There are all kinds of reasons the ruling is bad, but the rules of politics are already ridiculous. Now it’s worse, but you’ve still got to play by exploit the rules, because your opponent certainly will.
TPM points to a coming report from CampaignGrid (an online advertising platform for Republican campaigns) on how outside groups can use unlimited amounts of online advertising to drive signups and donations for a candidate.
]]>Using a combination of display and search advertising, FSC Bank could advertise online and link to Congressman Goodfellow’s campaign website to drive traffic and volunteers and donations to the website – however FSC Bank could not report back the results of these efforts to the Goodfellow Campaign.
This is a big problem for issues like climate change, rampant consumerism, pollution, trash, etc. “Pollute less” or “buy less” simply isn’t cutting it.
These issues need to be framed into one thing that eventually everyone can agree is bad. Planet abuse.
This has been done before. Child abuse. It wasn’t always a bad thing, but today many things, like striking a child in anger are widely regarded as wrong. Very few think kids should be forced to work. However, there is controversy on spanking children, and the age line of what constitutes molesting a child keeps moving. But if you ask someone “is child abuse wrong?” 100% will say yes.
If we started to talk about “planet abuse” we could eventually get a lot of people to agree that it is wrong, and then we can fight to define exactly what planet abuse is. Some things will be clear, and others will be murky and change over time. “You can’t do that, it’s planet abuse!”
I just googled this phrase, and apparently it’s never been used before. Let’s change that.
This came out of a discussion with Aaron Swartz.
]]>Only it was a little more complicated than that. Twitter limits each list to a maximum of 500 people, and each account to only 20 lists. There are over 4,000 Tweet Progress members so there was no way to create one big list. So I had to figure out some way to split up the list, but not too much or I’d run into the 20 list limit, and I didn’t want to just do the top 500 with the most followers, since that doesn’t really fit in with the spirit of the project. And I definitely didn’t want to make any kind of editorial decision as to who should be included or not. There had to be a computer algorithm sort of way to do this.
Here’s what I came up with. There are four lists. Mentors, Newcomers, Influential, and Highly Influential.
Mentors and Newcomers is similar to what you see on the Tweet Progress site, limited to the most recent 100 newcomers, and the 100 most influential mentors. Influential and Highly influential is based on Topsy, a great search engine for links shared on Twitter. Similar to how Google uses a 1-10 PageRank to rank web pages, Topsy uses a 1-10 metric to rank users, based on how frequently they are retweeted, who retweets them, etc. (more details here) They display this on the site with an “influential” and “highly influential” tag. I’ve incorporated that information into the Tweet Progress database and that’s how those lists are determined.
I’ve just started playing with the results, and I can say that the influential and highly influential lists are exceptionally useful, you should definitely follow them to stay on top of what matters to progressives.
If you want to be included, just join Tweet Progress. The lists are updated automatically every night.
Also, sort of related, you can use GovLuv to create a Twitter list of who represents you in government — federal, state, local.
]]>It’s very similar to the petitions, it tracks the people who recruited the most retweeters, it lets you put a lot more information on the act.ly page (including videos and links to donation pages) than just the 140 chars. There is a digg-like embeddable widget you can put on your own site. You get the fun Google Map, and you can have the checkbox to follow you when someone tweets, along with auto-following anyone who does tweet.
Check it out: http://act.ly/retweets and tweet me feedback @jgilliam.
Also, Nancy Scola interviewed me about the first 3 months of act.ly, what’s working and what isn’t, for TechPresident this week. There’s some good info in there on effective ways to use act.ly petitions.
]]>This is a trap that nearly everyone who is supposed to be “unbiased” falls into. They think it’s better to hide personal views than be open and transparent about it. I disagree.
I’m progressive, if you look at my tweets or google me, you’ll figure this out in about 5 seconds. Yet, I make tools that anyone can use — act.ly, GovLuv, and White House 2 are completely non-partisan. Part of it is necessity, how can I possibly draw a line on whether something aligns with a certain political view point? And part of it is my desire to change the game. Technology can be used for partisan ends (Tweet Progress is a good example) but it’s most effective at changing the rules of the game, and that’s what gets me excited.
So I’m in a somewhat similar position to the Washington Post. I don’t want conservatives to feel they are locked out of what I’m building, so the natural inclination would be to hide my personal views. But I don’t because I think people will trust me more when I’m honest about who I am. Very few people do this, particularly reporters, so people are naturally suspicious. This is part of why bloggers are gaining audience over newspapers and cable news is becoming more personality driven.
