How does the old saying go? One person’s spam is another person’s blogging fodder? Such was the case today when a colleague forwarded a house GOP “Internet Freedom Alert” to me. According to the alert, Nancy Pelosi and her wicked ilk mean to ban members of Congress from using YouTube to communicate with their constituencies.
The alert, sent by the office of Rep. John Boehner, informs us that house democrats have dredged up an arcane rule and mean to enforce it—after all, this is “the most ethical Congress ever.” The rule, enforced by the Congressional Franking Commission, disallows links to campaign-related website, political parties, advocacy groups and “any site the primary purpose of which is the conduct of commerce.” This means YouTube, replete with its ring tone ads, links John McCain t-shirts, and ads for Barack Obama commemorative neck ties, is a big Congressional no-no.
Congress ought to live by its own rules, but perhaps this one is worth revisiting. Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) seems to think so as well. He sits on the panel that is reforming the rules governing constituent communication and has quite accurately observed that “Technology moves fast. Congress moves slow.”
While that sentence may not be the most grammatically accurate way of stating the case, the Price is right. The alternative for Congress is hosting its own videos or requesting that commecial sites like YouTube build what Washington Post staff writer Jonathan Weisman calls a “government ghetto.”
The blog will tie the bills in Congress to the day’s headlines, discuss the bills being debated on the House and Senate floor, and reveal some hidden stories. Readers of TLF will understand this line from the opening post all too well: “Oh, there’ll be jokes – and I’m telling you right now they’re not all going to be funny.”
On the more serious side, the first substantive post tells the the inspiring story found on WashingtonWatch.com of an Army NCO who has taken Iraqi interpreters into his home. They served the U.S. military in Iraq and received special visas to come to the United States. He has helped them make their way in the U.S., and awaits three more who are on waiting lists, simply because “it’s the right thing to do.”
Over at BroadbandCensus.com, my friend Drew Bennett, who has graciously agreed to be a special correspondent for the publication while he is in New York covering the Personal Democracy Forum, has been pumping out the blog entries.
NEW YORK, June 24 – Jonathan Zittrain, author of “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It,” took to the stage at the Personal Democracy Forum to focus “civic technologies:” the personal computer, spreadsheet applications, Wikipedia, even the Internet itself are all examples. read more
NEW YORK, June 24 – Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig presented his ‘Declaration For Independence’ to the Personal Democracy Forum here today, fingering this problem in the American political system: the perception of a government disproportionately influenced by the stakeholders that fund political campaigns. read more
NEW YORK, June 24 – “What happens next?” is the question Andrew Rasiej used to start off the Tuesday morning panel discussion at the Personal Democracy Forum here. read more
The complete index page of articles, blog posts, and press releases on BroadbandCensus.com is available here.
A friend points out this MP3 featuring a Andrew Rasiej of the Personal Democracy Forum and Allison Fine of Demos appearing on WNYC radio. They’re the authors of this book about the future of democracy.
Rasiej and Fine mention Internet voting as the wave of the future. They then took three or four calls, all of which consisted of cogent arguments for why Internet-based or electronic voting is a disaster in the making. One pointed out that it will be too complicated to make sure your vote is complicated. Another contended out that Internet-based voting disenfranchises poor people. When Fine responded that poor people could vote with their cell phones, a third caller pointed out that this would undermine the secret ballot.
Fine and Rasiej, obviously exasperated, conceded that, yes, current voting technologies had some kinks. But they insisted that once those kinks get worked out, we’ll all be able to choose our next president on our cell phones.
Fine and Rasiej struck me as irritatingly airheaded. If current e-voting technologies are deeply flawed (which they are) it’s irresponsible to be writing book chapters and giving radio interviews disparaging paper ballots as outdated. And it’s especially irritating that their support for e-voting seems to be entirely based on a gee-whiz sense that paper is old-fashioned and boring while touch-screen machines are new and exciting. This is not a serious argument, and if that’s all you have to say on the subject, you should leave scarce radio time to people who know what they’re talking about.
Incidentally, the book in question is an edited collection featuring a bunch of really great writers, including Clay Shirky, Yochai Benkler, and Brad Templeton. So I’m sure there’s some great stuff in there, even if the chapter on e-voting isn’t so good.
Here are some thoughts that might become a paper. Feedback would be much appreciated.
Public choice theory can be summarized in four words: concentrated benefits, dispersed costs. Your share of the bill for the Bridge to Nowhere might be 5¢—much less than even the postage needed to write your member of Congress—but the developer and the local community stand to gain millions, which pays for lots of stamps. The few who will benefit from the transfer have an easy time organizing to lobby for it, while a group as diverse and dispersed as taxpayers face what Mancur Olson called a collective action problem. That is, the costs of organizing large groups are greater than the possible gain, and then there’s always the free-rider problem. This is the status quo and the source of much pessimism.
Here is, perhaps, cause for optimism: social media has pushed down, and continues to push down, the cost of organizing. If the cost can be pushed down far enough, it’s conceivable that the collective action problem could be solved. (That’s a thesis in case you hadn’t noticed.)
In his wonderful book, Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky tells the tale of two flights that where stranded at airports with the passengers subjected to terrible conditions. One incident happened in 1999, and the other almost identical incident happened in 2007. The former became a press blip, while the latter led to congressional reform of passenger rights. The difference, Shirky points out, is that the second event happened after the technology was in place to make it trivial for the passengers who had been in similar situations to find one another and organize into a cohesive group.
