Participatory Politics and the Democratic Convention

In an email conversation earlier this week with Jeff Jarvis, I mentioned that I was talking to the Democratic National Convention Committee back in early May about building an online community for this week's Convention. Jeff's recent post echoed a lot of my thoughts back in May (see emails below) about how the Democratic Party needs to start moving away from the "broadcast politics" of the past 40 years and more towards something called "participatory politics."

In broadcast politics, the American people are mostly informed through television and print media. The message is defined and then propagated through television and advertising campaigns. The American people have little say about what this message is and very few opportunities to actually contribute their thoughts and opinions. With participatory politics, the channels of communication are opened up between the groups of people attending the Convention (delegates, politicians, journalists, bloggers, etc.) and the American public. Instead of being talked to, they are being talked with. The inherent nature of this is participatory and provides a sense of belonging and ownership, two of the common traits identified within communities of all kinds (including online communities).

In Dan Gillmor's new book We The Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People For the People he quotes a comment I left on his blog back in April:

If your goal is debate and discussion, a network of blogs is a more powerful medium than a single blog with lots of readers, When your goal is message or top-down communication, then a few blogs with a lot of readers is more powerful.

This is something I learned building and running the Clark Community Network for the Wesley Clark presidential campaign. We found that having 10,000 user blogs was far more influential than having a single campaign blog with a few editors and a lot of readers. We learned that the blog network grew by word-of-mouth because our supporters were telling their friends and family about their Clark blogs. As more people logged on and saw that they too could have a blog and voice their opinions and support about Wesley Clark, the idea grew and we started to use it to propagate our campaign messages. These 11,000+ members of the Clark Community Network were our spokespeople. They were the ones speaking on our behalf in their living rooms and kitchens of America where traditional campaigning could not reach.

Now that the Democratic Convention is over, I want to share portions of the emails I sent to the DNCC, outlining what I thought was the best approach to integrating new media and blogging into the Convention media process.

The general public is pretty clueless about the Convention, yet thousands of activists nationwide want to participate if they are allowed to. By opening up the communication between those attending the Convention and the general public, it enhances the idea of inclusion, participatory democracy and openness -- best represented by the Democratic Party.

All politics is ultimately local. Delegates are at the Convention representing their constituencies, their interest groups, their politicians and the American people of the Democratic Party. Providing a categorized online communication architecture that outlines this for the American public so they can participate in the conversations they care about the most with the delegates, their politicians and other concerned Americans is a crucial step. The Bush-Cheney campaign and the RNC is all about command and control, with their army of trained underlings. The Democratic Party (and, ultimately the Kerry campaign) should be about channeling the diversity of their supporters in ways that benefit the Party. The core concept here is bi-directional communication -- communication that goes in both directions, from the top down but also from the bottom up.

The above paragraphs are from an email I sent to Mike Liddell, who was the person responsible for opening up the Convention to bloggers - as widely reported in the mainstream media. A smart decision, but one that I feel was not utilized to its fullest potential.

A second email with a rough project plan was sent later in the day, outlining how such a community network could be built. Had they followed my advice, the Convention this week would have many more thousands of people actively participating in politics. Instead, they decided to give three dozen bloggers press credentials and sent them into the convention hall to fend for themselves.

Critiquing the Bloggers

I have some strong opinions about the jobs these bloggers did reporting the Convention, but I really wish they had put more effort into interacting with the people who were not at the Convention. It would have been very simple for these bloggers to have taken a bunch of questions beforehand on their sites and then scoured convention hall for the people who could answer them. Why few did this is beyond me. Maybe it's because a lot of these bloggers have never been trained as journalists and instead they relied on their intuition, which was to write what they know about -- and unfortunately what they know the most about is themselves. Personal perspectives are relevant and important, but only if they're not boring and free of narcissistic tendencies.

