Suitwatch

Politics as unusual

Back last summer, at the end of OSCON (the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, in Portland) <http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2003/>, conference director Gina Blaber asked me if I had any ideas for other future conference themes. Without even thinking about it, I suggested a one-time Emerging Democracy event to coincide with O'Reilly's regular Emerging Technology conference <http://conferences.oreillynet.com/etech/>, which was scheduled for the following February in San Diego.

I figured the timing was right, since the event fell right in the middle of the presidential primaries. It was already clear that the Internet had changed the political environment, and that the whole Internet Thing would snowball all the way to Election Day the following November. There was already talk about "open source politics". Notably, the Howard Dean campaign had raised a surprisingly large amount of money and popular support, by embracing phenomena like MeetUp (which runs on Linux) and hacker volunteers looking to scaffold together something/anything that would help "take back" the country.

Gina thought this might be a good idea, so we talked about it with Tim O'Reilly over a brief lunch, and agreed to start moving forward. My next conversation was with Phil Windley <http://www.windley.com/>, the former CIO of Utah, after we both got off the plane from Portland to Salt Lake City. We stood in the concourse there for a long time, talking about what was happening in politics. Phil, who is wise and experienced in the ways of the government technology world, made several very memorable points.

One was that there were two very different kinds of democracy in action: electoral and govermnental. Perhaps we could borrow interest in the elections, he said, to talk more about connected governance. What would happen to local, state, regional, and federal government once they were truly networked to their constituents? He said there were already a number of areas where government organizations had come to rely on NGOs -- non-governmental organizations -- that were Net-savvy sources of useful information that crossed the jurisdictional boundaries that often limited the scope of any bureaucracy's concerns (state, county, federal, whatever). More of these were sure to follow.

Another was that we were coming to the end of two eras that had hurt government and its relationships with constituents. The first was a left-wing revolution in the 60s and 70s, when lots of people who hated business were elected to office. The second was the right-wing revolution of the 80s and 90s, when lots of people who hated government were elected to office. "Meanwhile, most people just want the roads fixed," Phil said. His point: perhaps it's time for a new sensibility about governance that doesn't come from making enemies of business, government, or both. Perhaps it's time for connected citizens to start helping their governments simply do the kind of good work we want them to do in a democratic society.

After many meetings, conference calls, email exchanges and wiki entries, the Digital Democracy Teach-In was held on Monday, February 9 -- the first day of eTech in San Diego. It was a terrific one-day conference. You can read all about it on the conference site <http://conferences.oreillynet.com/et2004/edemo.csp> and on the coverage page. The focus, naturally, was on the electoral side of emerging democracy. The opening keynote was by Joe Trippi, who ran the Dean Campaign right up to the point where it failed to win primaries, even as it succeeded in raising money.

Now, however, I find myself thinking back past the conference, to the stuff Phil told me in the airport after OSCON -- especially about the new sensibility that will inevitably emerge from the connected conditions provided by the Net.

Maybe that's because I've been invited by two local techie friends to participate in a meeting with some local government officials on a proposed project to get everybody more bandwidth around here. One of those friends, Patrick Gregston, called a few minutes ago, and said a number of things that so completely blew my mind that I had to slow him down so I could type them up. If these aren't verbatim, they're pretty close.

Governent isn't the problem. People need to bring solutions to government. Government is dying for answers. Bring some and you'll get somewhere.

I don't have experience with the government stonewalling me at all. I experience interest and cooperation at every level, as long as I bring solutions and not just problems.

A lot of helpless people want government to solve their problems, or to carry their spear on one issue or another. That reflects an ignorance of how the whole ecosystem actually works. If you're constructive, you can participate in that ecosystem. Bureaucrats are crying for help on all kinds of issues. If we provide some, we can make get stuff done together.

Government and business are both parts of an ecosystem. Both also have advantages. Government has a clear priority for community good on a long term basis. There's no quarterly rush. Business has a bias for action and for private interests. Government is concerned with output: meetings and notes, for example. Reports. Busienss is concerned with outcome. Getting things done. You can get a culture clash out of output vs. outcome, or you can combine the two and solve some problems.

What Patrick says makes clear what Phil's new sensibility is all about. It's power *from* the people, and not just *to* the people. And it only starts with votes.