The funny thing is, I haven’t gotten any pressure from conservatives to stack the deck, and they love using both act.ly and White House 2.
But some progressives (not most, just a few) have actually tried to bully me into favoring them. Either changing something on the site, or even preventing conservatives from using the tool entirely. Not gonna happen.
]]>“it’s rude *not* to tweet during #wlip RT @baratunde If I live tweet during We Live In Public, will the universe collapse? #wlip”
Dan Zarrella goes more into the specifics of what’s wrong with the proposed changes.
With act.ly and Tweet Progress, I’ve spent a good deal of time with the Twitter API, and I think there is a very elegant solution to this problem that also fixes replies.
In the same way that Twitter ditched “replies” for “mentions”, they should ditch the concept of a reply to a tweet, and instead let people “attach” or “refer” to a specific tweet, which would then be included along with the new tweet.
This fixes a number of different problems.
1. It handles all the situations that RT is currently being used
2. It gives people a full 140 characters to respond or add their own commentary to another tweet.
3. Conversation threading, which is currently a total mess, is now much more explicit and will probably even work.
This is a good user experience because some third party clients are trying to do it, but it doesn’t work very well because it’s basically guess work. Twitter can make this explicit and solve several problems at once, rather than create a new problem by mangling retweets.
]]>They produced a forum that was less spontaneous and less-townhall-like than if all the questions had come from citizens live at the event using no technology at all. In effect, Obama’s health care forum was like last year’s CNN/YouTube debates–only instead of CNN producers hand-picking the video questions, here the White House eliminated the middleman!
Instead of the online town hall, I think the Obama administration should re-conceptualize this as an open and transparent FAQ. In other words:
Wow.
]]>that was just one of the marijuana questions that ranked highly on all three of obama’s online forums. much of the dialogue since then has been about how to prevent this “gaming” of the system.
well, gaming the system is nothing new. it’s been happening for decades. they’re called lobbyists. pundits. 501c4s. political consultants. campaign ads.
what’s happening right now is regular people are finally getting a chance to game the system too. and when everyone does it, you know what that’s called?
DEMOCRACY.
but surely marijuana isn’t one of the most important issues for average americans, right?
there’s a myth about the marijuana legalization movement online. it’s not driven by a large top down organization. it’s real people, tired of being ignored, finding each other anywhere the internet lets them. digg. reddit. twitter.
the marijuana question was never asked by the white house press corps, precisely because they would have been laughed at, just like the President did. but you know what happened after this town hall?
gibbs was peppered with questions about marijuana from the white house press corps. the news cycle that day was all about how marijuana is a very serious issue, not something to laugh at. the california budget office estimated that a marijuana tax would raise $1.2 billion for california… per year. and the story kept building, cnn ran a segment about how ending the entire drug war would save $77 billion dollars… per year.
The reason Obama doesn’t support legalization is not because he thinks it’s a bad idea, because he does support decriminalization. He just doesn’t think outright legalization is politically viable…. yet.
I was pretty mad that day, this is what I wrote for the front page of the huffington post. But I’m starting to think Obama knew exactly what he was doing. He knew it would draw attention, that we’d be outraged, and that’s exactly what he wanted.
After that town hall, polls showed support for legalization shot up to 40% and the new drug czar said he’d stop referring to the “war on drugs” because it’s just not helping.
This is the core value open online systems can bring. They can identify good ideas that are being ignored, they can build public support, and make it possible for politicians to support them.
When the people lead, the leaders will follow.
i’ve been experimenting at white house 2, imagining how the white house could work if it was run completely democratically by thousands or millions of people over the internet.
i started this right before the election, as an outside effort, not sanctioned by the white house. i knew they had all kinds of restrictions on what they could do, both legally and culturally, and it’s just really hard to innovative in a bureaucracy. if i could show it working, maybe it would help make it happen.
i haven’t figured it all out yet, there are many challenges, here are 7 of them, and what i’ve done or plan to do to fix them.
1. virtual ballot stuffing.
The main power of the white house is to set the agenda, here are the priorities.
On White House 2, everyone sets their own list of priorities, and they all get added up and ranked like the nielsen tv ratings.
This forces people to really think because every time you put something on your list, it means something else is pushed down. digg, for example, has unlimited voting, and as a result, it’s dominated by people who can spend all day voting tens of thousands of stories.
