Among those obsolescent patterns is politicians’ willful disregard of their constituents’ preferences. Every day we are urged to “tell your representative to …………….” But our pleas, if we even make them, never match a cause with a voter who matters to an Olivia Snowe or Max Baucus. These messages are as futile as yelling at the support tech that their web site sucks.

If you don’t feel impotent about effecting change, you don’t understand the real game in politics as well as Matt Taibbi does.

The iVote4U system is fundamentally different. It’s about governance, not politics. Using iVote4U, you don’t care much who your politician is. Instead, you “push” your interests to him/her and make it clear that how the politician votes in Congress will affect how you will vote in the next primary election.

The most valuable resource in politics is a voter who shows up at a primary election. Like diamonds, they’re valuable because they’re scarce. Primary voters matter so much because most elections are safely Democrat or Republican. All the nuttiness we see in Congress is about primary elections, not the general. iVote4U gives certified constituents a way to use their primary vote pledges to give political cover to politicians who act on principle, so they don’t have to pander to the zealots who show up for the primary.

Like those zealots, iVote4U primary voters are loyal to a cause but not a party, but their loyalty stems from rational curating of a politician’s actions for years, with real consequences for the incumbent or challenger in the next primary election.

Called “Super Voters,” they are 3rd-party certified constituents, pledged to vote in the next primary, who are watching the politician’s actions, and will vote accordingly.

There is no greater threat or benefit to a politician’s career.

(FWIW, calling it the “Comcast transaction” without explanation, Susan reveals how far we insiders have distanced ourselves from the real people – voters – who might have an interest in an issue and might exert real political power on an acquisition that affects our ability to use broadband and to be free to deploy the Internet on our own behalf without interference from our Internet provider’s vested interest in the content they want us to “consume”. Out here in the nocluesphere, we have no idea what the “Comcast transaction” might be.)

Susan is rightly exercised:

1. The transaction would give Comcast, the nation’s largest cable operator, control of one of the five large US content providers and about 30% control of Hulu.com.  If the transaction is approved, Comcast will be behind about one out of every five viewing hours in the U.S.  We are a nation of living-room watchers, and Comcast will be there.
2. Comcast is smart to be using control over content to guarantee dominance in broadband.  There are fewer competitors in broadband – usually two in any locality, a cable company and a telco – than there are in video.  Cable is already doing better than VZ/AT&T, and prices for high-speed Internet access are staying high and bundled.  NCTA says that cable modem service is “available” to 92% of homes.  We won’t be seeing VZ or AT&T fiber reaching more than 40% of households over the next few years.  Cable has a bright future.
3. Comcast says that this is a vertical transaction that should not trigger competition concerns.  They point out that both the Comcast and NBCU cable networks together will add up to just 12% of national cable advertising and affiliate revenue.  (Comcast wants the NBCU cable networks (CNBC, Bravo, Oxygen), which generate 60% of NBCU’s earnings.)  They also say that online video content is so wildly competitive that this deal will have no impact.

And Susan suggests the questions that might come up on Thursday:

• What power will Comcast have to shape the future of online video (or “Internet TV”)?  This transaction may make it less likely that people will cut the cord and disintermediate their cable provider, moving their online video-watching from their PCs to their large living room screens.  Comcast will have no incentive to make its content available online to non-subscribers.
• Online video/Internet TV is a new market.  Right now, it’s relatively small and confined to PC-viewing.  Comcast says we shouldn’t consider potential harms to a future market.  Is that right?
• What effect will this transaction have on the prices consumers pay for cable subscriptions and high speed Internet access?

But there is NO structural mechanism to ensure that those questions actually come up. Sure, on Thursday, under the currently trusted guidance of FCC Chair Julius Genachowski, the right questions might be heard. But would they have been heard under Dubya’s appointed tool, Genachowski’s predecessor, Kevin Martin? As citizens, can we afford to place our trust in the hope that the regulators will always have our interests in mind? How might we ensure that knowledgeable questions are asked in these crucial committee meetings? Since lobbyists can’t guarantee what questions are raised in a hearing, how might we?