A second criticism of the blog reporting coming from the Convention is that it was not organized in any kind of fashion that made sense for the readers coming to their blogs. The average reader is not going to browse through a lot of blog crap until the true gem appears. Lastly, the Convention Committee failed to set expectations for the kind fo reports coming from bloggers. It would have been very beneficial had there been some kind of "blog director" overseeing the reports coming from bloggers, giving them quotas to fulfill, directing story ideas, and helping them locate the people in the convention hall for them to interview.

But enough about the DNC's convention. It's over and no matter how many people criticize it, it will not change history. All we can do is look at how the bloggers were handled (and how they handled being part of the media) and try to learn from it. The RNC would be wise to take notes, as their convention in NYC is only a month away.

The Convention Committee broke new ground by letting bloggers into the convention hall and I applaud them for that. It was a good idea and I hope that others follow their lead. In 2008, I am confident that the kind of blog network I wanted to build earlier this summer will be commonplace and all of my concerns above will be moot. Only time will tell.

O'Reilly's New Magazine For Geeks

Protecting Your Open Discussion Forum

I'm sitting in a session entitled Protecting Your Open Discussion Forum. The presenter is Jamie McCarthy, from Slashdot.

Slides: http://slashdot.org/jamie-oscon-talk/oscon_01.html

• Slashdot has been the proving grounds for social misfits online.
• User participation is good. Brings new ideas.
• Large forums: defined as 1000+ people or more.
• "Attacker", traditional exploits are cross-site scripting, DoS, annoying HTML, unhelpful comments, and being a jerk.
• Know your goals. Know your enemy. Make an attacker invest. Block IP numbers, slow down the attacker's processes.
• Seeing is gaming. An attacker sees it as a game. Attackers will switch tactics because to them it is a game. To you, it is a headache. Removing the ability for the attacker to see their results works. Information hiding. If an attacker can score it, they are motivated even more.
• Users have made a game out of getting both negative and positive karma. Mistake to make karma a number, since it has a "score". Better to not use a numbers system, but rather a text label.
• People can forgive draconian rules as long as they are consistent.
• First line of defense is to increase your attacker's resource allocation: time, bandwidth, IPs, open proxies, their accounts.
• Do a google search for "free proxy list" and use that. Test these IP numbers.
• Watch our for robo-created accounts.
• Make new accounts less powerful, fewer capabilities.
• Never allow users to upload scripts or javascript, at any time.

Technorati Politics

I couldn't help but notice the similarity in layouts between Politics Technorati and WatchBlog. All I can say is if a layout proves to be successful, then imitation of it only validates it even more.

Simon St. Laurent in Silhouette

Commercial Open Source Business Panel

On the fourth day of this incredibly packed conference, I'm sitting in a panel discussion about Commercial Open Source Business models. The panelists are Tim O'Reilly, a venture capitalist who funds open source projects, Brian Behlendorf (my old boss and employer), someone from Novell and some guy from a company Tim described as from the "Evil Empire" and who one of the other panelists corrected as "a small software company in the Northwest."

Key points:

Venture capitalists are looking for software companies that want 40-50% profit models after a couple of years. They're not going to find this.
• Open source naturally keeps software prices in check.
• What made Dell successful was getting to a point where their processes were fine-tuned. In software, anybody can replicate these kinds of processes.
• CollabNet's model is service-based. We take care of all the little things that made managing software a high-cost issue. It's an ASP model.
• From VC guy: a lot of customers is better than a lot of intellectual property and copyright.
• Reputation capital: Micahel Jordan made more money selling Nike products than he ever made playing basketball. The open source superstar programmer has reputation capital. The employer does not retain this if the programmer leaves.

Apple's Tiger Server Does Blogs

I completely missed this news about Apple integrating a blog-hosting server application into Tiger Server, their next enterprise server.

A new Weblog server in Tiger Server makes it easy to publish, distribute and syndicate web-based content. The Weblog server provides users with calendar-based navigation and customizable themes, is fully compatible with Safari RSS and enables posting entries using built-in web-based functionality or with weblog clients that support XML-RPC or the ATOM API. The Weblog Server, based on the popular open source project “Blojsom,” works with Open Directory for user accounts and authentication.