But how do you handle someone who shows up on election day, never having registered to vote, skips right past the check in desk, hops into the voting booth, votes for some obscure candidate and no one else, then never comes back?
At WH2, there’s a “sincerity” algorithm that weights a user’s priorities based on several factors like whether they’ve verified their account, left a fake email address, or only put one thing in their list of priorities and never came back.
This doesn’t stop a concerted effort to stuff the ballot by a large outside organization, but it does slow it down.
that’s great, but there’s actually a very straightforward way the government can deal with virtual ballot stuffing. just use the voter rolls. senator online in australia does this.
in the u.s., voting is run by counties, so it’s not in some big federal repository. a well-designed central database could still distribute authentication and management of the database down to the county level. there are also several commercial databases that sell access to the data for candidates.
2. how do you encourage good contributions?
with economics. at wh2 we have a currency called political capital. it’s shamelessly stolen from massively multiplayer online games like world of warcraft, and modeled after how political capital works in real life. famously, bush earned political capital by winning the 2004 election, and spent it trying to privatize social security.
at wh2, you earn it by writing talking points people find helpful, bringing in new members, when people follow you, things like that.
you can spend it buying ads for the homepage to promote your priorities, and anything that consumes someone else’s attention.
now there’s a positive feedback loop. i have a priority for the government, i write talking points explaining why it’s important, i earn political capital if people find those helpful, and then i spend it promoting my idea on the homepage.
now imagine if candidates for office filled out their list of priorities, then people get matched up with candidates with similar priorities. why would a candidate do this? because then people can donate their political capital to the candidate, who can then spend it promoting their candidacy on the site.
like priorities, everyone understands currency, so it’s a very simple tool that can be used countless ways to make the right incentives.
3. how do you find the good contributions?
Most sites, like Amazon, use voting. That’s what I’ve use for talking points. The problem is that whatever has been around the longest ends up getting the most votes, new things don’t have as much a chance.
Here we can look to sports. Tennis has to rank thousands of people, and give newcomers some chance to rise to the top. So they have a ladder. If you beat someone higher than you on the ladder, you move up, and vice versa.
So make finding the best content a game, put two pieces side by side in a duel, which one is better? Re-sort the list, and award political capital to the people who made the best contributions.
4. how do you build consensus with thousands of people involved?
we have a big database of all these priorities, but what if someone’s got a better way to solve a problem? They can’t just change the name of the priority when other people have it in their list.
Here, we can look to the business world. You can spend some of your political capital proposing your new priority acquire another one. You can give a reason why, and then all the people affected are notified and have 48 hours to vote.
If they vote yes, they will immediately transfer over to the new priority, if they vote no, they will stay with the current one. If more than 70% voted in favor, then anyone who didn’t vote, automatically transfers over, the acquisition is considered a success, and the person who proposed it gets double their pc back.
5. how do you balance competing interests?
Here, I looked to our founding fathers. They created three branches of government as a way to provide checks and balances, to ensure none of them had too much power. But instead of Executive, Judiciary, and Legislative, we can use branches to separate different constituencies with different goals.
This is easiest to understand in the context of a corporation. There’s shareholders, who want the stock price to go up, employees who want salaries to go up, and customers who want prices to go down. You might have a hundred thousand customers, but only a couple hundred employees. It’s not fair for the customers to completely dominate the agenda. Now we can track whether an idea is more important to shareholders or employees.
On any issue, you can use this to identify different stakeholders, get better info, and make better decisions.
6. what about all those crazy ideas?
Obama is actually doing much of what he said he would, so now I have a new problem — most of the things left at the top of the list are things he’s never going to do!
Here, I’m looking to the stock market. It’s possible to predict a date by letting people bet their political capital on when it will happen. Inkling Markets has software that does this. Imagine a “wisdom of the crowds” calendar for the White House agenda.
See the pattern here? It’s all about money. We’ve failed miserably at getting money out of politics, so what if we flooded politics with money. but it’s a new kind of money, one that’s earned by people being better citizens, by helping their community. All of a sudden, we’ve got another positive feedback loop.
We’ve looked at many different disciplines: economics, psychology, sports, the stock market. We’re not really building websites anymore, we’re actually building nations. Not one nation, or even a few hundred, but millions.
7. how do we get more people involved?
make it simple, fun, and a little competitive. at white house 2, at first all you have to do is make your list of priorities. but if you want to do more, you can write talking points, start discussions, propose acquisitions with better ideas. earn political capital, buy ads.