“We” being, you know, actual voters. Maybe even *certified voters*, proven to be constituents of the representatives asking the questions and guiding the trajectory of the hearing. i.e., voters getting their democracy on.

Those are the kind of voters who drive politicians’ actions: the questions, comments and votes they express in committee hearings and on the floor of the Congress.

If there were a zoning hearing affecting your home, you’d damn well find out who’s on the Zoning Board and what their biases are. Likewise, if you want to affect a Congressional Committee Hearing, you need to know who’s on the committee. In this case, the committee is the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, reporting to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. So here’s the playing field of this particular subcommittee:

Rick Boucher, Virginia, Chairman

There they are, 34 Congresspeople, concerned mostly about being re-elected in nine months, jonesing for $3,000 per day so they can buy as many ads as needed to convince voters (whoever they are!) that they are listening to their voters. I can’t find the quote, but $3,000 per day is what I remember from Larry Lessig and that’s good enough for me. On any given day next fall, these representatives will drive 45 minutes out of their way to meet a dozen or so of their (presumed) constituents in a gym or diner to demonstrate how well they listen.

Given those imperatives, how hard can it be for a few third-party-certified* constituents to get a question asked in a hearing, the asking of which costs the representative nothing and which may line him up for grassroots campaign contributions that the lobbyists can’t promise and, amazingly, might explicitly pledged votes? Those being votes that no lobbyist would even suggest they could corral for you. They’re not in the Get-Out-The-Vote business. “GOTV” is the essence of “retail politics”, and that’s what political campaigns spend lobbyist money on. But what if we voters got into the GOTV business? Hmmm.

Welcome to the new math of citizen engagement. In the bargain, voters’ questions might actually make the representative look well informed. But wouldn’t that reduce the contributions they might get from the interested corporations? How much would it matter? According to a 2006 report from Freepress.net:

Between 1991 and 2006 major cable industry interests and their trade groups spent more than $105 million on campaign contributions to federal candidates and on lobbying in Washington. The five members of Congress who currently hold key positions on the crucial House and Senate Commerce Committees alone have received more than half a million dollars in contributions from major cable interests since 1991. Contributions went both to members’ candidate committees and their leadership political action committees (PACs).

It’s a lot of money, but how much might those fifteen years of contributions sway each representative? According to the FreePress report, Comcast has contributed $2,516,528 to Federal candidate committees and leadership PACs from 1991 to 2006. That amounts to $167,769 to ALL politicians through the period. Freepress notes that, in 2006, when Fred Upton, R-MI, was chair of the House subcommittee, he had received $118,997 from Comcast since 1991. Of course, it stinks, but it amounts to $7,933 per year.

Perspective: We hate the fact that our congresscritters, on average, must raise $3,000 per day to conduct a serious campaign. But shouldn’t we acknowledge that, for their apparent champion on the subcommittee, Comcast was only willing to provide 2.6 days of fundraising? Do we really believe that Fred Upton is willing to pervert his entire agenda for that mild level of support?

And Fred’s just the most highly compensated supporter of the Comcast devil. In fact, the other 33 committee members must be far less impressed, financially, with Comcast’s agenda. And you can bet that they also have broadband that sucks, and they know it.

So what’s the point here? American households, not corporations, have most of the money and all of the votes. Given the tools becoming available, we might be equipped to use them.

Responding to 9/11

… we need to be warriors: take our losses, bury our dead, isolate our exposures, repair specific flaws in our systems and stick to our mission plan: … In America’s third century, [it] has not changed for 228 years: Our God-given purpose is to demonstrate that a varied populace from disparate origins can live peacefully under an open government that governs minimally but humanely.

Britt Blaser, 2004

Chris didn’t like his link telling people that my blog would harm our computers. That’s not my aim. I just wanna hurt our brains. Some friends know that my project, the Independence Year Foundation , has evolved away from the iYear branding to a two-part platform called iVote4U. That’s because it’s a better way to state what’s in the tin.

Here’s the current description, with enough links to screw up your weekend:

The iVote4UPolitician Management & Support System

Nutshell:

iVote4U: two parts that work together.

