Iraq as a political issue in the US. And then as the daily reports are dominated by news from Saddam’s trial about just how bad a person he was, being opposed to the war is going to look like a moral error.

But just for the record: Our president systematically lied to us in order to get us to go to war; we were told we were in imminent danger when we were not. We went in without a plan for getting out or realistic expectations about what we were letting ourselves in for. We have sold the official looting rights to the administration’s closest friends. It all was a cynical distraction from the failure of our war on terrorism. Our unilateralism sets a dangerous precedent and makes us less safe. And we will not know even if the ends justifed the means for years when the ultimate fate of Iraq and the region is clearer.

Nevertheless: We got him! Woohoo!

Here’s Gov. Dean’s comment on the capture.

Dave raises some good questions.

11 Comments »

Here’s Britt’s pithy summary of Dick Morris’ interview with Chris Lydon:

He’s saying that the Dean campaign is Netscape and the Republicans are Microsoft. Done deal. Next question.

The rest of Britt’s analysis of Morris is well worth reading, too.

Be the first to comment »

Salon is running transcripts of speeches by John Kerry and Howard Dean. And Joe Conason has what I think is the most plausible explanation of why Gore is endorsing Dean.

This just in: Dan Gillmor’s analysis seems totally on the mark to me.

And this in just after that one that was just in: Howard Kurz has a snarky roundup of what the media is making of Dean and the Gore enorsement.

Be the first to comment »

Gore’s endorsement of Dean tomorrow should be the Tipper, um, Tipping Point. I believe Dean now will win Iowa and will be unstoppable, short of a major gaffe or scandal, of course.

Please keep in mind that I have never once been right about anything in politics.

2 Comments »

Robert Cringely writes:

Diebold makes a lot of ATM machines. They make machines that sell tickets for trains and subways. They make store checkout scanners, including self-service scanners. They make machines that allow access to buildings for people with magnetic cards. They make machines that use magnetic cards for payment in closed systems like university dining rooms. All of these are machines that involve data input that results in a transaction, just like a voting machine. But unlike a voting machine, every one of these other kinds of Diebold machines — EVERY ONE — creates a paper trail and can be audited.

Why was the feature left out of voting machines? Cringely promises us the answer next week.

(Thanks to Tim O’Reilly for the link.)

3 Comments »

I love Samantha Shapiro’s NY Times magazine article on the Dean phenomenon. It gets a lot of the enthusiasm — and the lovely absurdity enthusiasm engenders — right. For example:

There are now 900 unofficial Dean groups. Some of the activities undertaken on behalf of Dean qualify as recognizable politics: people hand out fliers at farmer’s markets or attend local Democratic Party meetings. Others take steps of their own invention: they cover their pajamas with stickers that say ”Howard Dean Has a Posse” and wear them to an art opening, or they organize a squadron to do ”Yoga for Dean.” They compose original songs in honor of Dean. (About two dozen people have done that; another man wrote a set of 23 limericks.) They marry each other wearing Dean paraphernalia. Overweight supporters create Web pages documenting, in daily dispatches, their efforts to lose 100 pounds in time for Dean’s election. … I saw a middle-aged man at a garden party in New Hampshire preface a question to Dean by saying he was associated with Howards for Howard. Dean nodded, as if the man had said he was with the AARP.

And this is crucial:

…they say the point is to give people something to believe in, and to connect those people to one another. The point is to get them out of their houses and bring them together at barbecues, rallies and voting booths. …
Dean supporters do not drive 200 miles through 10 inches of snow — as John Crabtree, 39, and Craig Fleming, 41, did to attend the November Dean meet-up in Fargo, N.D. — to see a political candidate or a representative of his staff. They drive that far to see each other.

And this is right, too:

At the headquarters of most political campaigns, there’s a familiar organizational structure: a group of junior employees carrying out a plan devised by a bunch of senior advisers. The Dean headquarters feels different: a thin veneer of Official Adults barely hovers above a 24-hour hive of intense, mostly youthful devotion. When the adults leave, usually around 10 p.m., the aisles between cubicles are still cluttered with scooters and dogs; when they return in the morning, balancing just-microwaved cinnamon buns and coffee, they climb over pale legs poking out from beneath their desks and shoo sleeping volunteers off their office couches.

It seems to me that the Dean blog is getting better about including negative news. For example, the blog reports that Dean has a slight lead in South Carolina but also reports that the poll says Bush would beat all the leading Democrats in head-to-head matches 8-18%. I like the fact the blog doesn’t bother pointing out that Dean, along with Clark, is one of the 8%’ers.

And the blog prominently links to The Club for Growth site where you can see the TV ad they’re running that claims that Dean wants to raise taxes by about $2,000 on every man, woman, child and dog in America. In typical fashion, the Dean campaign immediately used the attack ad to prompt supporters to raise money for an ad to counter it … and within a couple of days, raised $85,000 more than the $200,000 needed.

I don’t expect a candidate’s blog to be the best aggregator of news about the candidate. But frankness is good.

6 Comments »

Paul Krugman lays out the e-voting machine issues in his column. Here’s his opening paragraph:

Inviting Bush supporters to a fund-raiser, the host wrote, “I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.” No surprise there. But Walden O’Dell – who says that he wasn’t talking about his business operations – happens to be the chief executive of Diebold Inc., whose touch-screen voting machines are in increasingly widespread use across the United States.

1 Comment »