But it’s even easier than that for government. All government has to do is show people their efforts have an impact. it won’t take much, people have pretty low expectations, a huge percentage of america doesn’t think government can solve anything. we need a little shock and awe.
a government sanctioned petition site put together by mysociety got 10% of the UK population involved. a similar, obama approved site in the u.s. could get 20 million people in a year.
and if this doesn’t happen?
this is the polihale state park in Hawaii.
to get to this beautiful beach, you have to drive 17 miles on a dirt road..
except you can’t, because a storm last december damaged an old, but critical bridge.
The state estimated it would cost $4 million to repair the damage, but no state govt has money right now, and even if they did, the repairs would take two years to work their way through the bureaucracy.
Which is time that Napali Kayaking simply didn’t have. If this road wasn’t open by May, he would lose his business.
So a surfer, Bruce Pleas, organized volunteers and local business owners.
They pooled their money, resources, time… and they fixed the bridge.
IN 8 DAYS.
The technology community is building simple fun tools to make this happen online faster and on a much broader scale than you can even imagine. We’re upending industry after industry, and we’re going to do it to government too.
when the people lead
the leaders will follow
or become obsolete.
Meet act.ly.
It’s very simple. Here’s how it works. You sign a petition by tweeting it, and other people can sign the petition just be re-tweeting it. There’s no need to go to the act.ly site, except to start a petition. If you are re-tweeted, you get credit for the referral, and will show up in the “Smokin’ Recruiters” link on act.ly.
We put one petition up last night just to work out the bugs: http://act.ly/1
But here’s the coolest part about doing petitions with act.ly. You target your petition to another Twitter user, so each time someone signs, the tweet shows up in their mentions. It’s insanely viral. Then, all the targeted person needs to do is click on the act.ly link and log in with their Twitter account to respond! Act.ly then sends a DM to the person who started the petition to verify if it’s completed.
So you can go from outrage to petition idea to people signing in about 2 minutes. And we track right on the petition page how long it’s been with no response.
We’ll be adding analytics, similar to what people have come to expect from email marketing. There are some extremely cool things possible with Twitter analytics because nearly the entire social graph is public. Things we’ve been trying to track with email for years that just weren’t possible, are now possible with Twitter.
Recent events have made it clear there is huge potential to tweet change. Act.ly can help.
UPDATE: There’s more at TechPresident.
]]>I’ll be presenting at the PdF conference in NYC on June 30th. “Imagining White House 2.0: Making Open Collaboration Platforms Work.” I’ll be at PdF both Monday and Tuesday, and I’ll also be at ParticipationCamp the Saturday and Sunday prior.
]]>The core problem is that there are two very different types of people involved in U.S. politics, people who want government to work, and people who don’t. Please don’t take this as a knock on any given political party, because that misses the point. There are plenty of Republicans and Democrats who want to make government a success. I’m talking about the people who feel, quite rationally, that government is bad and want it to fail.
This same problem exists in the context of a business. While shareholders, executives, employees, and customers may have different goals for the business, they all want the company to be successful. But there’s one group that doesn’t: competitors. They want the business to fail. And that’s the crux of the issue in politics too. Many view government as competition to private industry and their own freedoms, so a failed government is a good thing.
So how do you deal with competitors, people who want you to fail, in an open, transparent, and collaborative system like what I’m trying to build with White House 2 and NationBuilder?
And I’m not talking about trolls, people who are trying to muck up the process itself. Plenty of thought has gone into that. This issue is specifically with people who are sincerely participating in an open process with the goal NOT of making the process fail, but the thing itself fail.
Please comment below or on Hacker News.
]]>The purpose of the three branches of U.S. government (Executive, Legislative, and Judicial) is to provide checks and balances to ensure that none of them have too much power. We’re ripping this off and sticking it in NationBuilder, so you can organize different constituencies with different goals into their own branches.
For example, a corporation might have Management, Employees, Shareholders, Customers, and Partners branches. A government might have Politicians, Citizens, Employees, and Diplomats.
In a company, shareholders care primarily about the stock price going up, while customers want more value (cheaper prices), and employees want higher salaries. By separating them, it provides a way to balance these different interests, and build your nation on a solid foundation.
I’m thinking that each priority page will have a separate ranking for each branch, so you can see that a priority is #5 amongst customers, #55 amongst employees, and #155 amongst shareholders.