Part 1: a set of spaces, one per US representative. The spaces are for constituents to meet, talk, and influence their reps.	Part 2: a Facebook app for voters to pledge action.
David Weinberger, Ph.D.: “The trick is that the app is set up so the rep can be certain that the citizen is in fact one of her/his constituents.”

iVote4U’s Facebook Application Services

1. Voter home page, with politician action panels
2. Candidates for each office you vote for.
3. Dashboard: Politicians you’ve “touched” in any way.
4. Vote and Money Pledge manager.
5. Vote bombs: Vote challenges you’ve issued or supported.
6. Causes: the Facebook Causes you’ve sent to politicians.
7. Invite Friends to join iVote4U.

1. Politician Action Panel elements:

1. Become a certified constituent to make politicians listen.
2. Say Yes-No as a snap indicator of support.
3. Pledge your vote with a firm calendar commitment.
4. OWN your politicians: pledge to vote in the Primary.
5. Pledge money to your favorite politicians.
6. Form a powerful voting bloc supporting a Facebook Cause.
7. Send a smiley, a frown or other emotion to your politicians.

Documents and links

Who’s behind the iVote4U system?

The design and vision is provided by the Independence Year Foundation, a Not-for-Profit corporation. The Facebook iVote4U apps leverage the community and connectivity of the world’s largest social network.

The 585+ virtual political jurisdictions are being designed, built, hosted, maintained and supported by the companies who built and support whitehouse.gov: Acquia Inc. and Phase2 Technology. (They can’t and won’t tell you that, but it’s public knowledge)

I have a default action when I run into the absurdity of grand potential limited by unimaginative capital. I haul out my tattered copy of Tom Robbins’ Skinny Legs and All and re-read the best single paragraph ever written on economics:

During periods of so-called economic depression, societies suffer for want of all manner of essential goods, yet investigation almost invariably discloses that there are plenty of goods available. Plenty of coal in the ground, corn in the fields, wool on the sheep. What is missing is not materials but an abstract unit of measurement called ‘money.’ It is akin to a starving woman with a sweet tooth lamenting that she can’t bake a cake because she doesn’t have any ounces. She has butter, flour, eggs, milk, and sugar, she just doesn’t have any ounces, any pinches, any pints.(Skinny Legs and All, 1990)

1. a sequence of words that sound like communication when spoken but are equally meaningless when read backwords or forwards, e.g., in the great history of America rulings there have been rulings.
2. a person who speaks in palindrones, often a person who does no useful work and lives off others.

ORIGIN early 21st cent.: from Greek palin‘again‘ + Old English drān, drÇ£n [male bee,] from a West Germanic verb meaning ‘resound, boom‘ ; related to Dutch dreunen ‘to drone.‘

I’ve been absent from this blog for 2-1/2 months, a gap that once seemed inconceivable to this narcissistic raconteur. In that time though, our team has created 5 potential blogs for me, at the following sites:

1. iYear.US
2. NewGov.US
3. NewPrez.US
4. .govAdvisers.US
5. PeoplePressure.US

They created 5 potential blogs there for you too, since every member at those sites gets their own blogs, which include some nifty blog features that we’ve not seen elsewhere. (“nifty”= old fart for very cool)
It started when we rolled out the Independence Year Project (iYear.US) on June 23, as a major sponsor at the Personal Democracy Forum. Independence Year is the year between the last and next Independence Days, which we kicked off at a fireworks celebration at the East 43rd St. HQ on July 4th. As usual, the display was spectacular, being so close to the Macy’s fireworks barges.

[It's always troubled me that a nation formed to support its citizens' pursuit of happiness celebrates its birth by mimicking combat explosions. Having experienced both sides of combat firepower, I know there's little happiness in the pursuits of a shooter or a shootee.]

The featured guests on July 4th were our partners at Zaah Technologies, Maurice Freedman and Sandy Fliderman and their friends and family. The Independence Year platform and its stunning possibilities are a celebration of the mechanisms provided by Zaah through our partnership to build a new way to transform American governance.

I hope to add to this each day from South Yarmouth, Cape Cod. If so, I’ll try to describe the many ways that the iYear platform routes around politics to implement citizen-managed governance, at every place that such a disturbance might be beneficial.