There seem to be two ways to get the attention of Congress: money or members. The AARP is the most effective lobby in town because it has the backing of 38 million members. Like the AAA, unions, and other large lobbies, the AARP solves the collective action problem by offering its members benefits—beyond representation in Washington—that can actually be captured by the individual. (What Olson called a “separate and selective incentive.”) Wikipedia and Linux and the rest offer selective incentives, but they also lower the costs of organization and participation dramatically. Would it be possible for an ad hoc Facebook group to rival a traditional lobby? I don’t know. Maybe we should try. Continue reading →
As if on cue, I tried to follow a link to a citation to a document on the BEA website, and I got this helpful message:
The BEA Web site has taken on a new look and feel as part of a redesign.
It is understood that many users create ‘bookmarks’ or ‘favorites’ for their most frequently accessed pages on our site. However, due to some alterations to our directory structure, some ‘bookmarked’ URLs may no longer house the information they did prior to the redesign.
The links provided below will assist you in locating information within the new BEA site. Should you be unable to locate the information you want, please contact us at webmaster@bea.gov and let us know the web page you were looking for.
Now, the Technology Liberation Front has been hosted for the last four years by PJ Doland Web Design, a small web design company that you really should check out if you’re in the market for that sort of thing. We recently upgraded from Movable Type to WordPress, and in the process we broke a lot of permalinks. Fortunately, PJ and his team whipped up a script to create redirects from each of our old posts to our new posts. That means that if anyone follows an old permalink, they’ll be silently redirected to the correct page.
Did I mention PJ did this for us for free? In contrast, I rather doubt the people who re-designed the BEA website did it for free. Setting up re-directs is a pain, but it’s not that much of a pain, and especially for a site full of economic statistics, maintaining stable URLs ought to be a priority. If our volunteer webmaster can manage it for our insignificant little blog, somehow a federal agency should be able to manage the same feat.
In my latest piece for Ars, I write up the Princeton paper I pointed out on Monday, and also discuss Jerry’s paper on the same subject. The BEA’s less than spectecular web savvy nicely illustrates the point that governments should focus on providing data and leave the web design to the private sector.
So I finally had a chance to read Beth Simone Noveck’s article on wiki-government about which Jim has previouslyposted. The idea is to take tools of mass collaboration that have given us Wikipedia and Linux and apply them to the development of policy. Like the encyclopedias and operating systems of the past, policy development is now often the exclusive domain of government experts. Noveck coins the term “civic software” to refer to collaboration tools aimed at policy.
While I’m a fan of the power of crowds (see my recent paper on “crowdsourcing government transparency”) I’d like to take issue with one minor point of her plan. She critiques our current system of experts saying, “Sometimes these pre-selected scientists and outside experts are simply lobbyists passing by another name.” (I’d change “sometimes” to often.) The implication is that a mass collaborative process might help limit the influence of special interests in policy-making. How? The wiki-wonks, Noveck suggests, won’t be limited to appointed pros:
People have no option to self-select on the basis of enthusiasm, rather than being chosen on the basis of profession. Even when not unduly subject to political influence, the decision as to who participates is based on institutional status. Those who may have meaningful contributions to make–graduate students, independent scientists, avid hobbyists, retired executives, and other consultants in the “free agent nation”–fall outside the boundaries of professional institutions and status and will of necessity be excluded, regardless of their intellectual assets.
But isn’t that what lobbies are? The most enthusiastic on a given issue? The same way ornithologists or passionate bird watchers are the ones writing the Wikipedia entries about robbins, it seems to me that special interests will be the most active in shaping any wiki-policy. As Hillary Clinton likes to say, lobbyists “represent real Americans.” I don’t think wiki-government can meaningfully diminish special interest influence.
That said, Noveck’s Peer-to-Patent pilot program with the USPTO is an excellent idea. I especially like how the community chooses what gets sent to the Patent Office:
The community not only submits information, but it also annotates and comments on the publications, explaining how the prior art is relevant to the claims of the patent application. The community rates the submitted prior art and decides whether or not it deserves to be shared with the USPTO. Only the 10 best submitted prior-art references, as judged on the basis of their relevance to the claims of the patent applications by the online review community, will be forwarded to the patent examiner.
I’d love to see something like this for regulations. There’s no reason why we must wait for a government pilot program to do this. Maybe we can set up a wiki where the community can collaborate on a comment on a proposed agency rulemaking and the finished product is submitted to the docket. There’s no such thing as a neutral point of view when it comes to policy, so the wiki would have to have some first principles the community agrees to, or maybe a mechanism for developing several opposing comments. Thoughts?
I’m interested in changing the way things work – witness WashingtonWatch.com – and I have no doubt about the earnest good intentions of Professor Lessig. But there are plenty of reasons why the project might not succeed, and indeed might be harmful to discourse in our democracy. They’re articulated well in the comments to Weigel’s post.
Back in December, I wrote about a good article in Democracy by Beth Simone Noveck, director of the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School. Her article highlighted the Peer-to-Patent experiment being conducted with the Patent and Trademark Office.
A response has now been published by Andrew Keen, a critic of all things 2.0 heretofore unknown to me – and for good reason. Keen’s response is drivel.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.