Independence Year Foundation

As a volunteer for the Howard Dean campaign, I helped start the “Netroots” - the net-savvy people who put grassroots campaigning online, leading to Obama’s success. I’ve come to realize that, in many ways, the netroots is old wine in new bottles. It’s hard to know if it has had any greater effect, proportionately, than direct mail politics in the 1950s. A similar “revolution”, direct mail was the first way that campaigns could reach voters directly without the media filter. Both used new media to elect the same politicians, who then operate the same obsolete way.

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 primary 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. 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. The most valuable resource in politics is a loyal constituent who votes in a primary. Like diamonds, they’re valuable because they’re scarce. Primary voters matter so much because most elections in the US are safely Democrat or Republican.

iVote4U primary voters are loyal to a cause and not a party, curating the politician’s actions for years, with a 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.

Douglas Rushkoff’s new show on WFMU, Media Squat, is “a program looking at how life has been literally “incorporated” by business and economics, as well as looking at possibilities for how to incorporate LIFE back into our lives: local commerce, community, social currency, and all that good stuff.” Mark Elliot appeared on Douglas’s show last Monday and even plugged OpenGovNYC’s collaborative policy workshop.

iYear was pleased to hear Mark’s belief that the “holy grail” application of his methods is to empower citizens to govern themselves, initiating a transition from a purely representative democracy to a more participatory democracy. This is a theme that iYear Founder Britt Blaser explored with co-authors Joe Trippi and David Weinberger in this paper submitted for the (sadly canceled) Digital Governance Society of North America Conference in Puebla, Mexico.

The theme of the show this week was “Hidden Sources”. In the first segment, Rushkoff takes on the myth that you need money to start business moving. He argues that you can create value by finding resources in your local community network, money becoming the result of your hard work rather than the pre-condition for it. It won’t make you a millionaire, but it might make you happy and comfortable. iYear embraces this method. We have found that there is a wealth of talented volunteers willing to take great ideas about open government and work hard to make them real. We’ve been calling this an “inverse foundation”: focus on completing great projects, and the money will follow.

Tuesday’s Collaborative Policy Workshop was a success, with the discussion lasting well past the appointed end time. We had participants with varied interests and backgrounds, each arriving with a different vision of what collaborative policy building would look like.

Initially, the group was focused on developing the concept of a ‘policy sprint’, an analogy to a coding sprint in which software developers race to complete a specified application in a short amount of time.  As the group tested the analogy, they realized that a policy sprint could take place at any point in the policy development process.  Therefore, any sprint would need preparatory work in which the goals of the sprint event would be clearly defined.

Much of the discussion was recorded in a wiki page on the Sunlight Labs wiki.  Attendees agreed to improve the page after the event, with the goal of starting a broader discussion.  Significant edits have already been made by participants Tom Lowenhaupt, who is applying collaborative policy methods in his .nyc project, and Julie Steele.

The collaborative policy working group will report back at tomorrow’s regular meeting of the Open Government NYC meetup.  Please help us take this project further by improving the wiki page.  We need help defining the concept, links to similar projects, and policy ideas that might make good test cases.

The Independence Year Foundation is pleased to announce the release of our iVote4U Facebook Application.  iVote4U allows you to declare support (or lack of it) for your representatives, and share your declarations with your friends.  It is just the beginning of our plan to build tools that educate and empower citizens, and we’re excited to get it out there and get your feedback.

Special thanks to our partner DotBox, and to all those who gave us feedback throughout the development process.

Tonight’s workshop on collaborative policy development (http://bit.ly/G0VKx) will be open to virtual participation. Please join us!

Watch the event live on UStream.TV
We’ll broadcast starting at 7pm at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/open-gov-nyc

Join the conversation on Twitter
We’ll project a Twitter backchannel at the front of the room. Use the #opengovnyc tag add your comments.

Edit the project wiki

We’ll be collaborating on the Sunlight Labs wiki, building out a process. You can edit too at:

http://wiki.sunlightlabs.com/index.php/OpenGovNYC_Collaborative_Policy_Workshop

See you tonight!

If you saw Pixar’s Ratatouille you’ll remember Remy the Rat’s unyielding belief in Chef Gusteau’s motto that “anyone can be a chef”. By the end of the tale, Remy convinces even the harshest of critics that you don’t need a traditional culinary pedigree to make an excellent dish.

Writing government policy is even more specialized and arcane than cooking, but citizens can still play an active role. After all, citizens often have more knowledge and expertise about needs of their communities and industries than policy-makers. President Obama, our own Chef Gusteau of government, made this explicit in his January 21, 2009 directive on Transparency and Open Government:

Executive departments and agencies should offer Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information.

President Obama further asked for agencies to “solicit public input on how we can increase and improve opportunities for public participation in Government.” The Open Government meetup offers the concept of the “policy sprint”. From our most recent blog post:

“Techies will be familiar with the idea of a coding sprint, at which coders will choose a particular project on a particular day and code like hell until it’s done. We want to do the same thing with policy, so that by the end of the day we’ll have something that we can present to Albany or City Hall.”

Dr. Mark Elliot

The Open Government NYC meetup group will begin exploring this idea at our next event, a Collaborative Policy Building Workshop on April 28th.

— RSVP here —

The workshop will be led by Dr. Mark Elliott, who conducted his doctoral research on mass collaboration and founded the innovative open-government-focused consulting firm CollabForge. (Read his full bio here.)

Dr. Elliott is already focused collaborative policy building, and ran the successful Future Melbourne project to crowdsource city planning.  He will give a brief presentation of his previous work, and then will facilitate the workshop.  Dr. Elliot will help the group arrive at a framework and a toolset for conducting policy sprints and extended online policy collaborations.

This workshop will help the Open Government NYC group to plan for a proposed larger event in late Spring 2009, at which we hope to combine policy sprints with coding sprints and other open gov goodness.  So join us next Tuesday.  You too can be a wonk.

This past Monday marked the second meeting of the Open Government NYC meetup group. I started the meetup because I saw a lot of overlapping work happening in the space, and also a need to to define and cohere the open government movement. The Independence Year Foundation has sponsored my time, knowing that the meetup could only benefit the work we’re already doing.

Lots of ideas were shared at Monday’s meeting, but the one that sparked the most interest was the “policy sprint”. Techies will be familiar with the idea of a coding sprint, at which coders will choose a particular project on a particular day and code like hell until it’s done. We want to do the same thing with policy, so that by the end of the day we’ll have something that we can present to Albany or City Hall. Policy ideas included improved transparency of the Freedom of Informarion Law (FOIL) process, a general open government data policy, and a repeal of the publishing requirement imposed on new LLC’s.

While coding sprints have a long history, policy sprints are something new. Help us work out the details of this unique event by joining our google group and contributing your voice. Hope to see you at the next meetup!