A political party is a political organization that seeks to attain and maintain political power within government, usually by participating in electoral campaigns. Parties often espouse a specific ideology and vision, but may also represent a coalition among disparate interests.

I know I belong to a pervasive Neo-Conversative party, whose members are conversing about government in a new way. I have lots of friends all over the spectrum and their appeal for me is how well we can discuss 1. how things are, 2. how they might be and 3. what we might do, specifically, to improve things. Without all three qualities, there’s no engagement for me, and I bet that’s true for you too.

The millions of supporting anecdotes aren’t enough to alarm broadcast politics’ flat-earthers, cable news and their politicians, but it’s just as obvious as a round globe was to observant coastal dwellers, watching the earth’s curve hide the hull first and the sails later.

Toilets overflowing, People going crazy, and no one’s listening!

We’re trapped in this broken airplane called America, stuck on the unforgiving tarmac of oily geopolitics. Shirky’s best anecdote is a kind of parable. A couple of hundred million of us can be as cohesive as a couple hundred passengers trapped for hours in a fetid airplane. That’s the force that Clay describes as being impossible in 1999 and inevitable in 2006.

Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry made that case last March At Politico.com, citing Clay Shirky’s point that use of the Internet group-forming was the sole differentiator in cases where people were equally outraged but unequally armed for success:

Two remarkably similar events, with two incredibly disparate outcomes. In Detroit [1999], the passengers’ fury led to a lawsuit but nothing larger. In Austin [2006], it led to the creation of a powerful organization that went national within days. As Shirky writes: “Why did one infuriating delay lead nowhere, while the other led to a real increase in pressure on the airlines?”

His answer: The key change was that Hanni had in her hands the tools to encourage and sustain participation. She had the desire to do something, and in 2007 she was able to communicate that desire in a way that created a public movement, using tools that have become commonplace…

…The adage that organized minorities are more powerful than disorganized majorities is now more true than ever. However, as these organized minorities multiply and grow, they are challenging the very nature of what power is and how it will be maintained in our society.

Already, we can see how presidential campaigns that embraced this new phenomenon — such as those of Barack Obama, Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul — have been able to proceed much farther down the path to party nominations than they might otherwise have. Self-organizing groups, and networks that tie these groups into powerful coalitions, are the new players. To alter Time magazine’s formulation, the Person of the Year isn’t “you,” it’s “us.”

At Andrew and Micah’s PDF conference on 6/23, the Independence Year Foundation will announce iYear, which runs from 7/4/08 to 7/4/09. iYear is not a catalyst to what will happen over that period, but a lever arm, perhaps bionic, to help the citizen’s reach exceed politicians’ grasp.
__________________________

*Andrew and Micah are the dynamic duo who seem to be everywhere that matters in the technopolitical space:

• PDF (6/23 & 24 – don’t miss it!)
• TechPresident
• Sunlight Foundation

They have doublehandedly steered the conversation about politics toward results, in the direction we’re now seeing.

But there’s an almost recreational, willful form of arrogance that I think Diane Francis has a radar for. Lately, it’s been beeping whenever Bill Clinton swings into action.

Diane Francis is an American who’s become one of the most honored voices in Canada. She’s also a dear friend and respected adviser to our Independence Year project. Here’s her ORGware About page.

I’ve been following Diane’s new series at the Huffington Post. Here’s her radar at work, in point #2 from Hillary’s Hidden Agenda:

This is really all about Bill, not Hillary.

He wants his backdoor entry to the White House. He is a pathological competitor who is more motivated the more others pass him by, from Al Gore to Bill Richardson and certainly Barack Obama. Besides that, Hillary knows that idle hands are the devil’s tools and once she is out, Bill’s wandering eye will turn elsewhere.

The Clintons are betting their farm that Obama will make a mistake or that her persistence will somehow force him to choose her and Bill as his running mates — a move that former Clinton advisor Dick Morris said would lead to upstaging and backstabbing in the White House.

As some sage pointed out, no one wants Bill Clinton hanging around the East Wing with too much time on his hands. The other problem is that the Republicans, like the Secret Service, know about the girl friends in various ports. I don’t know this myself, but I’ve heard enough to be convinced. Spots. Leopard. Think. Some say it’s a story that will make the failed TrooperGate scandal look like a mistletoe kiss on New Year’s eve.