Notes From OSCON

Here are a few observations from OSCON so far:

• This is the biggest OSCON ever. Rooms are overflowing. Next year, they will have to find a bigger venue.
• The most popular sessions are the ones that have little to do with technology or programming.
• The wifi network is amazingly stable, considering there are probably 500+ people connected at any one time.

Tim O'Reilly

A Tale of Two Conventions

About six weeks ago I had to make a decision whether to apply for press credentials to attend the Democratic National Convention in Boston or whether to take some time off, travel to Oregon and attend the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Both the conventions started today and end later this week. I made the decision to avoid the political geeks and hang out with a differnet kind of geek instead.

It's not that I couldn't attend the DNC Convention if I had wanted to go. I'm confident that my credentials would have been approved. A little known fact is that I was in Boston in early May talking to the DNCC about building a network of blogs and online communities for the delegates and journalists attending. They ultimately decided the cost and timeframe were not feasible, and instead opened up the Convention to bloggers: a decision that has been widely praised and reported.

I also am realizing that one of the reasons I skipped the DNC Convention is that I was completely burned out on politics and wanted a break. After my consulting gig at the John Kerry campaign and dealing with the ingrained politics of D.C., I knew that I wanted to dis-engage from that world and focus on something else. Ironically enough, I keep getting pulled back into web-based political projects. In June, I designed the DraftBruce.com site, a grassroots campaign to convince Bruce Springsteen to play a concert at Giants Stadium on the same day George W. Bush accepts the RNC nomination. Last week, I helped build a web site for a new PAC called the Fight Back Fund whose first project is Win The Senate, a web site that asks people to donate to Senate campaigns. This is very important because even if John Kerry wins the election, the Democrats are still in danger of losing Senate seats to the Republicans.

Since I'm covering the Open Source Convention as a blogger/journalist, I will be reporting my observations here on a daily basis. This morning I wanted to sit in Matt Seargent's "Stop Spamming Me" tutorial but there were no seats left. So I'm now in a session called "Learning Perl Objects, References and Modules" which unfortunately is way over my head.

Upcoming Travel Schedule

I have made the decision to leave Washington D.C. and move back to New York, so I gave up my apartment in Arlington, packed up my car and am currently couch-surfing at my brother's in Brooklyn. I am traveling a good deal for the rest of July, but will be spending most of the rest of the month in the Portland, OR area. Have laptop, will travel.

July 7: New York City
July 8: Scripting News Dinner, NYC
July 9: The Fifth HOPE, NYC
July 10: Detroit and Ann Arbor, MI
July 12: Portland, OR
July 16: WebVisions 2004, Portland, OR
July 17: Blogger Picnic, Bainbridge Island, WA (tentative)
July 20: Flutterby Blogger Gathering, San Francisco, CA (tentative)
July 23: BlogOn 2004, Berkeley, CA
July 24: Portland Penguin Day, Portland, OR (tentative)
July 26-30: O'Reilly Open Source Conference, Portland, OR
August 3: Las Vegas
August 5-6: Chicago and Michigan
August 12: New York City
August 14-17: Tampa, FL
August 18: New York City
August 21: Michigan
August 21-25: Driving Cross-Country
August 26: Portland, OR

If you're going to be at any of these events or if I'm coming to your neck of the woods, drop me a line.

Update: I decided last week to relocate to Portland, OR for at least 3 months. It's a very relaxed and inexpensive place to live which will give me the opportunity to focus on my projects and business ideas. I expect to move back in NYC sometime between January and June of 2005. If Bush is re-elected, I will start looking overseas for jobs. I don't want to live in a country that the rest of the world hates.

17-inch Powerbook G4 for $500

Someone on the street in NYC offers you a 17-inch Powerbook G4, still in its box, with proof of receipt for $500. What would you do?