There will still be an overall ranking in addition to each branch’s ranking, but what if there was an optional feature to weight each branch equally (or even with different percentages). So if you have 4 branches, all the members of each branch get 25% of the vote, regardless of how many people are in the branch. This could work well if you were trying to balance the interests of a company that has 100 employees and 100,000 customers. It wouldn’t be fair to let the customers completely dominate the agenda.
I’m working on this actively right now, so please weigh in with your thoughts and ideas, either in the comments here, or on the priority at NationBuilder.
]]>The article is a must-read, but I wanted to comment on one piece of it, as it is directly relevant to the problem NationBuilder is trying to solve. Who runs these massively collaborative endeavors?
Indeed, a close examination of the governing kernel of, say, Wikipedia, Linux, or OpenOffice shows that these efforts are further from the collectivist ideal than appears from the outside. While millions of writers contribute to Wikipedia, a smaller number of editors (around 1,500) are responsible for the majority of the editing. Ditto for collectives that write code. A vast army of contributions is managed by a much smaller group of coordinators. As Mitch Kapor, founding chair of the Mozilla open source code factory, observed, “Inside every working anarchy, there’s an old-boy network.”
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Some types of collectives benefit from hierarchy while others are hurt by it. Platforms like the Internet and Facebook, or democracy—which are intended to serve as a substrate for producing goods and delivering services—benefit from being as nonhierarchical as possible, minimizing barriers to entry and distributing rights and responsibilities equally. When powerful actors appear, the entire fabric suffers. On the other hand, organizations built to create products often need strong leaders and hierarchies arranged around time scales: One level focuses on hourly needs, another on the next five years.
In the past, constructing an organization that exploited hierarchy yet maximized collectivism was nearly impossible. Now digital networking provides the necessary infrastructure. The Net empowers product-focused organizations to function collectively while keeping the hierarchy from fully taking over. The organization behind MySQL, an open source database, is not romantically nonhierarchical, but it is far more collectivist than Oracle. Likewise, Wikipedia is not a bastion of equality, but it is vastly more collectivist than the Encyclopædia Britannica. The elite core we find at the heart of online collectives is actually a sign that stateless socialism can work on a grand scale.
There simply aren’t any tools designed for these types of groups to run themselves democratically, so they are just making do with what they’ve got. That’s where NationBuilder comes in.
]]>NationBuilder is a radical and fun new way to run your country, state, city, neighborhood, corporation or non-profit completely democratically with thousands of people over the internet. This started life as White House 2, and I will be launching a web service version of this in mid-June that will make forming your own government as technically easy as setting up a Blogger blog or a Ning social network.
Unless you are quite technically adept, I don’t suggest you try to get this running yourself, the web service version is what you’ll want to use. Soon I will be setting up I’ve set up NationBuilder the software to run NationBuilder the company so people all over the world can get involved.
Shortly before the election, I started White House 2 to democratically set the agenda for the incoming Obama administration, and track it like the Nielsen’s TV ratings. There was so much to be done, I wanted people to think hard about what the priorities should be — there was just no way he could do everything at once!
I put the first site up in two weeks, and people from all over the world started contacting me about bringing it to their country. I’ve been working non-stop since then, and am about 5-6 weeks away from beta on NationBuilder, a web service that will let anyone set up their own site just like White House 2.
You can look at White House 2 and easily see how this could be used for governments of all kinds, but I believe it can also be used to bring democracy to business. Successful businesses of the future need to involve all the stakeholders, whether they are employees, management, shareholders, or customers. They need to establish the right incentives, and have tools that work better when hundreds of thousands of people are involved, not worse. Oh, and it has to be fun, or no one will care.
At Brave New Films, we pretty much turned the documentary world upside down doing a first generation version of this. We built our own audience, and then involved them as much as we could in making and distributing the films. They hosted tens of thousands of screenings, shot footage, took photos of abandoned Wal-Marts, put up half the funding for our last documentary ($260k), and even suggested the name of the company itself. But the only reason we were able to do as much as we did, is because I could code anything we might dream up. There just aren’t many tools designed for companies to operate like this.
NationBuilder will be a general purpose operating system to run democracies online, and we’ll use the software itself to run the company. It’s kind of a far out idea, and I don’t have all the answers on how it should work yet, but I’m having a ton of fun figuring it out. This blog will track the evolution of the platform, and show how people can use NationBuilder to, well, make the future.
]]>