Alpha male philandering is the oldest form of recreational arrogance. A newer instance is Hillary telling Katy Couric half a year ago that “it will be me” (2:22 in to this video). Celebrities lose most Americans when their incidental arrogance crosses the bright line of willfulness.

Diane’s writing some great stuff from her Huffington command post. But you’d expect that from the woman who wrote:

I’m an American who lived in Canada for 30 years. I never meant to stay so long, but I got busy as a journalist and wrote nine books.

I’m happy to be home, except for the politics. Too much yelling. Too much anger. Too many labels. Too many bloated open-line radio hosts and close-minded columnists and bloggers. Too many obscene campaign contributions.
Too little brainstorming. America has become Nation Republican vs. Nation Democrat. It sounds like the Superbowl, but America is not the Superbowl.

This is a society with a lot on its mind and isn’t being heard. We are not Democrats or Republicans. We are not undecideds or independents or cranks or lazy. We are shoppers who want to spend our precious votes on smart, effective policies and politicians with character.

Here in Victoria, we’re looking at a $1.2 billion infrastructure project for sewage treatment, and the 2 levels of government (local and provincial) are feuding because both say that the other side didn’t tell them about information that was wanted. Walled garden? It’s a bloody fortification…

Then there are those infrastructures that are supposed to support social programs, including mental hospitals and detox facilities — they’re not working, either, and our homeless now include not only poor people, but people who should be in some pipeline of institutional support because they’re mentally ill or addicted (or both, typically).

It all gets off- or downloaded to citizens now, as if we could individually step into the breach, without infrastructural support.

Maybe government is where we need open source most of all — as a way of thinking and as a way of “architecting” infrastructure.

My three readers (fortunately including Doc) know that this Open Source Society theme has been my meme for time out of mind, and that I call it OSS2, differentiating it from Open Source Software, or OSS1.

Another of my readers is Phil Windley, a “republican friend” whom Doc refers to in his reply to Yule’s despairing comment:

Thanks, Yule. You’ve made my week. Or perhaps longer.

I am taken lately with the belief that understanding infrastructure is critical not only for building and maintaining civilization’s essentials, but for bridging chasms of opinion that make constructive discourse impossible.

A few years ago a republican friend from Utah said two things that have stuck in my mind. One was “There are two parts to democracy. Elections and governance. And governance is where the work actually gets done.” The other was, “Most people, regardless of political philosophy, just want the roads fixed.”

At Berkman, over two years ago, I wrote:

What about an Open Source Society? Only the first exists, but we can imagine two OSS movements:

OSS1 = Open Source Software (a result, but also a movement)

OSS2 = Open Source Society (a dream that needs movement)

And they both need organizational tools. OSS1 has a perfect match of organizational needs and organizational tools because the developers wrote them as they became a movement. SourceForge and Trac are great examples. OSS1 wouldn’t exist without the community’s organizational tools. But there’s more. OSS1 Developers use dozens of disparate tools and websites to organize their work…

…But the developers of OSS2, whose work we desperately need, to escape from the political specialists who’ve hijacked governance, don’t behave like that. The OSS2 developers we seek to serve are ready and able to form groups and describe their pain and hopes. But, just like OSS1 developers, they need an organizing environment suitable to their skills: a collaboration mall with all the tools they might need as they become more engaged.

I called it a collaboration mall because the Open Source Society engineers are regular people, who won’t even blog, unless tricked into it, and need a UI as user-friendly as the malls that have worked so well, regardless of sophisticates’ sniffing at them as proletarian.

OSS2 engineers are people who don’t know they need to collaborate to re-engineer society, and sure won’t if you tell us that’s what you want from us.

But if some of us are persistent enough to build hundreds of expandable little collaboration malls, located where they (we) will try them and engage our neighbors and find it easy to shop for hope there, then we’ll become the unwitting designers and producers of little patches on our governmental structures. Taken together, all those patches can comprise a Patchy government OS, as resilient and resourceful as Geronimo.